Just dance

Picture / Alamy

Growing up means being free to boogie like there’s nobody watching, writes Noelle McCarthy.

In France, they dance at parties. "Le rock", the compulsory move at any get together, is twirl-and-spin carry-on at its cheesiest. It's the dance that goes with Great Balls of Fire, Rock around the Clock or anything else by Jerry Lee Lewis (who the French still adore unironically).

It's that 50s rockabilly routine where the guy dips you then spins you around and throws you across the dance floor before reeling you back into him. In other words, the routine favoured by your drunk uncle at weddings, minus the twerking.

They dance like this all over France, I was told, even in Paris. It looks ridiculous but is surprisingly enjoyable once you commit yourself. I laughed so hard I nearly fell through a sliding door the first time I did it. All the same I was glad nobody I knew could see me feeling great and looking silly.

Dancing is often compared to sex; in less permissive times it even functioned as a proxy and the two activities have much in common; for starters, both require skin on skin contact and an attitude of wholehearted enthusiasm to be successful.

But the biggest way in which dancing and sex are similar is epitomised by the dancing at French parties; le rock is more fun for the people doing it than for those watching.

I'd like to think that's why I stopped dancing for years, because I didn't want to inflict the spectacle of my contortions on others. In my 20s, unless I was wasted enough to harangue the host or DJ for Culture Club (always Victims, inexplicably) I wouldn't be caught dead on the dance floor.

At best, my dance style might be described as "vigorous", at worst, a danger to myself and others. That's not why I didn't shake it like a polaroid picture, however. I didn't dance because I was too cool for it.

At the age of 25, say, I would rather have gotten down on my knees and licked the pavement than done something as lacking in irony, as suggestive of actual enthusiasm, as moving my body purposefully in time to music.

Especially alongside other people who were also doing it. Far better to lean against the wall or bar to watch and judge those around me.

This limiting self-consciousness is a common affliction, especially for young women.

When I was younger I was so caught up in worrying about how I looked to everyone else, so stuck in what David Foster Wallace christened "our own tiny skull-sized kingdom" that I couldn't leave myself alone in my imagination, even for an instant.

I couldn't dance because in my head there was always someone watching.

Nowadays, I often bring a pair of ballet slippers to events or parties. You never know where someone is going to play Womack and Womack [Footsteps on the Dance Floor] and you don't want to be caught short when it happens.

What changed? I got over myself. From paying taxes to ringing my mother, I do a lot of things now I used to think I was too cool to do.

Dancing's just one of them and it's a hell of a lot more fun than a GST return.

To go back to the sex analogy, dancing also comes with the risk of looking stupid while you're doing it. That's why you can't be too hard on those girls who lean against the bar or sit at their tables. They're afraid of looking silly, or worse, desperate. Dancing alone is the quintessential spectacle of loneliness.

"I'm just gonna dance all night I'm all messed up, I'm so out of line Stilettos and broken bottles. I'm spinning around in circles".

Who wants to be the girl in the Robyn song; drunk, aching and alone? The irony of course is that Dancing on my Own is a really good song to dance to. Something that didn't go past Lena Dunham.

There's a stand-out scene in season one of Girls, when Hannah comes home after finding out her college boyfriend is gay. She almost tweets something woefully self-indulgent, settles for something enigmatic, then turns up Dancing on My Own and does exactly that until Marnie comes home and joins her.

Friends don't let friends dance solo.

- VIVA