Maybe you already dance (and, yes, dancing around the bedroom with your headphones on does count!). If you don’t, you should start. Mainly, because it will make you feel lovely. But also because understanding what it really feels like to dance will help you become a better essay writer!

I was definitely not early to Fred again..’s music and the first time I watched a set of his was on the BBC when he played at Glastonbury. It’s rare I watch an entire live performance on television because it’s just not the same as being there, but the Fred again.. set was mesmerising and I’ve returned to it multiple times since it first aired.

The fact that I could feel the magic of those songs through the TV screen must be testament to the power of Fred again..’s music. And, in part, we connect with him so deeply and so immediately because his music is so human. He records actual life with his iPhone and builds his songs around snippets of conversations that he’s captured outside the pub, at parties or wherever, and – because his material is, at its heart, so raw and real – we recognise, and relate to, it.

His process is so relevant to that of essay writing. Yes, when we respond to a question set by our teachers, we are to some extent trying to analyse someone else’s writing. But our response to that writing by Shakespeare, Atwood or whoever should speak for our vision of the world as loudly as Fred again..’s captured content speaks for his own. We should choose to explore quotes around which we can build an essay that says something important about the way we view the world.

To some extent, Fred again… uses a kind of cut and paste style when constructing music. He inhales the world around him and then shuffles its bits and pieces around until they fit together in a new way. The end result is original and exciting. You could think of your own writing as a cut and paste exercise too. Using the bits and pieces of someone else’s text, you are aiming to construct essays that reflect your own interpretation of life.

One way to ensure that your essays have this layer of truth embedded within them is to analyse your course writers’ words in a way that reflects your actual experience of things. Look for the words that actually resonate with you. Think, for example, about the word ‘darkness’. If you had never actually been in the dark, and never had the feeling of not being able to see, then obviously it would be more difficult to analyse the word in depth. But when you’ve ever spent time in darkness, then you are able to use your own feelings about that experience to inform your analysis.

Today, you’re going to draw on your own understanding of the word ‘dancing’…

ACTIVITY 1

Watch Fred again’s ‘Marea (We’ve Lost Dancing)’ video.

When talking about the track, Fred said: “This features Marea Stamper, aka The Blessed Madonna. I met Marea initially in Palestine at a trip for songwriters organized by [creative group] Block9 and Banksy. She’s such an open book and a real bastion of the human spirit, and we’ve been good friends since. This sample came from a conversation we were having on Zoom about what’s happened to our industry this year and hopefully what will come next. She’s such a natural orator and a great example of someone who’s optimistic in the face of adversity. This song’s almost like a bonus track, as it looks ahead to what’s coming next.”

ACTIVITY 2

What does dancing mean? How does it make us act? How does it make us feel? What opportunities does it offer us? Use your own experiences, watch the videos below, read the articles/extracts and create a spiderdiagram of ideas.

Dancing is anything you want it to be. Slow-motion? At 100mph? Angry? Happy? It all starts inside your own mind… everywhere is a stage and nothing is off limits. In a nutshell, (dancing is) the ability to physically express oneself to music or rhythm. Certain types of dance, particularly those religious in nature, have withstood an ever-changing landscape of technologies, politics and more to stay as authentic as ever, while other types are constantly evolving… In North America, the earliest form of dancing wasn’t the Charleston, but likely stemming from indigenous groups who believed dancing could help them to curry favour with higher powers. Rain Dances would be used to usher in downpours for crops, Stomp Dancing would help to heal the sick, and the Sun Dance would, it was believed, bring the body and spirit together in blissful union… dancing is important because it brings people together and is one of humanity’s most important art forms. It’s also terrific for cardio, improving health and increasing the life span who use it as a form of working out.

ACTIVITY 3

Only when you’ve thought about what dancing means, can you understand what it means to lose dancing. Explore the lyric below. What techniques can you spot? What is the speaker really trying to say about that experience of Covid and lockdowns? And how do the techniques you noticed really help highlight the message of the song?

“Day by day we’ve lost dancing.”

ACTIVITY 4

Now use all the thinking you’ve done so far to help you dig deeper into the quotes (in green) from our core texts. When you come across that dancing motif, you’ve got to unravel the full significance of it. Make sure to fully explain why each writer uses that image of dancing (what point the writer is trying to make) and how the effect of the image is impacted by the other words/techniques in each given quote. It might also be worth noting where the quotes are positioned in the respective texts.

Blood Brothers

When Mrs Johnstone remembers – at the beginning of the play – her younger life with her husband, she says: “we went dancing”.

The Handmaid’s Tale

In Margaret Bratwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ she writes in the first chapter that: “Dances would have been held” in the gym.

‘A Streetcar Named Desire’

In Tennessee Williams’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, when Blanche is waltzing, “[Stanley stalks fiercely through… into the bedroom. He crosses to the small white radio and snatches it off the table. With a shouted oath, he tosses the instrument out the window.”

‘The Great Gatsby’

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’, we hear about: “a great number of single girls dancing individualistically.” Earlier in the same sentence, we do hear about the: “old men pushing young girls backward”.