Saved events

Emma Warren with Dave Swindells: Dance Your Way Home

,Barbican Library
Emma Warren

Join Emma Warren as she discusses her new book, Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor, in conversation with Dave Swindells, club photographer and former Nightlife editor at Time Out.

This book is about the kind of ordinary dancing you and I might do in our kitchens when a favourite tune comes on. It’s more than a social history: it’s a set of interconnected histories of the overlooked places where dancing happens . . .

Why do we dance together? What does dancing tells us about ourselves, individually and collectively? And what can it do for us? Whether it be at home, in ’80s club nights, Irish dancehalls or reggae dances, jungle raves or volunteer-run spaces and youth centres, Emma Warren has sought the answers to these questions her entire life. 

At the intersection of memoir, social and cultural history, Dance Your Way Home is an intimate foray onto the dancefloor – wherever and whenever it may be – that speaks to the heart of what it is that makes us move.

Tagged with: Library Talks & events Library Lates
‘Joyous... Warren has added something powerful to dance's story, something moving in every sense.‘
Victoria Segal, Sunday Times - Book of the Week

Emma Warren

Emma has been documenting grassroots music and culture for decades. She is the author of Make Some Space: Tuning Into Total Refreshment Centre which she wrote and published on her own Sweet Machine imprint in 2019. Make Some Space was listed as one of the top ten books of the year by Mojo Magazine. In the same year, her pamphlet Steam Down: Or How Things Begin was published by Rough Trade Books and was listed as an Irish Times book of the year. 

Dave Swindells

Dave has been photographing London’s nightlife since the mid-1980s and became the Nightlife Editor at Time Out magazine in 1986, so he was reporting on club scenes every week. Knowing how lucky he was, he didn’t relinquish his hold on the job until 2009, and then went to work at the Notting Hill Arts Club for five years, staying close to the dance floor. In 2020 his photobook Ibiza ’89 appeared, followed by Spike Island (2021) and Acid House as it Happened (2022), all published by IDEA. 

Barbican Library