Dancing at the Edge of the World
A Portrait of Blackpool and the town’s Relationship to Dance
Design by Evelyn Flores
Less than thirty minutes by train from the seaside town of Blackpool, Tom Heyes was born in Preston and grew up nearby in the working class Chorley, before he became known by his stage moniker Blackhaine. The name, a portmanteau of Blackpool and the title of the French crime drama La Haine, debuted at the same time as his first single, which also references the once-bustling resort destination.
“Say you wanna be someone? Say you wanna be someone, I don’t even know how the fuck to be someone,” is how Blackhaine’s 2020 single “Blackpool” begins, with brisk flow and lyrics tinged with his Lancashire accent; in England, this is often shorthand for social class. The north — from Blackpool to Bradford to York — is synonymous with industrialization, coalfields and factories and smokestacks. Now, it’s also become synonymous with dance as refuge or even escape; the classic Billy Elliot took place in Yorkshire during the miners’ strike of 1985.
Blackhaine follows in this tradition; while his bars have caught the attention of drill enthusiasts, it is his choreography which has made him a singular up-and-coming star. In the music video for Pearl City’s “Down By The Tree,” his limbs snap and recoil with such explosive energy, it seems as though he is beating back unseen demons. Otherworldly and uncanny, with a shaved head and a black eye, he dances across a small-town pub as fellow customers continue to order drinks and play pool. In his violent movement, he rips off his shirt, revealing pale flesh and bare ribs and bruises; by his own admission, there are some times when Blackhaine dances so uncontrollably, he injures himself.
The performance feels much farther away from Blackpool than a train ride and a few miles. Farther still, ballroom dancers circle the floor in neat, organized orbits, elegant and statuesque. If you’ve ever heard from your dance coach that your dancing should look effortless, then here is the pinnacle of effortless ballroom dancers sweeping across the floor with grand swaths of fabric and glittering Swarovski gemstones. Here is the Mecca of ballroom dance, the pilgrimage you must undertake and the trials you must endure in order for your dancing to be validated before the eyes of ballroom royalty — never too far removed from real British royalty — and before the small, seaside town where the competition has taken place since 1920.
“Seaside towns are literally and metaphorically on the edge. When you look back inland, nothing seems as settled as it once did – and those instabilities can be culturally productive.”
When I attended the Blackpool Dance Festival in 2021, I had been warned not to stay nearby. Having moved to Beaconsfield, England only a few months earlier, the posh London suburb had lulled me into a false sense of pastoral fantasy. I explained to my new roommates that I was planning to make the trip to Blackpool and one of them, a burly flannel-wearing man from Cornwall with a mustache, told me the town was, “grim.” Hardly an adjective I’d ever heard used to describe a seaside resort, my roommate went on to describe walking around at night and feeling unsafe; he warned seriously of knife violence, and I took him at his word. Cornwall beaches, I imagined, were different; the ones facing south towards the English Channel are often the refuge of wealthy vacationers.
Meanwhile, the town of Blackpool has been quietly decaying for years. Before air travel became widely affordable and available for middle-class British families, they found refuge in the coastline idylls of Margate; Brighton; Cleethorpes; Whitby; and indeed, Blackpool. Though they now bank on a version of nostalgia which remains inaccessible to me, an American, these towns represent post-war prosperity, candy-colored and sun-soaked. Since the 1960s, express train lines have become increasingly defunded and even privatized, and it is now cheaper and less time-consuming to fly to Spain or Portugal. Towns like Blackpool, which once relied on tourism to bolster their economies, have become impoverished, hence the rise in violent crime. Heeding my roommate’s advice, I stayed in the large city of Liverpool for the duration of my trip, over an hour away.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Blackpool’s reputation as a ballroom dance destination fits neatly into this package of post-war nostalgia. Although ballroom dancing certainly existed prior to World War II, as did Blackpool Dance Festival, it was the years that followed which formed what we understand today as Dancesport. Here is where I rattle off a number of organizations, books, dates, all which might seem inconsequential, but I assure you have played an important part in the formation of competitive dance: governing bodies were founded in the intervening decades, such as the World Dancesport Council, the International Council of Amateur Dancers, the Ballroom Dancers Federation, the International Dance Teachers Association; an entire network of newfound bureaucracy. Walter Laird’s Technique of Latin Dancing was first published in 1961; the ISTD’s Revised Technique of Ballroom Dancing in 1948 served as the technical update for Alex Moore’s 1936 textbook. What does this mean? Power was consolidated; syllabi were standardized. The parameters first enforced in the 1960s have largely remained unchanged, although style and technique are ever evolving; like Blackpool itself, ballroom dance is a culture frozen in time.
“There’s a sense of the ‘end of the line.’ That feeling of abandonment is where the darker, seedier side of the seaside comes from.”
A few weeks after I attended the 2021 festival, I caught a clip on Twitter; my account is far divorced from my life of ballroom dancing, but somehow the virality of the video had extended beyond the humble spheres of Blackpool. Sammy Stopford, former dance partner and husband of Shirley Ballas and possessor of an MBE title, is filmed giving a lecture at Blackpool, blustering with a puffy red face and clutching an iPhone between his grubby fingers as he offers a cheap stand-up routine on the modern generation. “In my world, nothing is complicated,” Stopford says. “If it was, the girls I’ve danced with would never have gotten anywhere.” He continues: “When I was a boy, sex was between a man and a woman,” he says. “Now, it is between you and the alphabet.” You can hear polite chuckling from the audience; we can’t see their faces, so it’s impossible to judge whether they, too, are shifting in their seats with increasing discomfort.
“I believe I created the #MeToo movement,” Stopford boasts later in the lecture. “The system I operate works. And it’s simple.” What he means by this, he later explains, is that he allows his follower to take control of the amount of connection he, as a leader, introduces into the partnership; it remains an insane claim to make, considering the community has never truly reckoned with #MeToo and its ramifications in an art so reliant on physical connection. Indeed, perhaps this is why he finds it so easy to joke about it. He brings, now, a young woman onto the floor from the audience to demonstrate his point regarding connection, but not before making a snide comment about her appearance. The girl’s back is to us, so we don’t know her reaction, except that I recognize her stiffened posture from every time a man in power has spoken to me in the same patronizing way; Stopford leans in and, with a smirk, says, “I’m only joking.” The woman explains in a small, lightly accented voice that, to indicate she is moving backward in rumba, she pushes on the leader’s hand; Stopford makes fun of her pronunciation of the word “push” in a cloying voice thick with condescension.
Even I was surprised by such a blatant display of reactionary politics; Stopford is almost off-handedly homophobic (at one point, Stopford refers to the hypothetical follower as the lady, before sarcastically correcting himself: “the partner, follower, whatever it may be”) as well as misogynistic; for good measure, even the style of American Smooth catches strays. The Twitter comments below the video seems to agree:
“@ShirleyBallas surely you can't condone these comments from your ex-husband?”
“Despicable man”
“God almighty, that’s horrendous”
“Is he having a breakdown…..?”
It is honorable, though naïve, to suggest that Stopford’s MBE title be removed: after all, Blackpool, as a representative of the status quo, exists to only perpetuate itself; if it changes, it will not survive. It is not unlike the British monarchy as a whole.
“When I was a boy, sex was between a man and a woman. Now, it is between you and the alphabet.”
There is something liminal about towns like Blackpool, which exists now at the edge of the world, now at the margins of the British landscape, an uncanny atmosphere which tends to serve artists like Blackhaine and Tracey Emin. The latter’s film Why I Never Became a Dancer turns the rags-to-riches story of escape on its head; Emin describes her own experience coming of age in the small seaside town of Margate. She tells the story of wanting to be a professional disco dancer, but during one performance her past lovers come to watch her and shout obscenities from the sidelines. This proves to be the final impetus for her to leave Margate behind, even if it means leaving behind her love of dance as well. The other side of nostalgia is an inability to escape the past, to move on: the Empress Ballroom, a locked room full of ghosts.
After I attended my first day of Blackpool dancing, I realized only too late that I missed my last train back to Liverpool. It only took an hour or so of wandering around the sunny shoreline to realize that I could have stayed in the town after all, but now I was stuck there and my Airbnb far away. After scrambling to find a taxi, calling numerous companies on my dying phone, I finally found one to take me home, for the slight price of ￡120. With an hour to spare between us, I began talking to my driver about Blackpool, his hometown. He didn’t seem to realize there was a ballroom competition happening; I wondered, then, about the separation between the town and the ballroom community. The driver was a young man, stocky and handsome, and he asked me why I’d chosen to stay so far away; I explained the warnings my roommates had offered. Though he mildly agreed, he told me of the local regeneration scheme, the British government’s plans to revitalize the town, to compensate for the struggles Blackpool had suffered in the previous decades. He seemed full of hope, the driver, that Blackpool had a future. It only remains to be seen whether ballroom dance will share the same fate.
By Carly Mattox