A rainy Wednesday evening in Manchester seems an inauspicious beginning to a romantic travel journal through Latin America that explores sexuality and spirituality through the medium of salsa. Grevel Lindop is not the first to put aside his life to pursue an interest in dance.

But never mind his professed awkwardness in his first steps on the dance floor. He moves with great lyrical fluency in the transaction that matters, the one between himself and his readers. This should not be surprising as he is an accomplished poet.

Travels on the Dance Floor is written in the present tense, giving it the immediacy of a diary. Lindop’s descriptive ability is sure, but he seems unsure of the moves he is making as a dancer or a man. Yet he captures perfectly the edgy partnership of addiction and physical fulfilment embodied by dance.

His behaviour may look symptomatic of a midlife crisis but it is less desperate and more constructive than that. At one point he seems to embark on an emotional dance towards infidelity, telling us how one woman dances like sparkling champagne, another like a full-bodied red, as if trying to learn the steps to an affair. But it is when a local in Puerto Rico compliments his dancing as “good” that he writes: “I’ve never been happier.”

Much of the journey is about tempting fate, or himself, or even the rather sinister household gods of Santería, the Venezualan and Cuban folk religion he almost comes to believe in. From his first steps he seems to understand the importance of the floor, with his white dance shoes given a choreography all of their own. At one point the shoes get caked in cement, an accident that must surely come to rival other techniques used by teachers to get their pupils’ weight down.

As for the partner, his life is complicated when his wife Amanda declines his invitation to take the two-month tour of the salsa spots of Latin America at his side. When he is packing, she gives him a packet of 12 condoms. “What on earth are these?” he asks. “They’re condoms, dickhead,” she replies, sending him the ultimate mixed marital message.

It would be unchivalrous to reveal here whether he needed to use them. Let’s just say that by the end he has demonstrated that dance is an apt metaphor for life. He has mastered the technique of how to take two steps backwards, four steps forwards, while remaining in exactly the same place.

Travels on the Dance Floor: One Man’s Journey to the Heart of Salsa by Grevel Lindop
Andre Deutsch, £14.99 Buy the book

Born in Liverpool, Grevel Lindop was educated at Oxford and taught English Literature at Manchester University, becoming Professor of Romantic Studies before leaving in 2001 to become a writer. His books include six collections of poems – most recently Playing With Fire and Selected Poems – as well as The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey and A Literary Guide to the Lake District (Lakeland Book of the Year 2005). Married with three children, he lives in Manchester.

Article source: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article4627308.ece

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