Welcome to Dance Today

Welcome to our new-look website! At our grand old age – we are 100 this month – we thought it was an apt time for a bit of a nip and tuck, so as well as redesigning the magazine, we have updated our web look too. We are just in time for “Strictly Come Dancing” season, so stay up to the minute here with Marianka Swain’s new blog, Strictly speaking, complete with our sequin-o-meter rating the dances!

For more “Strictly” news, see our October issue (out on October 6) where Marianka meets new professionals Artem Chigvintsev and Jared Murillo. Elsewhere in the issue, we have some lovely, nostalgic features by Mary Clarke on Dance Today’s history and Zoë Anderson (How the Charleston changed the world). We hope you enjoy browsing through the website and magazine and, as we celebrate our centenary, we would like to thank our contributors, our advertisers and you, our readers, who have made reaching our 100th birthday possible. Here’s to the next century.

Things are hotting up – no, not outside, as I write this I can hear the rumblings of thunder – but London’s dance scene is definitely getting busier as we approach the Olympics. This month, we preview two pre-Olympic dance shows – Havana Rumba!, a Cuban “party”, headlining the E4 Udderbelly Festival from May 30, and a brand new musical, Wah! Wah! Girls, which celebrates London’s multicultural East End. Of course, May is also the month in which Blackpool Dance Festival kicks off and Alison Gallagher-Hughes shares her experiences of exhibiting in the Horseshoe at the Winter Gardens for the first time, while Marianka Swain finds out about the trials and tribulations of being an adjudicator at such an event. We will be previewing the dance highlights of this special summer in a later issue, but to see what’s coming up, visit the Big Dance website.

Nicola Rayner, Editor