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.

Strangely enough we have not one, but two, Star Championship reports in this month’s issue, with Iris Findlay reporting on this year’s Star and Jack Reavely remembering the same competition in 1952, when Wally Fryer and Violet Barnes won the Star Professional Ballroom. On the subject of nostalgia, Blanche Ingle-Bateman has also shared some wonderful photographs of Butlin’s. If you, too, have memories and pictures you would like to share, do get in touch with us. Other articles I have particularly enjoyed in this month’s issue are Alison Gallagher-Hughes’ in-depth look at the world of dance promoters and Zoë Anderson’s piece on how flamenco can improve your Latin, and perhaps even your ballroom, dance. If it’s Latin fire you’re after on a cold evening, why not enter our competition to hear Cuban band Los Van Van in action?

Nicola Rayner, Editor