Dancing in the Dark 2.26

The Story of Dancing in the Dark

Dancing in the Dark is the highly successful ballroom class club set up by Nick Walker.

In 2001 when Nick was running away from a bad divorce he took a world cruise on The QE2 to recover from a breakdown. Nick is a novelist and this hilarious time is related in his novel: Going Around the Bend on the QE2 (available on Kindle). Nick has always been fascinated by dance and dancers and eight of his mass market novels have centred around professional dancers both Ice and Jazz, neither of which Nick could actually do. In order to meet women on the ship Nick started to attend the ballroom dance classes and immediately fell in love with ballroom because he had found a form that everybody can do…even though he wasn’t very good at it.

Leaping forward a year and Nick is now living in California with a very rich American lady and she can afford to take them to Arthur Murray’s five nights a week and what was an interest became a passion for Nick. Nick and his partner got to the level of Silver Medallists at Arthur Murray’s before he found it necessary to run away again so he disappeared off to The Middle East to set up a science department in a posh Muslim school. He landed on the Monday and was horrified to learn that dancing is banned in Iraq and Kuwait where it is against the law for a man and woman to touch publically. On the Thursday night (three days later!) Nick had opened a dance club called: Shall We Dance (after the movie) at The Hilton Hotel. To his delight and amazement over 80 people turned up, most of them ex pats and Nick started to learn to teach dance. On the Saturday over 120 crammed into the club, unfortunately 20 of these were policemen and Nick was carted off to spend the night in jail. The following Tuesday Nick re-opened the club under its new name: Dancing in the Dark.

The club now went underground and became even more popular. These were exciting times of constantly changing venues with Arab friends spaced around the exterior armed with Walkie Talkies to warn of a raid. Even so Nick was jailed another 15 times over the next couple of years, fortunately the parents of his rich (and influential) Arab school kids rallied around and always had him released in time for school the following morning. Finally, the pressure was relaxed on the club when Nick started privately teaching Tango to a Princess of the ruling family.

Nick is also a journalist and had taken up the case of The Bedoon (the forgotten people of The Middle East) writing articles for The Sunday Express and Reader’s Digest on this controversial topic. Finally, having upset the authorities more than is normal, even for Nick, he and his last wife had two minutes warning before having to run for it and escape across the border. Arriving with just the clothes they were wearing two days later at Heathrow they went to live in the holiday cottage they had rented earlier that year in Scotland. Nick opened DD straight away in Inverness and soon had six clubs running and the club went through another period of success.

Nick has spent the last few months back at Arthur Murray’s in California getting his dance steps up to date and has now moved back to Cornwall, where he lived in his twenties. Now Dancing in the Dark is opening up for the first time in The West Country hopefully with the same success but with fewer police raids.

Nick never pretends to be a good dancer, this is not his skill. What he is, is a good teacher and he is excellent at running clubs (he is the founder and Chief Instructor of Kernow Karate one of the most successful Martial Arts Clubs in the World). The aim of DD is to teach you to enjoy Ballroom Dance, to get you onto the floor straight away and to have a damned good laugh.

If you want to learn to be a professional dancer then DD is not for you, but if you want to learn how to dance, how to look good dancing and how to feel good then you need to come along to Dancing in the Dark!