Dance floor etiquette

You can turn down any dance, at any time, without giving a reason. "Not right now, thanks" is enough and offends nobody.

And the other way round: if someone turns you down, accept it first time. Pushing is the one thing that is genuinely frowned upon.

The norm is one song per person. At the end you say thanks and both move on. Dancing three or four in a row happens, but you ask first.

If someone wants to leave halfway through a song, let them. They may have a thousand reasons and none of them are your business.

Whoever leads is responsible for watching where the couple is going. On a full floor that means smaller figures and fewer big turns.

If you bump into someone, you apologise and carry on. It happens constantly.

Stop the dance and walk off the floor. You do not have to finish the song out of politeness, and you owe nobody an explanation.

Almost every venue has someone from the organisation you can tell. If something serious happens, tell them: the socials that work are held together by exactly that.

This is the rule most often broken and the one that annoys people most. Correcting your partner mid-song — explaining the step, repositioning their arm, repeating a figure until it lands — turns a dance into a class nobody asked for.

Even when you are right. Even after ten years. At a social you dance with what the other person knows today, and if something does not work, you do something else.

The exception is being asked, and then it happens at the side of the floor, not in the middle of it. If you genuinely want to teach, schools are always looking for people to help with beginners classes.

You dance six inches from someone else for three hours, sweating. A spare shirt, deodorant and a mint are not a nicety: they are what makes people want a second song with you.

If you sweat a lot, a small towel on your table and a quick dry before each dance solves the whole problem. Nobody thinks badly of it — quite the opposite.

A thank you, and if you have ended up far from where you started, walk them back to the edge of the floor. It takes three seconds and it is the difference between a dance and a transaction.

And if the dance was good, say so. Half the people on any floor are convinced they are doing it badly, and one sentence changes a night.