Dancing Times

About Dancing Times

Dancing Times — Journal Profile

Dancing Times was Britain's oldest dance magazine: a monthly periodical devoted to dance in all its forms, published in London by The Dancing Times Limited under ISSN 0011-605X. It began in 1894 as the house magazine of the Cavendish Rooms, a London ballroom-dancing establishment; it was bought in 1910 by Phillip J. S. Richardson and T. M. Middleton and transformed into a national magazine reporting on dance worldwide; and it closed with its September 2022 issue, after what the Royal Academy of Dance's Dance Gazette describes as 112 years in print. At its closure it was, in the words preserved in the Oxford Dictionary of Dance and repeated in its reference record, the oldest dance magazine still being published.

This profile is written honestly about what the title was. Dancing Times sits in journal directories — including this one, and in the Scopus coverage record, which tracked it from 2002 to 2022 — because bibliographic databases register it as a periodical of record for dance. But it was a magazine: a professionally edited, photograph-rich monthly of news, interviews, reviews and criticism for dancers, teachers, directors, choreographers, students and enthusiasts, not a peer-reviewed scholarly journal with research articles and an academic editorial board. Its importance is not diminished by that distinction; it is clarified by it. For over a century the magazine was one of the institutions that organised British dance itself — it played a founding part in creating the Royal Academy of Dance, the Camargo Society and the British Dance Council — and its photographic archive of some 38,000 prints, now held by the Royal Academy of Dance, is one of the largest records of twentieth-century dance in existence.

Identity and record

The bibliographic identity of Dancing Times is unusually stable for so long-lived a title: one name, one publisher-company and one ISSN across its modern life. The ISSN 0011-605X and the OCLC number 2623442 identify the record in library catalogues worldwide; OpenAlex resolves the ISSN to its source S959641000, classifies the type as a journal (the classification databases use for periodicals generally), records the United Kingdom as country, gives the historic homepage dancing-times.co.uk and links the title's Wikidata item. The Journals World record matches that identity exactly — title, ISSN, British base and a coverage span of 2002–2022 that reflects the title's Scopus-tracked years rather than its full life. The stored record's numeric publisher code is a data artefact; the publisher of record is The Dancing Times Limited.

Two neighbouring titles must not be merged into this record. Dance Today is the magazine's own spin-off — the ballroom strand of Dancing Times, separated under editor A. H. Franks as Ballroom Dancing Times and relaunched in 2001 in a smaller format for a wider social-dance readership — a related but distinct periodical with its own record. And the scholarly dance journals that citation databases list beside Dancing Times, such as Dance Chronicle (Routledge) or the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, are different publications again: peer-reviewed research journals whose resemblance to Dancing Times begins and ends with the shared subject.

History: from ballroom house magazine to national institution

Dancing Times was first published in 1894 as the house magazine of the Cavendish Rooms in London, a ballroom-dancing establishment — a trade sheet for the world of ballroom teaching and social dance in late-Victorian London. Its transformation came in 1910, when Phillip J. S. Richardson and T. M. Middleton bought it and rebuilt it as a national periodical covering all forms of dancing and reporting worldwide. Richardson, who edited the magazine for nearly half a century, until 1958, and remained its president until his death in 1963, used it as an organising platform for the whole profession. Largely through his initiative and his contacts across the dance-teaching and performing worlds, the magazine played an instrumental part in founding the Association of Teachers of Operatic Dancing of Great Britain in 1920 — the body that became the Royal Academy of Dance — the Camargo Society, which presented British ballet in 1930–33, and the British Board of Ballroom Dancing, now the British Dance Council, which codified the technique and controls the standards of the "English Style" of ballroom dancing. Few magazines in any field can claim to have founded their field's examining body, its presenting society and its standards council; Dancing Times can.

Richardson was succeeded in 1958 by A. H. Franks, a journalist and author of books on ballet and social dancing, who separated the ballroom section into a second periodical, Ballroom Dancing Times, and in 1962 doubled the format of Dancing Times to the A4 size it kept for the rest of its life. Franks died suddenly in 1963 and Mary Clarke, then assistant editor, became editor — beginning one of the longest editorships in British magazine history. Clarke edited Dancing Times for 45 years, championed dance in all its forms, and was passionate, in her successor's words, about good dance criticism and photography; under her the magazine consolidated the standing that the Royal Academy of Dance later described as making it, through the expertise of its writers and the quality of its photographs, the leading publication for the dance industry as a whole. When Clarke retired in 2008, Jonathan Gray — who had joined in 2005 — became editor, and he remained editor and director until the end.

Closure in 2022

In August 2022 the magazine announced that it would cease publication; the September 2022 issue was its last. Gray's farewell editorial, preserved in the magazine's final issue, gives the cause plainly: despite efforts to recoup the revenue losses of the coronavirus pandemic years, compounded by the rapid cost increases of 2022, the magazine was no longer financially viable in its existing form, and he thanked subscribers, readers, advertisers and colleagues as the title closed. The announcement was met, the Royal Academy of Dance recorded, with great sadness from leading figures, organisations and writers across the British dance world — the response of a profession losing an institution it had treated, in Gray's phrase, as seemingly invincible.

The afterlife of the magazine is archival, and it is a distinguished one. With support from the Linbury Trust, the Royal Academy of Dance acquired the Dancing Times photographic collection — approximately 38,000 black and white and colour prints spanning roughly 1920 to 2000, one of the largest collections of twentieth-century dance photography in the world — to catalogue, preserve and house in the Wolfson Library and RAD Archive at the Academy's Wandsworth headquarters in London, with education opportunities for students and the wider dance community among the stated purposes of the acquisition. The Academy's Eleanor Fitzpatrick described the collection as an important historical and research resource for the dance community, and Gray, the magazine's last editor, welcomed its preservation by the organisation whose own founding the magazine had driven a century earlier. Researchers seeking Dancing Times today will therefore work in two places: the printed and microfilmed backfile in libraries, under ISSN 0011-605X, and the RAD's photographic archive in London.

Content and readership

Across its life the magazine's formula joined performance coverage to professional intelligence. Its pages carried reviews and criticism of ballet and contemporary dance, interviews with dancers and choreographers — the final issue itself was built around interviews and a double Dancer of the Month feature — news of companies, schools and examinations, a calendar of forthcoming performances (extended in the last issue to December and beyond), columns from correspondents abroad, and the photography for which it was famous. Its readership, as the Academy's summary puts it, spanned professional dancers, teachers, directors and choreographers as well as students and enthusiasts: the magazine served simultaneously as the trade paper of British dance and its public showcase.

Because the magazine was a general and professional periodical, the usual scholarly-journal questions need honest answers rather than invented ones. It did not operate academic peer review: contributions were commissioned and edited journalistically, and its authority rested on its critics and photographers rather than on referees. It charged readers, not authors: it was a subscription and news-stand magazine, and no article processing charge or author fee formed part of its model. Its "impact", accordingly, is not captured by citation metrics — the h-index of 2 in the Scopus-derived record simply registers that databases tracked a magazine whose contents are occasionally cited — but by the institutions it founded, the critics it trained its readers to trust, and the archive it left.

Metrics and indexing, in proportion

For completeness, the directory figures are these. The Journals World stored record gives an h-index of 2 and Scopus-era coverage of 2002–2022; the SCImago-derived record places the title in the fourth quartile of its categories. OpenAlex, resolving ISSN 0011-605X through the ISSN endpoint at checking time, returned source S959641000 with only 7 works and no citations recorded, a first ingested year of 1981 and a last of 2012 — an ingest so partial, for a monthly magazine that published thousands of items, that it is useful only as proof of how little of a print magazine's life enters article-metadata systems. OpenAlex also records the source as listed in some national journal registers, and not as an open-access or DOAJ title: consistently, the DOAJ search API returned no record for this ISSN at checking time, and none would be expected for a subscription magazine. None of these figures measures what the magazine was for; they are reported here because directory users look for them, with their sources attached.

For researchers: using Dancing Times as a source

Historians of dance, theatre and twentieth-century British culture treat Dancing Times as a primary source of the first rank. Its review pages document performance practice and reception season by season for more than a century; its interviews preserve the stated intentions of dancers and choreographers; its examination and teaching coverage documents the professionalisation of dance teaching; and its photographs — now concentrated in the RAD archive — document bodies, costumes, sets and studios that written records barely describe. Citations should give the magazine's title, month and year and page; the ISSN 0011-605X resolves the title unambiguously in catalogues. Backfile access is through libraries holding the print run or its microfilm and digital reissues; the publisher's own website ceased with the magazine, and the homepage recorded in databases survives only through web archives.

The magazine as an institution of British dance

To understand why a magazine's closure in 2022 drew statements from across an art form, it helps to see how completely Dancing Times was woven into the working life of British dance. The examining and teaching profession read it because the organisations that set their standards — the Royal Academy of Dance for ballet teaching and the British Dance Council for ballroom — had been created through its pages and its editor's convening power, and because its columns carried the examination news, syllabuses and professional argument of those worlds. Companies and schools read it because its reviews and its Dancer of the Month features conferred a kind of national notice that no regional press could match, and because its calendar pages told the profession where dance was happening. Photographers and designers read it because its picture pages set the visual standard of the field; the collection now at the RAD exists precisely because the magazine commissioned and kept photographs as a matter of policy across eighty years.

That institutional density also explains the magazine's longevity. Founded before cinema had a settled form, it survived the arrival of radio, television and the web by remaining the one place where the whole of British dance — stage and studio, ballet and ballroom, London and the regions, professional and amateur — appeared between the same covers each month. Its spin-off structure tells the same story: when ballroom grew large enough to need its own monthly, the magazine divided rather than narrowed, hiving Ballroom Dancing Times off under Franks and eventually relaunching it as Dance Today, while the parent title kept the full field. A directory record that lists only an ISSN and a coverage span cannot carry any of this; it is recorded here so that a researcher who meets the title in a database understands that the citation points to a century of a profession talking to itself.

Similar and related titles

Readers who used Dancing Times typically also follow: Dance Today, its ballroom and social-dance spin-off; Dance Gazette, the Royal Academy of Dance's own magazine, which reported the closure and the archive acquisition; Dancing Times' scholarly neighbours Dance Chronicle (Routledge, ISSN 0147-2526) and Dance Research (Edinburgh University Press) for peer-reviewed dance studies; and The Dancing Times' contemporaries among national dance magazines internationally. Within this directory, the profile most likely to be confused with this one is none — the title, ISSN and century-long run are unique — but Dance Today is a separate record and should not be merged into this one.

Frequently asked questions

What is the ISSN of Dancing Times? 0011-605X (OCLC 2623442). It anchors the magazine's record in the ISSN register, in library catalogues, in OpenAlex and in this directory.

When did Dancing Times begin and end? It began in 1894 as the house magazine of the Cavendish Rooms, London; it was relaunched as a national magazine in 1910; and it closed with the September 2022 issue, the closure having been announced in August 2022.

Who published it, and who edited it? The Dancing Times Limited, London. The editors were Phillip J. S. Richardson (to 1958), A. H. Franks (1958–1963), Mary Clarke (1963–2008) and Jonathan Gray (2008–2022).

Was Dancing Times a scholarly journal? No — and this profile says so plainly. It was a professional and general-interest monthly magazine of dance news, reviews, interviews and photography. It appears in journal directories and in Scopus coverage records as a periodical of record, but it did not publish peer-reviewed research and charged readers rather than authors.

Why did it close? Financial viability: pandemic-era revenue losses and the cost increases of 2022, as its last editor explained in the final issue and as the Royal Academy of Dance's account of the closure records.

Where is its archive now? The photographic archive — about 38,000 prints, c.1920–2000 — was acquired by the Royal Academy of Dance with Linbury Trust support and is housed at the RAD's headquarters in Wandsworth, London. The printed backfile remains in libraries under ISSN 0011-605X.

What did the magazine found? It played a founding part in the Royal Academy of Dance (1920, as the Association of Teachers of Operatic Dancing), the Camargo Society (1930–33) and the British Dance Council (as the British Board of Ballroom Dancing) — principally through its editor Phillip J. S. Richardson.

Is Dance Today the same publication? No. Dance Today is the magazine's ballroom spin-off, separated under A. H. Franks and relaunched in 2001; it has its own identity and record.

Sources consulted for this profile: the live Journals World record for the title; the magazine's reference record (editors, company, frequency, first and final issues, ISSN, OCLC); the Royal Academy of Dance's Dance Gazette account and press coverage of the closure and of the RAD's acquisition of the photographic archive (archive size, dates, Linbury Trust support, statements by Tim Arthur, Eleanor Fitzpatrick and Jonathan Gray); the final issue's farewell editorial as republished from the September 2022 issue (closure reasons, editorship succession, Mary Clarke's 45-year editorship); the OpenAlex source record resolved through the ISSN endpoint for 0011-605X (source S959641000, figures as at checking time); and the DOAJ search API (no record returned). No peer-review process, author fee or submission route is claimed for this magazine, because it had none.