Teddington Arts Centre to host Tea Dance this weekend
The Landmark Arts Centre is hosting its first ever Tea Dance this Saturday (10 May).
The Tea and Dance will run from 1.30pm – 4.30pm, with tickets costing £15. There will also be an optional beginners' lesson from 12pm – 1pm for £3.
Book your tickets here.
The Tea Dance, created and hosted by Malcolm Fernandes (AKA Mr Wonderful), invites attendees to participate in traditional ballroom and Latin-style dancing while enjoying tea and cake.
Mr Wonderful has been keeping London fit, healthy, and dancing for over 30 Years, organising, promoting, and presenting afternoon Tea Dances, and hosting Evening Social dances and Special Events.
He first started hosting Social Ballroom & Latin dances at the then Mecca-run Cafe de Paris in London's Leicester Square.
He has gone on to host dances in all the major Dance Halls in London, Bournemouth, Blackpool, Margate, Folkestone, Harrogate, Coventry and Manchester, and currently hosts a weekly dance at Bourne Hall in Ewell.
In an exclusive interview with Teddington Nub News, Mr Wonderful, who resides in Buckinghamshire with his qualified dance teacher partner Janet Cunningham-Clayton, explained that he started DJing for ballroom dance events about 40 years ago.
He said: "I kind of fell into it completely by accident about 40 years ago now, I was a DJ for weddings in one of these big hotel complexes and there was another guy doing another wedding in the next room, and during the speeches, we were outside having a little cigarette and he asked me if I'd like to stand in for him at Café de Paris.
"And I said, 'yeah, I wouldn't mind doing that. I'd do anything'. And then he went on to say that it was ballroom music. And I said, 'Well, I don't know whether I could do that because I've only got one piece of ballroom', which was Engelbert Humperdinck singing in The Last Waltz.
"So, he said, 'Well, if that's your only problem, don't worry, because I keep all my records in the cupboard underneath the console, and off you go. Just go and play two of each from foxtrot to the usual ballroom and Latin dances, and you'll be fine'.
"So, I turned up at the Café de Paris, and I loved it from the first minute because I brought DJing to ballroom dancing."
Mr Wonderful explained that he knew nothing about ballroom dancing before this first event.
He said: "But what got to me was that these people would come to a dance to dance. Whereas if you go to a party or a wedding, nobody gets up to dance until almost very near the end.
"But at Café de Paris, from the first minute they came in, they put on their dancing shoes, and they started dancing.
"I had never experienced that before, and I fell in love with it."
At this time, Mr Wonderful was also working a day job, but because his dancers "obviously liked" what he did and "started following [him] around to different venues", he eventually gave up his day job and started DJing full time.
Mr Wonderful and Cunningham-Clayton will also be teaching dancing at the event on Saturday.
Cunningham-Clayton's journey into ballroom dancing is different to that of Mr Wonderful's as she always dreamed of becoming a British Ballroom Champion.
In the early 2000s, Cunningham-Clayton became the Senior Over 35's Ballroom British Champion.
Mr Wonderful says that he does a bit of ballroom dancing himself because "one of the things that endeared me to these dances is I would jump off the stage and have a little jig around with my customers and my dancers".
He said: "Not that I was a dancer, but I was just having a bit of fun."
Cunningham-Clayton taught the DJ to "dance properly", he says.
Speaking about where the name Mr Wonderful came from, he said: "That's a bit of a story, because at that time, I was DJing around with mainly pensioners, and I had to dance with this lady who said, 'oh, that was wonderful, I think I'll call you Mr Wonderful'.
"I didn't have a stage name, but I loved it and thought 'I can live with that'."
Speaking about why he loves his career, Mr Wonderful said: "One of the things that surprised me about the job is the fact that I give a lot of people a lot of happiness out of it.
"There was this one lady that came into the dance I was doing in Bromley while I was setting up, and she said, 'I actually died on the operating theatre, and all I could remember while in a dreamlike state was that there was a dance on, and I had to get ready to go the dance, get my clothes ready'."
Mr Wonderful says that he hears lots of stories like this one as many of his customers are women and men who are full-time carers for their partners.
He said: "They need a few hours just once a week to just take a break and chill out and find the energy to do what they're doing. It gives me a lot of pleasure when people tell me stories like that. So, I almost feel like I'm providing a social kind of need."
Should this first event on Saturday be popular, the Landmark Arts Centre is hoping to make it a regular event.
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