Dance Diplomacy: Breaking Down Barriers

Medscape

22-05-2025

This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Hello. I'm David Kerr, professor of cancer medicine at the University of Oxford. Those of you who listen to me on Medscape will know that I recently did a video on the benefits of drumming, such as its rhythmic beauty, the fact that it induces exercise and a collaborative community, and so on.
For this video, I'd like to talk about dance diplomacy. That's a term made up by my friend, who's a professor of radiation biology at Harvard. The history of dance diplomacy, in some negative ways, goes back to Salome, the Dance of the Seven Veils, and the execution of John the Baptist, but much more recently there's been a positive spin on it.
In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, Britain and America were worried that Ghana, a great West African nation, would leave their commonwealth and fall under the influence of the Soviet Union. This was seen as a bad thing, potentially, the Soviet Union having a foothold in Africa in those heady, difficult days.
Up stepped Queen Elizabeth II, in a mission to persuade the Ghanaian president, Kwame Nkrumah, not to leave the partnership of nations, which she so cherished. If there is one thing that the Queen felt perhaps most strongly about, it was the commonwealth and its maintenance, a duty that she followed through on until her death.
During the regal visit, she was accompanied by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. During a visit to the capital city, Accra — another great city I love visiting — the Queen was photographed dancing very happily with the Ghanaian leader at a time when, in the United States, Black people in America were still denied the right to vote.This had a fantastic ripple effect, not only across the Commonwealth, but across the world, seeing these two heads of state dancing happily.
Other iconic dances include Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher at a White House dinner held in her honor, in 1986. Again, the year before that, with the involvement of First Lady Nancy Reagan, John Travolta was persuaded to ask Princess Diana to dance. This was an extraordinarily iconic dance that rippled throughout the world at a time when Princess Diana was doing some fantastic work on HIV/AIDS. Some very memorable other images came from that meeting.
Dancing is good for you. We know that. It's to do with rhythm. It's the same sense of community, collaboration, exercise, memory, and muscle memory. I love Scottish country dancing, including The Dashing White Sergeant and Strip the Willow. It's a fantastic way of really getting things going to the rhythm, often of a pipe band, which is another interest of mine.
My dance diplomacy stemmed a couple of years ago when Beatrice Addai, a fantastic breast cancer surgeon from Ghana, chaired The Lancet Oncology's Commission on Cancer Control in Sub-Saharan Africa.
We decided to launch the commission report — a rather important piece of work, I think — in Ghana. It went well. We went north, to the garden city of Kumasi, where Beatrice has her hospital and she's done an enormous amount to raise awareness around breast cancer and its treatment.
In the video that accompanies this, you'll see me make a complete dysrhythmic fool of myself doing dad dancing with some of the breast cancer survivors and their families, who knew how to shake a rug. I look a complete imbecile, but it was fun, it broke barriers down, and the ladies liked it very much indeed.
It became a thing, every part of our tour around various other elements of the Ghanaian cancer system. I was known as Dancing Dave. I was persuaded repeatedly to get out front and to shake an incredibly inelegant rug.
Why are we talking about this story? It's dance diplomacy. It's about people expecting someone like me — a stuffy, Oxford professor; aging, cancer professional-type person — to be rigid, distant, reserved. The sort of scientist that one would expect, but showing a glimpse of that sort of human side. This helps to break those barriers down, in an 'all of humanity in it together' sort of way.
Have a look at the videos. Have a good laugh. Undoubtedly you will. You'll see some other of my friends and colleagues there. Think how you might not dance your way through diplomacy, but what other tactics you might employ to break down barriers between us and the patients and families that we care for, to show us as being similarly human and similarly aligned.
Have a look. I'd be very interested in anything you have to say about it. Thanks for listening and watching, as always. I'm very pleased to receive any of your comments. For the time being, Medscapers, over and out.