GET IN LINE! CROWDS FIND FUN AND FELLOWSHIP IN LINE-DANCING LESSONS AT EAST SIDE CHURCHES, LIBRARIES AND COMMUNITY CENTERS
Dance fever spreads fun and fellowship
Fran Adams and her husband were enjoying a weeklong vacation down south. But as she soaked up the warm weather and all the sights of Myrtle Beach, her mind kept traveling back to Buffalo –specifically to the East Delavan Branch Library, where she takes dance lessons.
“The classes are so much fun that I was thinking about the dancing, the music and the people, while on vacation,” Adams admitted. “I missed being there.”
In her three months of going to the Thursday evening and Saturday morning swing dance and line dance classes, the vacation was the only week she wasn’t on the makeshift dance floor in the library’s basement.
“I’m here every week,” said Adams, 57. “It’s a permanent part of my routine now –work, church and dance.”
Adams isn’t the only one with a serious case of dance fever. It’s actually spreading rapidly across some Buffalo neighborhoods, mostly on the East Side.
“I look forward to dancing, I go to four classes a week,” said 49-year-old Antoinette Lewis, who’s in two classes with Adams at the library. “I hate it when something comes up and I can’t make one of my classes.”
A passionate group of dance instructors is nurturing the fast-growing line-dance community by offering affordable lessons at churches, libraries and community centers.
“In the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, more people used to go out to dance and enjoy themselves,” said instructor Cheri Brown. “So we are trying to get people to come out and dance again.”
And it’s working. With insanely low rates –just $3 per class –the Jazzy Steppers and Sensationals teaching group and others offer two dozen classes that attract more than 300 students each week. Every few months or so, a party, or an “affair,” as they are called, is held where dancers from all the classes gather at a hall on a Friday or Saturday night for hours of dancing, eating and socializing. The next one will be July 18.
“It’s popular because it’s something fun to do,” said Brown, who teaches three classes a week. “In our community, there’s no real social scene for a mature crowd, so people are eager to come out. And when people come here they don’t have to look over their shoulders. It’s safe fun.”
The classes are packed mostly with middle-age dancers to retirees.
“It’s not the ‘Superman’ or ‘Stanky Legg’ crowd,” said Brown, 61, a retired lab technician.
However, 27-year-old Michelle Fortson and her boyfriend, 25-year-old Tyler Clarke, are regulars.
“It’s great, clean fun; it’s better than going to clubs to me,” said Fortson, who makes it to five classes every week. “We always have a good time because everybody is so nice and friendly.”
Sit in on a line and swing dance class
Line dance classes are plentiful. You can take a different one six nights a week.
But we’re not talking cakewalk line dances like the classic “Electric Slide” or the newer “Cupid Shuffle,” with their simplistic movements. These dances are well-choreographed with slick, complicated steps and moves, and funky names like “No Mercy,” “Spanish Fly” and “Terminal Reaction.” The “Obama Shuffle,” done, of course, to the campaign’s anthem “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours,” was popular during the campaign season and done by line dancers throughout the East Side as a victory dance on Election Day.
Joan Harris teaches eight times a week, including a couple times in Niagara Falls. The 70-year-old can easily be called the mother of Buffalo’s vibrant line dancing culture and community. She gave birth to it in 2000 when she began teaching two classes one at a church and another at a community center. Soon other churches and community centers came calling, and Harris dispatched her top students, including Brown, to teach at the different locations to meet the demand.
“People became more and more interested because with line dancing, you don’t need a partner,” Harris said. “You’re just dancing in a line.”
The group of instructors takes dancing seriously. They travel a few times a year to dance conferences for training and to learn new line dance steps to share with students in their classes.
“We create our own dances and we get ideas from other cities when we go to conferences,” Brown said. “Doing the same line dance over and over again gets old, so we have to keep coming up with new ones.”
In addition to the multitude of line dance offerings, Dave “DJ Dave” Brooks, 62, teaches swing dancing, which requires a partner, twice a week in the East Delavan library. The male dancers approach the women, extending their hands, an old-fashioned way to ask for a dance. The throwback dance, popular in the ’30s and ’40s, is toned down and done in the class minus the acrobatic lifting of partners. But sweat beads gradually form on the foreheads of dancers as they smoothly step and glide across the basement of the library.
“When I first got here, I didn’t think I could do it, everybody just seemed so good at the steps,” Adams said. “But now I’m doing it. I even practice at home. I put on music when I’m doing my chores, and I go over the steps.”
Many students tout a rebirth of their social lives through their new dance friends. And some are excited about their improved health since taking the dance lessons.
“I have a waist now, I didn’t one when I started in December,” Fortson said. “I’ve lost 14 pounds.”
Michael Williams, a 59-year-old retired nurse administrator, has been dancing for more than a year. He’s shed 75 pounds. Known as the “spin master,” for constantly spinning his partners, he attends swing classes twice a week.
“I love partner dancing; it’s my forte,” he said. “I love being able to spin and turn; I just love it.”
Donald Dickerson, a 65-year-old accountant, dances four times a week and has been faithful to that schedule for more than a year. He said it was a better rehabilitation after his hip replacement surgery.
“The gym didn’t seem to be doing any good for my hip,” he said. “It got better when I started dancing.”
For Lewis, her weekly dancing helped ease her back pain. She’s had four back surgeries for an injury sustained in a car accident. Lewis used to get around with a walker and a cane.
“It’s like therapy for me,” she said. “I’m also losing weight. It doesn’t feel like exercise because I love doing it.”
These classes are held exclusively on the East Side, and Brown calls her offerings urban or soul line dancing. But she says “it’s not a black thing.” All ethnicities are welcome, and the instructors are willing to go to different communities, including the suburbs, to teach new students.
For information about the classes, call Joan Harris at 510-4866.
“We want everybody to experience the fun and the health benefits,” she said.
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