Dancers in the Bay Area’s vibrant ballroom scene call it a ‘fountain of youth’

Cupertino’s Rick Greene was 19 years old and taking a short vacation after his first voyage with the U.S. Merchant Marines during World War II when he decided to enroll in ballroom dancing lessons. He had enough money left over after buying his first car and wanted to be able to escort young ladies to dances, he said.

So he learned how to dance swing, rumba and waltz. In his free time, he would escort women to glamorous dances that featured the music of big band stars like Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey.

Eight decades later, in an interview just before his 100th birthday this past December, Greene said he still goes ballroom dancing three times a week. Though he can no longer do some dances – the Viennese waltz, the quickstep, the samba – due to what he calls a “gimpy leg,”  he is still learning new steps from Robin Horn, his San Jose instructor of 37 years.

“Once I get on the dance floor, it doesn’t bother me. Away I go!” he said. “I hope to be out there at 102.”

Today’s Bay Area’s ballroom dancing scene looks a bit different. While it may be smaller than it was in 1943, it’s still vibrant, with hundreds of dancers gathering at ballrooms weekly to dance the waltz, tango or swing. At retirement homes and senior centers, dancers come together at various locations almost every day of the week – with some attendees throwing in disco moves for the fun of it. And a contingent of competitive and professional dancers train at local studios before jet-setting across the country – and world – in pursuit of prestigious ballroom dancing titles.

Greene started dancing frequently again when he found himself getting lonely after his wife died in 1983, beginning with lessons at a ballroom in Saratoga, he said. Now, he goes to a dance in Santa Clara every Tuesday, one in Sunnyvale every Wednesday and one at the Starlite Ballroom in San Jose on Saturday nights.

“I get to circulate,” he said. “I don’t get lonely.”

“It’s little nooks and crannies, almost like high school,” said Horn of the Bay Area’s ballroom community. Horn was trained as a teacher after responding to a newspaper ad in 1984 and has taught ever since — now at her own studio Park Avenue Ballroom. “It’s a little clique-y, like in anything. … Even the people that go to the Santa Clara dance don’t necessarily go to the Sunnyvale dance, and there’s different people you can see each place you go.”

Ballroom dancing features a leader and a follower dancing together in a “frame,” and generally doing opposite steps, Horn said. As the leader’s foot moves forward, the follower’s foot moves back.

“It’s an international language,” said Joallyn Bohn, a Danville-based instructor who has taught ballroom dance for 30 years. “You hear the music, and you can go up to someone, sort of indicate you’d like to dance with them, and then get on the floor, and you’re moving like you’ve been dancing your whole life with that person.”

Dublin’s Scott Harrison, 70, knows that feeling.

“It’s quite exciting to dance with somebody and know that you felt that was the best dance of the evening or the afternoon, and sometimes they feel the same way,” Harrison said. “Things inspire you in the capacity of the person you’re dancing with, and the synchronization with the music – it’s very rewarding.”

Harrison goes out dancing six days per week, mostly at senior centers across the region — traveling as far north as Vallejo and as far south as San Jose, he said. When he found no one seemed to be tracking local events in the scene, he even launched a Bay Area ballroom dance newsletter and website.

Harrison said he joined his first ballroom dancing class with his wife about 25 years ago. He said he’s drawn to the mental workout as much as the physical one, though he very much prefers fancy footwork to lifting barbells in the gym.

“It’s the kind of exercise you don’t have to feel sore the next morning,” he said. “It’s challenging because, as a leader, you have to learn the step, plan the step, execute the step, and think about what the next step is going to be. … Assuming you change partners, each partner has a different ability, and if you’re at my level, you try to adjust your dance to your partner’s ability. It’s not repetitive at all.”

Louise Kirby, president and treasurer of Richmond’s Allegro Ballroom — a hub of the ballroom scene for more than 30 years — said people come from all over the Bay Area to take classes in everything from the foxtrot to the tango to the cha cha to samba, and to take part in dance socials.

She said Allegro is also a hotspot for Argentine tango, with top dancers visiting as guest teachers and giving performances. That’s significant because the Bay Area has what longtime ballroom dancer and Allegro instructor Mark Novak calls “probably the biggest” Argentine tango scene in the U.S.

The appeal, said Mat MaMoody, an Argentine tango instructor at Allegro, is that the style is particularly connective, making the dancers like “two souls in one body.”

Competitive ballroom dancing has its own social rhythms, as dancers see the same faces and know everyone competing at their level as they travel to contests across the country, said Monica Serpa, who formerly danced competitively and now owns Studio M Ballroom Club in San Jose. Studio M offers both competitive training and social dancing.

The competitive side of ballroom dancing runs at a level of intensity that’s very different than what attracts those into the scene just for the fun and social connection.

“You can spend hours and hours doing one step,” Serpa said.

Dancers can be competing every weekend, said Horn, who was in professional and professional-amateur competitions until she was 45, and is coming out of retirement in January to dance with a student.

“When they started getting really popular, we were traveling every weekend. And we would go to every single city, everywhere in the country, and go to a hotel and be in a ballroom for the whole weekend,” Horn said. “Not real glamorous.”

Dancers generally choose to compete in either Latin or standard ballroom dance — although some compete in as many as ten dances, said Polina Oddr, another Studio M instructor.

“If you’re on a professional level, you want to get the trophy — you’re not just doing it for fun,” said Oddr, who started training at six years old and won the World Latin American Championship three consecutive times. “You are hungry to become better.”

Both Oddr and Artem Shmigelyuk, another teacher at Studio M, have competed in the U.S. and abroad, and now continue to do so with their students in professional-amateur competitions, in which the student pays the instructor to be their partner and only the amateur is judged, Shmigelyuk said. But pro-am is expensive, as the student is paying not only for their own expenses but also for the fees and expenses of their teacher. One weekend can cost as much as $4,000 to $5,000.

Almost everyone in the Bay Area ballroom scene agrees that its appeal is driven very much by the ongoing popularity of TV’s “Dancing with the Stars.”

“It’s made the whole craft chic again,” said Novak.

Greene, who watches the show every week, enjoys seeing professionals in action, he said.

“They get all 10s, and it almost makes me cry, because the reactions of the audience and the judges and the contestants and everything,” he said. “It gets pretty wild sometimes.”

New dancers can find themselves hooked on not just the social aspect of ballroom, but the way it makes them feel, as well.

“Social dancing is the fountain of youth,” Bohn said. “It’s so good for you physically, mentally and socially.”

Greene, who has an extensive library of ballroom dance videos and picks out a few new steps to learn with Horn each week, said it keeps him mentally alert — and even helped him pass his driving test.

“Robin and I constantly move on to new steps,” he said. “There’s a lot of elderly people out there in our 90s dancing. The only problem is, most of the ladies I dance with, I’m old enough to be their father. But they don’t seem to care.”

Horn believes it can have similar benefits for everyone.

“If you just keep yourself moving,” she said, “you can live to be 100.”