It’s 8 o’clock on a Friday night when a group of eight — four men and four women — comes strolling through the doors of the dance hall located at the rear of the Hayloft RV Park in Lynnwood.
They join a handful of others ready for a night of social ballroom dancing as Carmen &Dale’s Strictly Ballroom gets another lesson under way. Last week, it was the rumba. This week, it’s polka and zydeco.
“Well, just so you know, I’m not much of a dancer,” one of the men tells instructor Dale Garnica, who quickly reassures him that he and his partner, Shirley “Carmen” Nelson, are there to turn one of those left feet right.
“This is a perfect crowd for polka,” Nelson said of the garrulous group. “Just wait until we get dancing, then they’ll really be laughing.”
And for Garnica and Nelson, that’s the point: learning to dance while having fun.
“We try to get everyday people to lose their fear of ballroom dancing by learning how really easy it is to learn basic ballroom steps,” said Nelson, who has been dancing since the age of 5 and became a dance instructor in 2000.
The couple only recently began offering group dances, with lessons given weekly except for the first Friday of the month and social dances planned for two Saturdays each month that coincide with the dance steps taught during previous lessons.
“It’s such a warm, fun, social time,” Garnica said of the classes and dances. “Everybody dances with everybody.”
Carmen &Dale’s Strictly Ballroom doesn’t teach competitive ballroom dancing, and that takes the pressure off of novices looking to learn, he said.
“It’s not about competition. It’s about social fun with your spouse or significant other and meeting new people,” Nelson agreed.
According to USA Dance, the national governing body of DanceSport in the United States, ballroom dance has seen a surge of interest in the past few years, with all age groups and social levels getting involved.
At the same time, “the image of ballroom dancers has changed,” according to the organization. “Instead of formally dressed couples in white tie, tails and gowns dancing in fancy ballrooms, we now see thousands of informally dressed couples having fun in gymnasiums, community centers and similar locations.”
Such as the Everett Boeing Recreation Center in Everett, where the Boeing Employees’ Big Band Dance Club meets Monday evenings to attend beginning and intermediate dance lessons.
Open to Boeing employees, retirees, their family and friends, the dance club’s beginner series includes lessons on the rumba, cha-cha, fox-trot, swing, waltz and samba, said Jim Trimble, who has been teaching dance for the past 11 years with his wife, Jackie.
“In intermediate, we do more steps in those same rhythms plus tango and nightclub two-step,” said Trimble, who also instructs the Kent chapter of the Boeing group as well as offering lessons for groups around Puget Sound.
Trimble said that class sizes have grown by about 30 percent since the TV show “Dancing with the Stars” premiered in 2005, elevating the activity’s profile among people of all ages.
No matter the class size, teaching has come naturally to the manufacturing engineer, who readily admits dancing didn’t come easily to him: “I was one of those people that struggled.”
But Trimble turned that weakness into a strength by developing a style of instruction that would help dancers of all abilities.
Jack Steele has been a beneficiary of the Trimbles’ instruction. Now a co-vice president of the Boeing Employees’ Big Band Dance Club in Everett, the retiree started dancing a year and a half ago.
“I’m probably still a beginner in some people’s eyes,” he said, chuckling. Beginner or not, he enjoys learning the new steps, getting his heart rate up and chatting with friends old and new.
“Just being able to dance is a lot of fun,” he said. “It’s a good activity — a good physical activity, a good social activity.”
Nowhere is that more apparent than at Carmen &Dale’s Strictly Ballroom, where the Friday night polka lesson continues, with the dancers practicing the basic progressive step before moving into the side step turn — whirling around on the hardwood floors and giggling at the occasional misstep.
“It only takes a moment to get out on the floor and have fun,” Garnica said
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