Hot to Fox Trot : Singles Get Back in Step With Ballroom Dancing as a Way to Find Fun, Romance

“One-two-three, step-two-three,” Phil Martin calls out to the 30 Cal State Long Beach students gliding across the dance floor. Lifting the needle off the slowly spinning record, he urges: “Down and around, find a new partner.”

The smiling students waltz by in front of Martin, their graceful motion interrupted only by occasional collisions that cause the couples to burst into embarrassed laughter.

Two hours later, the students are still dancing, seemingly oblivious to the fact that class has been over for 20 minutes. In other courses, students often wait anxiously for the end. In Martin’s class, they just can’t get seem to get enough. Sometimes, says Martin, he has to put away the records and lock the doors before his students will leave.

“They’ll keep dancing until I kick them out,” Martin notes with a grin.

Just when you thought the waltz and the cha-cha had followed the dinosaur into extinction, they and other social dances are back--and as Martin’s students will testify, they’re hot.

Across the nation, young people are rediscovering that the dances popularized by their grandparents not only are fun, they also offer something hard to find in today’s singles scene--a safe, relaxing environment in which to find friends and, possibly, even a little romance.

“Why would anybody want to sit at a bar and eyeball each other?” Martin asks. “I think that most people would much rather dance and enjoy one another’s company.”

For Dianah Marr, a senior in Martin’s class, dancing offers a more comfortable--and sometimes more insightful--means of getting to know someone.

“Dancing is a great way to break the ice between people, and you can learn a lot about a guy just by dancing with him,” Marr says. “The way he holds you, how assertive he is when he leads you through the steps--they all reveal things about your partner’s personality. There’s a lot of nonverbal communication that takes place when you’re dancing with a partner.”

Social dance encompasses everything from traditional ballroom dances like the waltz and fox trot to Latin dances like the samba and mambo. It even includes the latest craze, country-Western dancing.

The resurgent interest in social dancing, which started with movies like “Dirty Dancing” and has continued with recent releases like “The Mambo Kings,” has been particularly strong among college students, and ballroom dance courses can be found from Brigham Young University to the University of Chicago to Penn State.

In Southern California, most of the state-run public universities offer ballroom or social dance courses as part of their curriculum, and officials say the classes are often filled.

Mike Vandergriend, a dance instructor at UC San Diego, says ballroom dancing is so popular with students there that the 40-student classes sometimes have waiting lists of 70 or more.

At Cal State Los Angeles, social dance’s popularity with students ensured that in spite of budget deficits and a large reduction in other types of classes earlier this year, none of the six ballroom dance courses was eliminated.

For some of the ballroom dance students at Cal State Long Beach, losing their class to the budget ax would be a particularly hard blow, because the class is sometimes the one opportunity to relax and socialize with other students.

Maury Bonakdur, a Cal State Long Beach senior whose schedule is crammed with classes during the day and a full-time job at night, says that going to ballroom dance is an important form of relaxation that has brought him some unexpected benefits.

“Since I’ve begun dancing, I’ve been much more relaxed, and my grades have gone straight up,” Bonakdur says.

But improved grades are just one benefit social dancing can offer.

In a study published in Prevention magazine, Martin and a colleague wrote that social dancing conditions the cardiovascular system just as well as jogging and aerobics. Even better, it does not stress joints and ligaments like other forms of aerobic exercise, they found. But perhaps more important, says Martin, social dance raises a person’s self-esteem and self-confidence.

That confidence is clear as Martin’s students twirl through the intricate steps of a swing, laughing and calling out to one another as if they were a 1990s version of bobby soxers at the hop.

Clad in pastel sweat pants and high-top Air Jordans, the students bear little resemblance to their poodle-skirted predecessors. But what they do have in common is an infectious happiness that animates the warm smiles and conversations exchanged during the dances.

Elizabeth Wartluft, a graduate teaching fellow in the University of Oregon’s dance department, traces the growing popularity of social dance to young people’s growing dissatisfaction with society’s “anything goes” attitude.

“People like to dance,” says Wartluft, “but many of the current dancing styles are just like the singles scene: There are no set rules, and you do whatever you feel like. A lot of young people are uncomfortable with that kind of atmosphere. They’re looking for something more structured, something with a definite set of rules.”

For Marr, social dance has given her the opportunity to avoid the singles scene.

“In the singles scene, people judge you by your looks or the way you talk--your image is everything,” she says. “With social dance, people are much more genuine. No one cares if you’re not a perfect dancer.”

“It’s the same old thing every time you go to a singles bar, so I don’t go very often, “ says Heidi Wachli, a Cal State Long Beach senior who is the ballroom dancer club’s social director.

“The guys don’t treat you with much respect. They’re very pushy, and they follow you around asking for your phone number. And when you talk with a guy at one of these places, they’re not usually looking at your eyes,” says Wachli, a tinge of annoyance creeping into her voice.

A moment later, she adds that in ballroom dancing, the men “look at you differently. It’s hard to explain, but it makes me feel feminine. It makes me feel like a lady.”