On the upswing

It's not easy to feel like you're on the cutting edge of a trend when you're doing the fox trot with your mom. Especially at the snarly state of perpetual petulance known as age 15.

Lauren Sirota can only barely chuckle about it now, a full six years later. Six years in which millions of Americans, including a handful of friends who once taunted Sirota, have joined her in embracing ballroom dancing.

"When I first started, everyone interested in the sport was 40 and up," said Sirota, a University of Minnesota student from Long Island. "My friends would go, 'Ballroom dancing, how cheesy is that?' Then, after [several dance-focused movies] came out, they came to the studio to learn and wouldn't talk to me because they were so intimidated."

Not anymore. Whether local or professional, recreational or competitive, interest and participation in ballroom dancing is steppin' on up. Membership in USA Dance, the national governing body for dancesport, has increased more than 30 percent in the last two years, spokeswoman Angela Prince noted. Classes at Minneapolis' Four Seasons Dance Studio are two to four times larger than a decade ago, owner/instructor Rebecca Abas said. Even the University of Minnesota has a competitive ballroom-dancing team, with Sirota serving as one of the coaches.

In the past, movies such as "Dirty Dancing" and "Scent of a Woman" have fueled sudden spurts in dance-class numbers, Abas said. The 2004 hit "Shall We Dance," starring hoofing hotties Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez, provided a more sustained hike, abetted by a new-to-the-game medium: television. ABC's "Dancing With the Stars" showed America that learning a few nifty moves wasn't so daunting after all.

"For a long time, all you had on TV was the [championship-level] competition, and people would say 'I couldn't possibly do that,'" said Sirota. "On 'Dancing With the Stars,' they see people who had never done it can pick it up in a matter of weeks, that they can really look good doing it, that all age levels can do it. That really helped."

Weddings also a motivator

USA Dance's Prince maintains that while the ABC hit (averaging around 20 million viewers) and Fox's "So You Think You Can Dance" have helped, they have been riding the popularity wave rather than causing it. "These dance programs have come about because [the networks] recognized the rise in popularity of dancing, which has been progressing for a decade," she said. "Not to diminish what they've done, which is phenomenal, but the uphill climb was already there."

Instructor Abas also cites other factors locally, from wedding preparations to Minnesota winters to "droves of people who have been to Argentina" and come back itching to tango.

Not that the urge is universal. Abas and another veteran local dance teacher, Dean Constantine, acknowledged that quite often, a woman is almost literally dragging her significant other to dance lessons. "An awful lot of the men are under protest at first," said Constantine. "We just tell them to come watch. Before long, most of them are asking their wives 'Why didn't we do this years ago?'"

John and Linda Ethier of Maple Grove are prime examples. The recent empty-nesters and another couple started taking private lessons at Four Seasons. The motivation was simple: "The four of us have children in their 20s, and they're starting to get married," Linda Ethier said. "At a wedding you hate to get up there and do the basic sway back and forth. But you just don't want to be embarrassed or dread weddings."

But even dread was not enough of a motivating factor for the men, so Linda pulled out the heavy artillery. "I finally had to remind John of all the athletic events I had attended with him over the years," she said. "We tried to convince the men that this would be good exercise, an athletic thing, which they pooh-poohed. But it is kind of like a sport, and it called for more athleticism than they expected.

"I still don't think they enjoy it as much as we do, but they have stopped complaining."

And hey, it beats dancing with your mom.

Bill Ward • 612-673-7643