Shall You Dance?

Oh I love to climb a mountain
And reach the highest peak
But it doesn’t thrill me half as much
As dancing cheek to cheek
— Irving Berlin

Fred Astaire was just another scrawny twerp to Ginger Rogers — until she saw him dance. Richard Gere was a bored lawyer with a lackluster marriage until dance classes with instructor Jennifer Lopez put so much spring in his step that his wife thought he was having an affair. And Antonio Banderas built up the self-esteem of at-risk inner-city kids by turning their hip-hop moves into ballroom magic.

But this only happens in the movies, right? Wrong. Just ask Rocco Vita, a “gentleman of a certain age” who lost his wife of forty-nine years seven years ago. “You have a social circle, but you don’t feel like you fit in anymore,” he remembers about his suddenly single status. He felt like a fifth wheel at dinner parties, and he always felt lonely. Then a friend told him about Robin Poska’s Ballroom Magic in Darien. Though he’d always enjoyed dancing, particularly swing, Rocco was naturally a little hesitant. After all, he’d had the same dance partner for fifty years. But realizing that he wasn’t getting any younger, he signed up for a series of classes.

“Robin’s ‘Ballroom Magic’ has been magical to me,” says Rocco. “It reverted my life to how it was before. I started meeting younger people and taking on their energy, and I felt younger myself.” Rocco got so hooked on ballroom that he started going out dancing two or three nights a week. Then he discovered dancing on the high seas and became a dance host on international cruises. (It’s decidedly not like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in Out to Sea, he’s quick to point out.)

“I’ve cha-cha’d around Cape Horn and I waltzed the Baltics,” he says, noting that he originally signed on to make new friends and literally expand his horizons. But he got something unexpected in the bargain: a new dance partner. En route to Europe, near the Azores, Rocco met Elaine. They danced together as much as they could, but the land portion of the trip sent them in different directions. As luck would have it, they were on the same flight home from London. “I had no idea I could renew happiness,” says the dapper grandfather, who regularly commutes from his home in Stamford to hers in New Jersey. “And I owe it all to dancing.”

Robin Poska, who runs the studio with her husband, Ed, calls Rocco the poster child for ballroom dancing, and for good reason. His story may be more dramatic than others, but it’s a common one just the same. It happens every night in ballrooms, classrooms and clubs across the country. It’s probably happening right now on a dozen hardwood floors throughout Fairfield County. “I have another student who met his wife in a dance class,” says Robin. “He proposed at one of our Saturday night dances in front of 200 people.”

Vickie O’Connor grew up in a family that appreciated dancing. She took social ballroom classes in elementary school in Stamford and has loved it ever since. Her older sister had the ultimate sixties teenage thrill: She and a friend danced on American Bandstand. When Vickie married Bob O’Connor, her dancing shoes went into mothballs. “He’s a great guy, but he just didn’t like to dance,” she says wistfully. However, timing is everything. When their youngest child went off to college around the same time that their oldest was getting married, Vickie suggested the couple take dance lessons together. “There were no more excuses,” says the Norwalk resident.

“Now we are having the best time!” she practically squeals. “We have so much fun, and we laugh all the time.” She jokes with her kids that she may have created a monster. “He used to be quiet; now he’s even a little bold,” she says. Recently, Bob went in for minor surgery, and not only did he talk nonstop about ballroom dancing, he was handing out brochures for dance events to all the doctors and nurses.

What’s Old Is Newly Hip
Until the late 1950s, everyone went out for dinner and dancing, Robin says. “Then Big Band gave way to jazz, which was less danceable. Rock brought back dancing somewhat, but it was more freestyle.” As rock evolved, she notes, it was harder to dance to and became more about listening. Enter Donna Summer and the disco fever of the seventies, and suddenly everyone owned a white suit, platform shoes and was doing the hustle.

Then came the bear market and baby boom of the eighties and nineties, and people were too busy (or too tired) to hit the dance floor night after night. There were always people dancing, of course — and Dirty Dancing, with Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, registered a blip in the late eighties — but the heyday had passed. Yet over the past few years, Gap commercials and movies glamorizing dance competitions started to renew people’s interest. And then something really momentous happened, the one thing that can turn a little ripple into a rogue wave: a reality-TV program about ballroom dancing.

Given that there are reality shows about everything from swapping partners to working for Donald Trump, this was inevitable. Yet when Dancing with the Stars debuted on June 1, 2005, it drew the largest audience ever for a summer reality show: 13 million viewers. The following week, an additional 2 million tuned in to watch the likes of Evander Holyfield, Rachel Hunter and John O’Hurley (aka Elaine’s boss J. Peterman on Seinfeld) mix it up with professional dancers. The show promptly clinched the No. 1 spot and stayed there half the summer.

That’s when people like local dance star and teacher David Oliveri saw an immediate spike in enrollment. As David recalls, “We would get something like three new students a day — and they were sticking it out.” Which actually doesn’t surprise him. “If you teach people correctly, they will stay with it,” he says. “Guaranteed.”

What is it about dancing that’s different from other trends that Americans get excited about for five minutes, then drop like a biotech stock whose patent wasn’t approved? David has a modest theory: “If there’s one thing missing in your life, whatever it is, dancing can fill it.” Not only that, he adds, but dancing is “completely addictive. There’s the dancing itself, which is a good athletic workout, but the social aspect is a very big part of it. Unlike other sports, dancing is like going to a big, black-tie party all the time.”

Talk about poster boys. The twenty-two-year-old Darien resident has put Fairfield County on the ballroom map with his exciting flair that’s already won him three national championships. David has been dancing since the mid-nineties, back when “it was a big blur of cat suits and conformity,” as he puts it. π Dance lessons weren’t his idea, however. He only started as a favor to his mother, Denise, herself a competitive dancer. When David was nine, Denise taught him and a girlfriend a little dance number that they performed for the entire school on Parents Day. At twelve she asked him to take formal lessons at an Arthur Murray school near their Westchester County home, and he obliged her, even though all he wanted to do was play Nintendo.

He soon discovered that dancing was not without its perks. “Sometimes we had dance lessons at Richard Gere’s Pound Ridge house,” he says. “I wasn’t star-struck by him, but I had an enormous crush on [his then wife] Cindy Crawford!” When the Oliveris moved to Ossining, Denise enrolled him in a competitive studio run by two Hungarian brothers, and that’s when the bug bit. “I went to see my teacher’s son dance, and I was blown away. I decided I was going to emulate that.”

Social and Competitive
Most local social dancers aren’t interested in the competitive side of dancing, but they agree that it’s thrilling to watch. David claims to get an endorphin rush just watching other competitors on a dance floor. And seeing dancing performed at its highest levels is a great motivator for students. David uses himself as an example to his students, pointing out, as most good instructors do, that with desire and dedication, anyone can become a fine dancer.

One person who’s seen David evolve from a kid with potential to a potent competitor is Chris Donohue. He would know — he’s the former owner of the much-mourned Terrace Club, which closed its Stamford doors last New Year’s, and he’s Denise’s beau. “It’s been incredible to see what David has accomplished and what an amazing dancer he’s turned into.” Five nights a week for fifteen years, Chris oversaw the dancing and socializing at the Terrace Club, which local enthusiasts say will never be replaced. “They’re turning it into a shopping center,” he says plaintively. “But what are you going to do?”

That depends on how far you’re willing to drive. There are plenty of places to cut a rug, including dance parties put on by local teachers at their studios. Sal Scaringella of Westport has been a student of Robin and Ed’s for four years, and this sixtyish gent can be found out dancing twice, if not three times, a week. He attends Robin’s Saturday night dances and makes the rounds to Greenwich, Fairfield, even White Plains. He’s clearly one of those addicts David Oliveri talks about. Sal took a few basic classes after college, but, as he describes it, “marriage and kids put an end to that.” And then his wife, who was sixteen years his junior, put an end to the marriage.

“I was devastated,” he remembers. “I hated the idea of having to socialize again after so many years.” He hated the idea of bars and Internet dating even more, and found a support group for divorcés. At one meeting someone told him about the Terrace Club. “I went to one dance there,” says Sal, “and I never returned to the support group. The music was beautiful, and the people I met were friendly and wonderful. So I signed up for dance classes and have been hitting the circuit ever since.”

Like so many other social dancers, Sal discovered a new world populated by the young, the old, singles, old-married types — all linked by their love of dance. Sal is another of the many people who turned a dance partnership into a romantic one. Three years ago he met a great woman, and they’ve been an item ever since. “Dancing is a fabulous venue for anyone going through a transition,” he says. “It’s a lot better than crying in your soup.”

Dancing creates its own social environment, says Erik Novoa, son of a New York City ballet dancer and an opera singer, and a local teacher of West Coast swing and the hustle. “It can be hard to find social interaction in the isolated suburbs,” he continues, “so people go out of their way to be together, and dance is a perfect thing to do. It’s also the best way to meet other singles.” Like Robin Poska, he’s seen many marriages that started with the words “Would you like to dance?”

There’s another thing that dancing creates, according to Erik, and that’s a euphoric high. “Dance is a flirtation, a positive social interaction that makes people feel better about themselves. You develop a self-confidence when you learn the skills, and there’s a sense of connectedness that comes from touching other people. This releases the feel-good chemicals endorphin and dopamine, which produce that incredible happiness and euphoria.” He sees it night after night on the dance floor. “I joke with my friends that I’m like a drug dealer. I’m not selling dance,” he says, “I’m selling euphoria.”

While there’s nothing wrong with a little euphoria, dancing, as its devotees will tell you, is even bigger than that. In the 2005 documentary film Mad Hot Ballroom, about formal dance classes in New York public schools (which culminate in a citywide competition), a Brooklyn principal watches her students grow from embarrassed, awkward fledglings to truly accomplished dancers. Summing up the whole experience, PS 112’s Louise Verdemare says, “Dancing is more than learning a few steps, it’s more than a part of physical education. It’s etiquette, it’s knowledge of other cultures, it’s life.”

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