Dance Club emphasizes fun and connections

Perk up your ears around room 441 of the Campus Rec Center on any given Friday night and you’ll hear voices whispering repetitively, “5-6-7-8…1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8.”

On the surface, you can imagine The Count from Sesame Street vocalizing these numbers. Looking in the direction of the enumeration, however, reveals a dozen students busting a move to their step counts. These are the members of Portland State’s Dance Club.

The club is specifically for partner dances like salsa, blues and west coast swing. There has been some variation of the club for the past eight years, including a competitive Latin-dance team, but this year’s club is aiming to create more of a learning ambience than a competitive one.

“The main point of being in our club is to just have fun and make connections with the music, with other people and to connect with the style of dance,” said Missy Chen, club officer.

The club’s social dance coach, Cassie Winter, brings a bit of tradition and experience to the learning environment. Winter joined a variation of the dancer’s club at Portland State a few years ago and has learned many dances through classes and social dances she’s attended in the past. Many of the social dances she’s attended in the past have had drop-in dance lessons, which helped to build her dance knowledge.

If Winter had her way, the club would have a social dance environment.

“It’d be best if we made this club like a social dance where everybody could just have fun while still occasionally learning from us. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough members to make that happen.”

Winter says her interest in dance stems from watching the reality show “So You Think You Can Dance” and seeing all the spectacular moves that the contestants are able to pull off. She explains that those moves and other factors definitely make dance a sport.

“Just like any other athlete, [dancers] get hurt and bleed and sprain things,” Winter said. “I remember, not too long ago, a sports facility test came out that showed that contestants on ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ were just as athletic as Olympic athletes.”

“Like other sports, you also have to work as a team when dancing. It takes both partners to get the job done,” Winter said.

Despite admiring the athletic movements of those dance contestants, Winter emphasizes that the goal of the club is to meet new people and to have fun.

The club has taught numerous dances thus far, ranging from salsa and the cha cha to blues and west coast swing. The club is currently experimenting with different dances and will further delve into specific dances based on the feedback of its members.

Hari Raghavan, an immigrant from India, was intrigued by the variety of dances the club offered and decided to join.

“I just wanted to check (the club) out,” Raghavan said. “I recently came to the United States and was interested in the dancing here. I don’t know much about western dance styles and I just wanted to learn as much as I can.”

New members like Raghavan are seamlessly integrated into the club as soon as they step foot on the dance floor. After filling out a waiver form, a new member can immediately dive into the dance lesson.

Chen said that new members are always welcome to the Dance Club.

“It doesn’t matter what your skill level is either, everybody learns together,” Chen said. “You also don’t need to bring a partner because we’ll find you somebody to pair up with.”

A typical session at the dancer’s club starts off with a warm-up dance. The members begin to show what they know while dancing alongside a partner. At this particular warm up, the silence fades into the song “Bad Romance” and a male club member channels his inner Lady Gaga, ecstatically revealing his freestyle dance moves.

As the warm up concludes and the music subsides, Winter begins teaching the daily lesson. She goes over the step count in the west coast swing and reveals the best way to twirl a partner.

When Winter finishes her mini-lesson, the members line up by gender and face a member of the opposite gender. As everybody goes through the set of steps a few times, the partnering is changed and the process continues.

The Gaga freestyler is having trouble with the west coast swing and mutters under his breath at what he is doing wrong. After a few moments of disappointment, the Gaga freestyler nails the steps and the twirling and a smile spreads across his face.

This moment emphasizes the “fun” aspect that Winter and Chen constantly accentuate.

1-2-3-miss…5-6-miss-8. 1-2-3-4 and 5-6-7-8-smile. ?