Once intended only for the European social elite, ballroom dancing has undergone several evolutionary changes over the centuries. With the hustle going out of favor in the dancing world in the sixties, ballroom dancing has generally remained one of the less-popular forms of dancing in the U.S. The success of Fox’s “Dancing with the Stars” has made ballroom dancing accessible to C-list celebrities and introduced ballroom dancing to a new generation.
“Ballroom dancing’s been around since the 1700’s. It’s on a high point right now,” said Riley Fry, 21, intern instructor at the Arthur Murray dance studio in Thousand Oaks and a student at Brigham Young University-Idaho.
Rebecca Johnson, 18, an English major at Moorpark College, has been dancing for about a year and four months.
“It was always something that I really wanted to do and I saw the ad for the studio and started taking lessons”, said Johnson. “I don’t really have a training schedule. I come in when I can.”
Her private instructor, Fry, has been dancing since he was eight years old and has been training competitively for a year.
“There’s a lot of technique involved in dancing. There’s a lot of rules involved,” said Fry, explaining that ballroom dancing is an art form. “When you go watch people who’ve danced for years and years, they’re thinking about everything from where the pressure is on the foot to how their head is turned.”
Like most things, ballroom dancing will fall in and out of favor throughout the years to come. But it will most likely remain because according to Johnson, a man who knows how to ballroom dance is sexy.
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