The Houghton College Swing Dance Club has been a popular club on campus for years. Current Swing Dance leader, Hannah Banks ‘17, is optimistic about the club, whose meetings take place twice a week in the Nielsen Center auxiliary gym. A typical night involves the leaders teaching a new move, followed by an open dance where partners are rotated. However, one can attend with a partner and dance with them exclusively if that is what one is comfortable with, but Banks encouraged students to come as singles so as to make friends with their dance partners.
The club does more than just simply having nights of laid back dancing. Over October break, four members of the club went to a ballroom dance competition at Cornell University. Banks, along with three other current students, Katherine Stevick ‘19, Elizabeth Moore ‘20, and Jared Frey ‘18, attended the competition. Not to be confused with swing dance, ballroom dancing is a completely different style, more concerned with technique. The group participated in 12 subcategories of four main styles: Smooth, Standard, Latin, and Rhythm. In the Smooth style they participated in the waltz, tango and foxtrot in the Standard style, the waltz, tango, and quickstep; in the Latin style the jive, international rumba, and international cha-cha; and in the Rhythm style the East Coast swing, the American rumba, and the American cha-cha.
Banks was incredibly proud of her dancers, with herself and Stevick earning multiple callbacks after roughly a month’s worth of practice. They won a ribbon in the Fun Dance category, a separate category open to anyone without registration dancing the back-to-back tango, a dance literally executed with the dancers’ backs to each other. Stevick’s roommate, Anna Schilke ‘19, said, “I was proud of her accomplishment.”
After pulling off a successful swing dance social on campus that involved University of Buffalo (UB) instructors and swing dance club members interacting with around 30 to 40 Houghton College students, Banks looks forward to the future for Houghton Swing Dance. Herself and the club are planning at least one, hopefully two, trips to Buffalo to dance off-campus, including UB’s swing social on December 2. Banks hopes to forge a stronger relationship with UB’s swing dance club so that the two clubs can learn from and grow with each other. Claire Brower ‘18 expressed her enjoyment last year during a swing event in Buffalo, and encourages others to give it a try.
In closing, Banks said that “more people should come” to the club’s meetings. She added, “It’s a great place to pick up chicks.” The club meets Monday and Tuesday nights from 9:30 to 10:30 p.m. in the auxiliary gym.