Fun, fitness & dance

Country dance lets folks exercise and socialize

By LISA EISENHAUER
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Ronald Sawyer admits there are nights when he’s not sure he has enough energy to scoot his boots, let alone push his tush.

But once he hits the floor with his country and western dancing pal, Ella Kuhar, the 65-year-old semi-retired barber says he always finds his groove.

“There’s times when we dance at least four hours,” the Gillespie, Ill., resident says.

Sawyer and Kuhar met on a dance floor about a decade ago, and have kept each other moving to the twangs of country music ever since, sometimes as often as four nights a week.

“I always feel better the next day,” says Kuhar, 57, of Girard, Ill. She was taking a brief break on a night that otherwise found her whirling around or shuffling across the basketball-court-sized floor at Wild Country in Collinsville, Mo., one of her and Sawyer’s weekly stops.

The pair are among the dozens of regulars who queue up for line dances or pair off as a couple beneath the nightclub’s huge glitter ball for the Boot Scootin’ Boogie, Tush Push, Two Step, Electric Slide, Slappin’ Leather and other dances.

Like many of their fellow hoofers, they can’t say how many dances they know or single out a favorite. In fact, that variety and challenge is what keeps them on their feet, many country dancers say.

“It doesn’t even feel like exercise,” says Kuhar. “It’s just fun. But you do get the benefits of exercise.”

For Kuhar, those benefits include a bone density that her doctor recently found remarkable.

For Scott Hurst, another Wild Country regular, the benefits include a cardiovascular workout that nicely complements the workout he gets lifting cases of beer all day on the job at a local distributorship. “It actually keeps me pretty in shape,” the 20-year-old Marine resident says of his after-work hobby.

For Millstadt residents Julie Stehl, 45, and her husband, Jeff, 46, nights on the dance floor add a good balance to their day jobs running an RV and trailer sales business. “It’s like a stress relief for us,” Jeff Stehl says.

Dance instructor Joyce Warren says the perks of country dance don’t stop there. “It’s also got social benefits, which is always good for your health,” she says.

Warren, 51, of Troy, Ill., has spent 25 years building those healthy social bonds as people learn to string together the slides, kicks, shuffles and hops that make up, for example, “God Bless Texas” or “Baby Loves to Rock It.”

In addition to teaching classes, she also coordinates a dance group called the Slappers that has had members as young as 7 and as old as 89. The Slappers finds welcoming audiences at retirement centers and other sites where group members kick up their heels.

Warren and other instructors say the hook for country dancing is the music behind it.

Instructor Beth Emerson, 41, of St. Charles, Mo., says that because most of the dances are low impact, you can “go three to four hours and not get worn out.”

But that doesn’t mean you’re not getting a workout. “Dance is dance,” says instructor Jeff Bartholomew. And like all of its sister dance styles, country is a mix of exercise with aerobic, toning and flexibility benefits.

Instructors say country dance is at heart just a version of ballroom dance with, in Bartholomew’s words, “different music and to some degree different clothing.”

Bartholomew is something of an expert on both styles, having spent about 22 years as a competitive ballroom dancer and teacher before giving over to the lure of country. In 1986, the Camp Hill, Pa., resident founded the United Country Western Dance Council, which now sanctions dozens of competitions worldwide that draw hundreds of participants.

While country dance took root in American traditions and has a solid following here, Bartholomew says its popularity is propelling it around the globe, most recently to Australia and Asia. Already, country has found its niche in Europe. He has seen competitions there draw up to four generations of dancers from the same family.

“Somehow, the music seems to be able in Europe to pull entire families into events,” Bartholomew says.

That’s not the typical case in the United States. Here, country dance clubs usually draw couples or singles out for a night, dancers say.

And thanks to the array of line and couple country dances, those twosomes and onesomes can share the floor for just about any song.

The dances have their set patterns of steps, slides and even stomps, but dancers say those routines also leave some room for interpretation. An extra wiggle here or a bit of a dip there can let expressive dancers set themselves apart on a crowded honky-tonk floor.

There’s also plenty of flexibility in attire. While cowboy hats and boots are required in competition, baseball caps and flip-flops are just as popular among the casual dance crowd at clubs such as Wild Country.