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On Halloween night, while the rest of the city was busy throwing together last minute costumes and elbowing their way to the bar or through the Village parade, the mood was a bit less chaotic - if not as energetic - at Dance Chelsea, a studio on 25th St. between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. A young man in a Dead Kennedys T-shirt and beat-up Chuck Taylors waltzed around the room with a girl sporting a wig that complimented her partner's electric blue Mohawk.
The couple's attire might have looked a little out of place, but they did not. Their gracefulness was proof of ballroom dancing's cultural reemergence amongst a generation more comfortable with the mosh pit, club free-for-all or simple cross-armed indifference. Formal dancing's return to the limelight has been helped by a string of recent movies and reality TV shows, but the fact remains: women always dig a guy who can cut a rug.
"For a straight male, it's a great way to meet women," says Drew Brown, 27, an instructor and student at Dance Chelsea. "I went to an engineering school where there was something like a four-to-one guys to girls ratio. So I took a ballroom dancing class and it was four-to-one girls to guys, and I was like, wait a minute."
For single men, knowing the right steps can pay off. There still aren't a whole lot of guys comfortable busting out complex gyrations on the dance floor, let alone with the sort of typically refined dancing that often gets equated with their grandparents' evening activities.
"We teach them to walk and then we teach them to dance," Dance Chelsea owner Stanley McCalla says of his new pupils. "Dancing transforms the students. It gives them confidence, their posture is different."
