The Continental

Back when dancing musicals were big money makers for the Hollywood film industry, oh say in the 1930’s, there was a brief fad for creating dance-song pairings. Maybe it was a reaction to the crushing effects of the depression – escapism as the remedy to financial ruin and an increasingly ugly political landscape. I don’t know, without having lived through the depression I don’t think I’m in a position to pass judgment either. All I can say is that the fad existed and out of it sprang a handful of dances that were temporarily popular but ill equipped for social dancing. They surged into the ballrooms of the mid-twentieth century and just as quickly ebbed into obscurity leaving only a few standardized patterns to be co-opted by American Ballroom Dance along with the films from which they sprang as evidence of their existence.


Once such dance is the Continental, described in all the eloquent obscurity typical to describing dances of this era by Streetswing.com as follows:

“The dance starts like a stately Minuet, where the man approaches the woman and bows and kisses her hand while doing the one step towards each other. As they come together, the Follower rest her head on the Leads shoulder and do a brief circular Foxtrot, while doing this the Lady lifts her head every other measure and gazes caringly at her partner...”

But I haven’t come to praise or bury the Continental; I’ve come to say that we attended a gathering of the Continental Dance Club last night.

There are some really nice things about the Continental Club. They dance every Sunday at the same time and in the same place. That means no searching for an obscure ballroom or adjusting to a new dance floor that may or may not be to our liking. Secondly, they dance at the Starlight Ballroom which is mere minutes from our doorstep – a real bonus for a dancing on a Sunday night when I really want everything to be very easy. And, most important of all for us as dancers, they focus on a different sort of dancing than we normally do: waltz, foxtrot, and rumba.

Though I’m all for dancing the dances you love I'm also aware that as a dancer you've got to stretch yourself. If you learned to dance the rumba, you've got to dance it to maintain your skills - even if it isn't your very favorite dance. Kelly and I are swing dancers. We enjoy bouncy, fast paced tunes that get the blood flowing and the heart beating. Though we're quickly falling in love with the vintage foxtrot, we're still in that awkward stage - a sort of clumsy dance adolescence that only time and practice can cure. So, the slower pace and wide-open dance floor of the Continentals is well suited to our needs.

So, for the foreseeable future we'll be dancing to the tune of a one-man band playing old dancehall standards on a synth and navigating a crowd easily twice our age. You dance the number played for you, I guess.