Save a Dancehall

Today I had another reminder just how lucky I am to have a place like the Indiana Roof Ballroom to dance. I’m a fairly religious NPR listener and one of my favorite shows is Morning Edition. Happenstance would have it that this morning, while driving to work, I caught a story on an organization that’s trying to rescue the historic dance halls of Texas. The story was a beautiful thing – a man with money saw Sengelman Hall, a Schulenburg, TX and he saw more than a moldering building that’d been sitting more or less vacant since the 40’s. He saw a piece of the soul of the town dying and he started resuscitation. Now, after two years of hard work a nearly 100 year old dance floor is feeling the feet of new generations.


Maybe I’m a member of some weird religion or maybe I just go in for anthropomorphizing but I’m certain that a building has a soul. That soul is a composite of all the people who’ve been there and all their experiences they’ve had while there. So an IRS or Dentist’s office probably are karmic black holes – filled the pain and fear. Maybe some part of the heebie-jeebies you get when you go to the DMV is because of the yuck that’s been poured into the woodwork.

What about a dancehall? Imagine a immigrant from Germany who comes to America in the 1800’s, leaving everything he knows behind in search of a better life and more opportunity. He takes the only job he can get – it’s low paying and back breaking – and after putting in another week of hard labor he finds himself on Main Street of the little town that’s his new home. He’s strolling down the street, even the signs are in a language he barely speaks – and then he hears the sound of a polka band. He follows the sound until it leads him to a brightly lit marquee and after paying the entry fee he’s immersed in the music he remembers from the old country and surrounded by other people who speak his language and for a moment he’s not an outsider and life is easier. Multiply that by a four or five hundred people and sixty or seventy years and envision the joy that might soak into the walls of an old dancehall.

I advocate dancing for the enjoyment of dancing. That’s the only reason to dance – for fun. But, if you need another reason to dance, saving your local dancehall is a pretty darn good one.