Get up and dance

If you can see yourself sweeping across the dance floor to the music of a Viennese waltz or turning up the heat to a spicy tango, put on your dancing shoes, your time is here. Ballroom dancing with all its flare, glamour and pizazz, is again popular – and not just on television but in Coeur d’Alene as well.

Thanks to blockbuster hit television shows such as “Dancing With the Stars” and “So You Think You Can Dance,” the fire of the salsa, the mambo, the rumba, the pasodoble and the jive, to name a few, have caught our interest and creativity to want to get up and dance. It’s not just the movement that is so popular. Ballroom dancing is now recognized as one of the best forms of exercise, beating out tennis, walking or biking for calorie-burning activities. An hour of moderate-paced dance burns between 250 to 300 calories per hour.

No one is more thrilled about this new popularity of dance than Sheryl Bentz-Sipe, professional dance instructor, champion dance competitor and owner of Dance Tales in Coeur d’Alene. She has performed and taught dance in the Northwest for more than 20 years after earning a master’s degree in dance from the University of Oregon and a degree in physical education from the University of Idaho. Internationally-ranked professionals have consistently rated Bentz-Sipe as one of the tops in her choreography, music and teaching skills.

Bentz-Sipe and her dance partner Mark Vesterby have won second and fourth place trophies in the Coeur d’Alene Ballroom Spectacular, and last May won the prestigious Supreme Award Challenge for their Argentine Tango routine. Having formed a team less than four years ago, they have worked themselves up to perform recently in front of a large studio audience at a taping of the ABC show “Dancing With the Stars.”

They explained that after learning they could get seats to the show, they flew to California for the taping in a Santa Monica airport hangar. While in the audience, the producer came over and invited them onto the dance floor to show how a tango should be done. They not only wowed the crowd, but got to talk dance with one of the celebrities, John O’Hurley. Now they are looking at some possibilities of a future visit to the set.

Bentz-Sipe offers classes on her 1,200-square-foot dance floor at Dance Tales and also teaches several dance classes at North Idaho College.

She said that, thanks to the new television shows, most of the students who are taking her classes have long had a desire to dance but are just now realizing that anyone can do it. Each week they are watching celebrities with no professional dance training turn into serious competitors after just a few classes.

“It makes people realize that regular people can do these dances,” she said, and that they are finding how much fun ballroom dancing can be.

The United States Amateur Ballroom Dance Association, the governing body for ballroom dance in the United States, expects its membership to jump to more than 30,000 by the end of the year, nearly doubling its numbers of two years ago.