Taking dance classes at the Y and attending the monthly dance socials might be the way to gently ease back into fitness in a really fun way.
The hosts of the Family Y Sunday night dance classes are from Jazzmatazz Dance Company.
“Dancing is supposed to be fun and that’s the idea behind our classes,” said Alison McNeill, a founder of Jazzmatazz. “We want people to have fun. It’s about being social and it’s not about competing. It’s not about memorizing patterns and being perfect on the floor. It’s about getting out with your partner and your friends and just having a good time, enjoying the music and your partner.”
But like anything else, in order to have fun and reduce the risk of injury you need some basic technique, Yvon Allen, interjected. He’s the other half of Jazzmatazz.
Over the last 25 years McNeill has been at the Y and the popularity of the classes over those years have ebbed and flowed, she said.
“When Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance were really popular my classes were huge,” McNeill recalled. “I was teaching six classes a week and they were all full at 30 people. It was wild. Then interest waned and then COVID really knocked us on our butts. I thought it was going to be the end of Jazzmatazz. I really did but then some of our old students started telling us they were getting really rusty and asked if we could start things up again.”
The Sunday night classes have all ages attending.
“The vast majority of our students tend to be young couples before they have kids and empty-nesters,” McNeill said. “It’s a really neat dynamic because you’ve got the young people who are so much in love and all cutesy, cutesy and then you’ve got couples that have been together for 30-40 years who are just starting to date again. The kids have left the house and they’re getting to know each other again.”
Some dancers keep coming back for the fun.
“There are two couples who have taken our classes for years and it’s their date night,” McNeill explained. “They could teach the class by now. It’s really fun to see those couples reconnect with each other.”
The dance socials started again on Saturday, Sept. 28 at the Knox United Church, 1448 Fifth Ave., in downtown Prince George.
Everyone is welcome to attend but a lot of times it’s the students who are coming.
“So I did the song list myself and then I will put out signs for each song saying what the dance is because we play swing, waltz, two-step and all these different things,” McNeill said. “We want people to start to get an ear for the music even if they don’t know how to dance that dance yet they can go ‘oh, that’s what a cha-cha sounds like.’”
The dance socials go the last Saturday of every month. The December dance is set for the second Saturday and features all holiday-themed music.
The socials are $10 per person as there is a rental fee for the space that has to be covered.
McNeill, who grew up in Prince George, found her way to dance through happenstance as a teenager.
“When I was 15 my high school boyfriend’s parents were part of the Whispering Pines Dancers, which was one of the country dance troupes in town in the 90s, McNeill said.
“They used to practice in his basement and my boyfriend was not at all interested in dancing so I used to go down and watch them and I learned from them and did workshops with them and that’s really when I started doing social dancing.”
After McNeill did her teacher training in the late 90s, early 2000s, when schools were closing at an alarming rate, there was no employment opportunities for her.
“So I created my own job,” McNeill said. “I was going around to elementary schools teaching for about five years. I would go in for two weeks, teach all the kids, have a big show at the end and then move on to the next one.”
One of the parents who saw the children dancing in one of the schools worked at the Prince George Y and told McNeill she needed to start offering the classes at the fitness centre.
“And it kind of evolved from there,” McNeill said. “I met my former dance partner (Attila Kozma) in 2003. (He was the cofounder of Jazzmatazz.) He and I taught together for 10 years at the Y but he sadly passed away in 2014.”
McNeill met Yvon Allen, a teacher, over several years as she taught dance to students in the schools where he worked.
“My journey started pretty much when I moved to Prince George in 1990,” Allen said, who moved here from Quebec.
“I came here to teach. I first started at Duchess Park and switched to Spruceland Elementary School. I wanted to be part of the community so I asked around to see what type of activity I should do that is kind of unique to Prince George or British Columbia. Someone told me I should learn to two-step at the Cadillac Ranch (a popular downtown bar). So that’s where I learned how to dance.”
The Cadillac Ranch offered free instruction in the early evenings before things started hopping.
Yvon learned the two-step and some line dancing and then fatefully took an East Coast Swing dance class from Alison before they were a couple.
McNeill and Allen have been dancing together for about a decade.
“We are very passionate about what we teach,” McNeill said. “We give our students a very good foundation. The idea of social dance is that you should be able to dance with anybody. If a leader knows how to lead and a follower knows how to follow and provide frame you should be able to dance with anyone and that’s the foundation we give for all our students.”
For more information on the lessons at the Y, the dance socials and private lessons visit http://jazzmatazzdance.ca/index.htm
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