Twelve-year-old girls with long hair and skinny jeans faced boys, some of them shorter than the girls, and held their hands while they practised Latin American dance steps.
There was no eye contact between partners, but hints of smiles and squints of concentration among the 80 Grade 7 students who formed long rows in the scuffed gym at Queen Mary elementary on a recent afternoon.
"They're learning more than just dance," said the West Point Grey school's vice principal, Shannon Burton.
While the school has brought in companies that teach more contemporary dance forms such as hip hop, it continues to bring back DanzKool's Ballroom Dance Camp.
"It's more communication based," Burton said.
DanzKool founder and instructor Tim Mah didn't appear concerned about the lack of eye contact between students.
"Dancing is a form of conversation," he said. "It's a conversation conducted between two people using hands to speak, no words are involved. I use that to try to explain to them why I'm putting them into this torturous situation that they absolutely don't want to be in and they start to get it."
The mid-February session was his seventh of eight at Queen Mary, a typical package he sells to elementary schools.
The 51-year-old resident of Dunbar stumbled into ballroom dance at the University of B.C. He and his ballroom partner Bernadette, now his wife, danced the samba, the cha cha and the waltz competitively for 11 years at the national and international level until his wife's health tripped them up in 1994.
Mah was "going nuts" without dancing, so a friend suggested he try teaching high school students. The man with a master's degree in business quickly discovered a natural talent for holding the attention of more than a hundred teens at a time.
In 2005, Mah dispensed with his day job of career and business strategy consulting to teach secondary and elementary students ballroom dance.
He has since taught more than 5,000 students across the Lower Mainland.
Mah teaches elementary students swing, jive and Latin American dances and adds waltz and tango to the roster for high school students when he's teaching 75minute classes.
"I just finished writing a short story for a contest and I was talking about a dance lesson, and I used the term, 'the kids looked like a room of arthritics searching for a contact lens,'" he said. "That's exactly what it looks like because [for] tango they have to stand close together, so they're afraid to really move much."
Last year, Mah brought together 150 Grade 7 students from two schools for a daylong Ballroom Blitz Danzfest at Lord Strathcona elementary. To win prizes, students had to dance with a partner from the other school. This year's Danzfest in May will involve three schools.
Students initially find ballroom dance dorky, Mah concedes. But once they settle down about handholding and learn a few steps, he sees their confidence rise.
When the second 40 Grade 7 pairs successfully completed a two-handed turn Wednesday, excited chatter erupted.
Mah told students they hadn't mastered the move until they followed the turn with more steps.
So they completed the turned and added the steps.
"Yeah!" some students exclaimed. "High five."
They pay attention because they don't want to mess up for their partner and because they know they're going to perform for their parents at their graduation ceremony in June.
Twelve-year-old Liam McQuaid told his friends he'd probably break an ankle during jive and Latin dance lessons.
"It seemed weird. I don't like dancing. I'm not a good dancer," he said.
But the classes have turned that around.
"It's actually pretty fun."
[email protected] Twitter: @Cheryl_Rossi
