About Dancing

It was 1975 and I had just finished playing music for a dance performance at The Institute for Dance and Experimental Art in Santa Monica, California. Fellow musician Susan Rawcliffe's car was not working and she needed a ride to meet a friend at a church in Westwood Village near where I lived at the time. As we walked into the social hall of the church, I was overtaken by the intoxicating pulsating rhythms of the Bulgarian music that was playing on the record player and the sheer energy of a room full of joyous leaping, gliding and bouncing dancers. Such was my introduction to UCLA's Beseda International recreational dance group. I was instantly hooked and from there I quickly discovered A Whole World Of Dance including Austrian, English, French, Greek, Hungarian, Israeli, Macedonian, Scandinavian and Scottish dances as well as our own American Square and Contra Dances.

A study at the Albert Einstein Center in New York found that participants who danced three or four times a week showed seventy-six percent less incidence of dementia than those who danced just once a week or not at all.
Source: New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 348. No. 25