Vero Beach’s popular Friday evening ballroom and country dances have moved to the elegant wood floor at Bethel Creek House near Jaycee Park, with the first dance taking place last week.
Joe and Sharri Tessier, of Swingsation’s 14th Avenue Dance Studio, began the festivities with a free dance lesson at 7 p.m. at the city-owned banquet hall, 4405 North A1A.
The Tessiers then provide the music for ballroom dancing until 10 p.m. with dance mixers and line dances sprinkled in.
Vero Beach Community Center, 2140 14th Ave., is downtown’s dance mecca, hosting several classes and dances each week, but the hard composite floor makes it more difficult to maneuver smoothly and comfortably for an entire evening.
“We’re really excited about the opportunity to move our Friday night socials out to Bethel Creek House and dance on a softer, better, more professional type floor,” Joe Tessier said. “We love the Community Center, but it’s known in the dance community to have a little bit of a rough, sticky floor.”
“I’m hoping we draw some of the barrier island crowd,” Tessier said. “We’ve done events over there in the past and they’ve been very successful.
Vero Beach’s ballroom dancing scene has been slowly yet steadily returning since March as more residents are vaccinated against COVID-19 and fewer people are diagnosed with the virus, Tessier said.
“We are staging a bit of a comeback,” Tessier said. “We started off under the mandates of the CDC where you had to wear a mask and no [partner] rotations at first.”
Once the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lifted the face mask advisory for vaccinated people, dancers seemed far more enthusiastic about returning to dance floor, Tessier said.
“When they lifted the mask mandate, the numbers doubled that next week. People could not wait to get away from the masks. They were really sick of it.”
While social distancing guidelines prevented virtually all ballroom dancing events and group classes for more than a year, Swingsation’s 14th Avenue Dance Studio and the nearby Indian River Ballroom have both been booking more private lessons with couples and individuals since reopening.
“It was completely shut down other than private lessons,” Tessier said. “With private lessons, we could wear masks and keep our hands clean. We didn’t take on any new students during the pandemic. We only stayed with our regular group that we had.”
The Indian River Ballroom, 845 16th Place, which specializes in private lessons, has also seen a return of many longtime patrons, said owner Robert Scott.
“Since I’m fully vaccinated, I feel comfortable teaching,” Scott said. “My students are pretty much all vaccinated. Things are returning to a semblance of normal.”
Meanwhile, it will take a couple of months for Swingsation’s to fully ramp up its twice-a-month Friday evening dances at Bethel Creek House.
The first country dance will be held on Friday Aug. 13, Tessier said. There will also be a country dance on Friday Sept. 10 and a ballroom dance on Friday, Sept. 17.
The pandemic forced the Tessier’s to cancel Swingsation’s 20th Anniversary celebration and temporarily close their doors, but they managed to keep the studio going thanks to strength of the Vero Beach dance community.
“We were going to do a big dance event and a whole week of classes and specialty events for our students,” Tessier said about the anniversary festivities. “Everything was all planned out and it got kiboshed. Instead of having a celebration of 20 years, we tried to survive.”
“But now we’ve in our 21st year and we’re very excited to get that word out that we’ve been part of this community in Vero Beach for 21 years,” Tessier said. “We were very grateful for all the support we received from our patrons to be able to survive through the pandemic. People really did support us in a big way.”
Photos by Kaila Jones
