It’s swing time at area dance venues

It’s 11:30 on a Friday night at the Chevy Chase Ballroom on Wisconsin Avenue and the joint is jumping. Rick Estrin of the Los Angeles band Little Charlie and the Nightcats is singing a fast-paced blues number for an appreciative crowd. He’s resplendent in a sharkskin suit, shades, black shirt and tie and two-tone shoes.

On the dance floor, jitterbugging couples back off from the bandstand as local dance instructors Tom Koerner and Debra Sternberg make their swingouts wider, increasing the pace of their turns to a frenzy. The dancers all know what’s coming next, and they create a circle to watch, giving the instructors space to maneuver.

Effortlessly, Ms. Sternberg makes herself into an arrow and slides on slick heels between Mr. Koerner’s legs. He pulls her back out again, catching her in the air as she comes out of her slide. The two complete the aerial as Ms. Sternberg twists her lithe body like a jackknife around his waist, then bounces back to the floor.

It’s swing dance, a throwback to the zoot-suited, saddleshod 1940s and ‘50s. Brought back to fashion here by Washington baby boomers in the 1980s, the dance style probably reached the height of public awareness in the late 1990s when a TV commercial featured attractive couples jitterbugging to the Stray Cats’ Brian Setzer’s version of an old Louis Prima tune, “Jump, Jive and Wail.”

Since then the rage for swing has grown steadily in Washington, becoming today a culture all its own, with favored bands, favored instructors and ballrooms and even favored retro togs.

And, you might say, even a guide to living.

“If everyone contemplating marriage took swing dance lessons together, they would know in advance whether their marriage was going to make it, and we would see less divorce,” says Mr. Koerner, a former divorce lawyer who still practices law in Virginia.

Visiting swing dancers from other states call the District and environs a swing dance mecca, where they can find at least one dance a night every day of the week.

Almost all have danced at the National Park Service’s Spanish Ballroom at Glen Echo Park on Saturday nights, where swing dances are organized by a nonprofit group, the Washington Swing Dance Committee. Dances at the Clarendon Ballroom in Arlington on Tuesdays, at Chevy Chase and the Dulles Hilton on Fridays, and at other venues around the Beltway guarantee a full dance card.

And here at the Chevy Chase Ballroom the couples, inspired by their instructors’ twists, take turns showing their stuff. The kicks and hip-shaking, the swoops and spins, look effortless as a male lead, through some mysterious telepathy, lets his partner know it’s time for her to whip her body away from his. She does, her twirling skirt furling and unfurling until he snaps her back in place.

When the dance ends, the partners politely thank each other, then either seek out a chair and take a long drink from their water bottles, or move off in search of their next dancing companions.

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The swing dance lifestyle in the Washington area attracts established couples in their 40s and 50s, as well as twenty-something singles.

K Street accountants and Crystal City engineering contractors who may be shy or plain by day blossom into hepcats at night on the dance floor, donning 1950s bowling shirts and 1940s-style swing skirts or reasonable modern facsimiles to strut and kick-step their way across the floor.

“It’s easy for a single guy to find partners” at the multitude of dances around town, says Erik Long, a contract engineer from Arlington, as he takes a breather to cool off from a Tuesday night dance at the Clarendon Ballroom.

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