The intoxication of the waltz

A year ago, I attended the 46th Stanford Viennese Ball at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis with no preparation and no expectations. I walked through the doors and found myself at the edge of a dance floor that seemed to breathe with light and motion. Men in sharp black suits and women in flowing white gowns moved through choreographed formations with an almost architectural precision. Then the colors came — men and women in every shade of the rainbow, dressed in Victorian finery, swirling like figures in a painting that had learned to move. I knew, no matter what, that I would come back.

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So this year I enrolled in Austria Fortnight — two weeks of dance classes leading up to the ball. My friend Gurchit Chatha gave me the nudge: “Let’s go to the very first lesson.” That Saturday, we walked into Roble Gymnasium. Standing in the center of the waltz circle was Rebecca Wang, leading the class. Normally a Ph.D. student, here she was, giving her free time to something she loved.

I remember the moment I first took hold of a partner and we began to turn. We spun and spun and spun. There was an intoxication in it I was not prepared for — the sensation of moving in circles while the world blurred softly at the edges, the feeling of another person’s hand in mine as we navigated the geometry of the dance together. Everyone in the room was a beginner. It was fumbling and playful and imperfect, and that made it beautiful.

That evening, the Bon Bon Ball began — right there in Roble, just hours after my very first lesson. Dancers from Dancebreak and other Stanford organizations took the floor, moving in that unified, coordinated way that makes you hold your breath. I stood at the edge of it all with four or five moves in my body, learned just hours ago, and thought: “Why not try?”

It was magical because the contrast was so immediate. I could see what trained dancers could do — the fluidity, the confidence, the way their bodies understood the music — and I could feel, in my own tentative steps, the first stirrings of something I wanted to grow into. I gathered my courage and walked up to strangers to ask them to dance. Sometimes you shared a single dance and said goodbye. Sometimes you drifted to the side and talked, then danced again. A whole new social architecture was revealing itself — one of invitation, acceptance and the quiet thrill of breaking barriers with someone you had only just met.

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In the weeks that followed, I threw myself into every lesson Roble had to offer: cross-step waltz, Lindy Hop, West Coast Swing and intermediate rotary waltz. Each form had its own vocabulary, its own physics, its own way of making two bodies into one moving thing. Each was taught by Ph.D. students and competitive dancers who were themselves impossibly busy yet freely gave their evenings to teach people like me the basics. Within Roble Gymnasium lives the quiet brilliance of this Stanford dance community.

I remember what one of these coaches, Bella Archibald, told me during an intermediate rotary waltz class: “Just vibe with it. Feel it. Dance is supposed to be improvisational — it’s not supposed to be forced. Experiment. Play. Have fun.”

Something unlocked in me. I started watching the more experienced dancers and began to try things — to emulate, to modify, to invent. Sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes I stumbled. There was almost no judgment, and the freedom was dizzying.

There was something uniquely thrilling about the traveling dances — the ones where everyone moves together in a great circle around the floor. They made you feel like part of one unified, collective event — a single organism turning through the room, dozens of partnerships all orbiting the same invisible center.

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The 47th Viennese Ball arrived — held this year at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport — and I got to feel the fullness of it. I had brought 15 or 20 friends from across Stanford with me. We gathered on the edge of the dance floor and watched the competitions in rotary and cross-step waltz, performed by dancers who had clearly been doing this for a decade or more. There is something about sitting together, shoulder to shoulder, watching another human being do something transcendent with their body, that collapses the distance between strangers. We lost our minds. We cheered. We sat in stunned, grinning silence.

I saw couples of every kind sharing the floor: male and female pairs, two women dancing together, a transgender woman and a cisgender woman moving as partners. And then there were big, chaotic group dances — the Ceili, an Irish dance I still have no idea how to do properly, that filled the room with laughter and joyful confusion. There were line dances, too — moments when everyone seemed to know exactly what to do, as though they were all in on a secret language I hadn’t yet learned. I threw myself in anyway, learning ungracefully, laughing at my own confusion.

As I found new partners, I realized how vast the range was. Sometimes I would dance with a senior. Other times I would dance with an adult in their fifties. And that was the whole point. Age, background, skill level — none of it mattered once you stepped onto that floor. You spun with a stranger, communicating without words, building a fleeting connection through rhythm and the shared agreement to move through space together.

I danced many dances — swing, tango, salsa, bachata — but the waltz gets to me in a way the others do not. It is the intoxication of the circle, the slowness and flowing continuity of the movement, the way it can feel almost romantic even when there is no romance in it. Perhaps that is its quiet genius: it lets you embrace warmth and closeness while separating that feeling from the weight of serious romantic expectation — the norms that might otherwise deter two people from connecting at all. The waltz creates permission to feel something genuine without it needing to be anything more than what it is.

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After the Bon Bon Ball, I found myself waltzing back to my dorm. Not walking — waltzing. I traced the six-step beat along the path to Jack McDonald Hall, spinning in slow circles under the night sky, alone with the rhythm still humming in my body. Now, weeks later, at the end of the Viennese Ball weekend, the same thing is happening in my room. Celine Dion’s “A New Day Has Come” is playing and I am turning and turning, one-two-three-four-five-six, thinking: I need to write about this.

These last weeks of my winter quarter have been defined by dance — this unexpected, beautiful chapter. I only have one spring quarter left at Stanford, and I hope the thread carries me through it. I will be back at the Viennese Ball every year that I am near enough to attend. Because something has shifted. The music is still playing, and I am still spinning, and I do not want to stop.

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