Where Swing Is King : The West Coast version is a lively dance of hips, legs, shoulders and chest. Its beat attracts all ages.

It’s just after 10 p.m. Sunday and a Studio City dinner, drinks and dance club called Pasion is jumping to the ‘50s sound of Louisiana rock. The women, in their 30s and early 40s, dressed to impress in short skirts, heels and low-cut blouses, are here to dance. So are the men, a shade more casual in slacks and shirts. Like the women, though, they are all inleather-soled shoes for dancing, for following a particular dance style from club to club on different nights of the week. They’re here tonight because it’s West Coast swing night at Pasion, with a dance exhibition that draws some of the city’s best dancers.

One of them is Donna Hyatt, a statuesque, high-energy, fortysomething blonde, who is figuratively burning up the floor. She and partner Rick Hanna, 62, of Van Nuys, between the two of them, have won hundreds of dance contests. Tonight they are hot, like the music they’re dancing to, a driving blues-rock record called “Blue House” by New Orleans boogie pianist Marcia Ball.

Technically, as in all partner dancing, the man leads in West Coast swing. But the twirls, strutting passes, spins and showy stops are done by the woman. For the woman, and especially for Hyatt, this is a dance of hips, legs, shoulders and chest. Hyatt has everyone’s attention as she plays with the beat, stepping, spinning, swaying and swinging.

Hanna’s dancing is a languid, understated counterpart to Hyatt’s. He steps, slides, pivots and sidesteps, casually keeping time with the elegant simplicity of motion that is his dance signature. There’s applause when they finish, flushed and breathing hard, and Hyatt is euphoric with a dancer’s high.

“I come out of myself, and the light comes in when I’m dancing, and everything’s right,” says Hyatt of Beverly Hills, a dancer since her high school days in Garden Grove.

West Coast swing, a modern, stylized version of the jitterbug, is a contact dance, with partners always linked by one or both hands. It is danced to blues, blues-rock and soul, music with a curve to the beat that makes even non-dancers tap their feet. Although most Californians don’t know it, West Coast swing was designated the official state dance in 1988. It’s also the dance local instructors say is outpacing all other styles in popularity.

“West Coast swing is the fastest-growing dance style in the country,” says renowned instructor Phil Adams, whose Swingtime USA studio in Bellflower is where dance teachers go for lessons.

“Five years ago, there were only 10 decent West Coast swing dance teachers around. Now there are 30 really good ones,” Adams says, adding that news stories on dancing miss the growing popularity of West Coast swing.

“I have one ballroom dance class at my Bellflower studio,” Adams says, “which isn’t full, and one Latin dance class. I have six classes in West Coast swing, just to accommodate the demand.”

West Coast swing’s underground popularity is in character with its pre-World War I origins in Southern juke joints, where it was danced to blues music seldom heard by whites. It moved north to Harlem and got named the Lindy Hop (after Charles Lindbergh) when taken up by whites in the late 1920s. In the 1940s it was called the jitterbug.

Adapted to the slower, heavier beat of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, the swing dance style flourished in California until 1961, when the twist knocked it into a cultural hibernation that persisted until the late ‘70s. But even by the early ‘60s, it had already evolved on the West Coast into a different style of dancing from that done in the East.

“East Coast swing is a faster, more frantic style, danced to more up-tempo music,” says Sonny Watson of Shadow Hills, who hosts West Coast swing dance nights on Tuesdays at the Crest Lounge in Reseda, where he and his partner Chris Haggerty give lessons.

“West Coast swing,” says Watson, 35, “involves slower and sexier hip movements and undulations than Eastern swing.”

Watson began swing dancing 12 years ago, when the dance was making a comeback after staying in the shadows through the rock dance fads of the ‘60s and early ‘70s. Actress Sandra Giles brought the dance to a Beverly Hills club called Pip’s in the late ‘70s, hosting a popular West Coast swing night. From Pip’s, dancers followed Giles to swing nights at other clubs. Some of the nights over which Giles now presides include Sundays at Pasion, Wednesdays at Marino’s in Beverly Hills and Fridays at the Captain’s Wharf in Marina del Rey.

“West Coast swing has been a cult dance for years,” says Giles. “Now it’s coming out of the shadows.”

Barbata’s Steak House in Woodland Hills also features West Coast swing dancing on Friday nights. The Ventura Club in Sherman Oaks offers it one night a month, and Norah’s Place in North Hollywood mixes in West Coast swing numbers with its traditional Sunday night tango music.

On a recent Tuesday at the Crest Lounge, one of the 50 or 60 West Coast swing dancers on the floor was Marcia Miller of West Los Angeles, a designer and manufacturer of gift and novelty products. She says she took up dancing after a divorce five years ago.

“I went out to a club and fell in love with West Coast swing on sight. All the push and pull of the two dancers,” Miller says, “the hot music and the excitement--it was the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Miller, 39, likes the fact that the music is played far below the industrial-strength, hearing-loss volume levels favored by Generation X dance clubbers. It’s possible to talk over the swing dance records, which are blues-rock numbers ranging from Bill Haley to B. B. King.

She says her two children--ages 12 and 16--got hooked watching her practice the dance at home.

“Now they’re both taking lessons,” says Miller. “Kids really love this dance when they see it.”

Jack Bridges of Las Vegas, who has produced the U.S. Open West Coast Swing Dance Championships in Anaheim for the past 13 years, says attendance has tripled over the past few years. Sonny Watson says his Valley Swing Dance Club has close to 300 members, and Jamie and Gail Arias, a prize-winning competitive dance couple from Ventura, say students at their weekly classes in Brentwood, Agoura Hills and Ventura number several hundred.

“The music is blues-rock that a lot of people love, but don’t know what to dance to it,” says Gail Arias. “Then they see West Coast swing . . . and they want to learn it.”

Kent Sterling, owner of the Arthur Murray studios in Woodland Hills and Beverly Hills, agrees.

“We’re getting more and more requests for lessons in West Coast swing,” Sterling says. “There’s a major out-of-town West Coast swing dance event--a convention or contest--almost every weekend.”

“I just got back from a West Coast swing dance convention in Scottsdale (Ariz.) that drew more than 1,000 people,” Sterling says, “a lot of them in their 20s, some even younger. The U. S. Open West Coast Swing Dance Championships in Anaheim last November drew more than 1,500 people, not just from all over the U.S., but from Europe and Scandinavia.”

At Let’s Dance in Alhambra, a dance studio highly regarded by professionals, Inyo Cordoba teaches with his brother Robert, a three-time U. S. Open West Coast Swing Dancing champion. Inyo Cordoba notes that, in the waltz, if the man only knows one step, that’s all the woman can do.

“In West Coast swing,” says Cordoba, “the number of variations a woman can do to her partner’s basic pattern is almost infinite.”

Another appeal of West Coast swing dancing is its liberating effect on a shy personality. Joanna Savage of Sherman Oaks is a Sunday night regular at Pasion.

“When I’m on the dance floor, I’m not inhibited, and I feel sensuous,” says Savage, 55, mother of two grown sons. “I wouldn’t be able to be like that with a stranger if I weren’t dancing.”