DANCE : They’re Back in Step : Can ballroom dancing waltz its way back into the mainstream? That’s already the case in other countries. And, says one devotee, ‘Ballroom is happening in America.’

OK, you probably think ballroom dancing is something your parents did--make that your grandparents. The old-fashioned, hokey stuff like the fox trot that went out with rock ‘n’ roll and that no one under 50 would be caught dead doing, right?

Think again.

Consider the United States Ballroom Championships held here not long ago in the Grand Ballroom of the Fontainebleau Hilton. More than 40 sleekly muscular couples from around the world were whipping and spinning and strutting in dizzyingly complex versions of the cha-cha-cha and samba, in the Professional Latin Championships.

When world champions Marcus and Karen Hilton flew across the floor in a quickstep--yes, that ancient relative of the fox trot--they lifted the audiences’ hearts and barely touched the ground. And while they might have been the image of immaculate wedding cake perfection in white tie and tails and floating ostrich feather-trimmed gown, they were using the same amount of energy as a world-class athlete might while running 800 meters. Only Karen Hilton, like Ginger Rogers before her, did it all backward and in heels.

Backstage in the practice room was a cadre of teen-age Russians, who normally work out in a New York studio run by a Russian expatriate ballroom dancer. They intently preened and undulated, their torsos snaking in an intricate iconography of adult allure. The air hummed with competitive tension and physical exhilaration.

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Welcome to professional ballroom dancing in the ‘90s, an amalgam of intense athleticism, ultra-stylized dance technique and extravagant showmanship. The five-day annual event, with more than 800 competitors from the United States, Europe, Japan, Australia and South Africa, is the largest ballroom competition in this country. But it is dwarfed by similar events in Europe, where major competitions are held in stadiums for 10,000 to 15,000 people and can draw 500 couples for a single division. In Japan, ballroom dancing is even bigger.

In Europe, where ballroom dancing is recognized as a legitimate dance and athletic endeavor requiring years of training, thousands compete and the top couples are seen as stars. Dancesport, as it is called, is shown frequently on television.

In the United States, however, ballroom is almost invisible to the mainstream. Audiences got a taste from the sleeper 1993 Australian film “Strictly Ballroom” and sometimes catch PBS’ popular broadcasts of the small Ohio Star Ball.

Things may soon change. “Ballroom is happening in America. Americans just don’t realize it yet,” said Linda Wakefield, a former champion competitor who with her husband, Lee, runs a ballroom dance program for 5,000 students at Brigham Young University, with major competitive teams and scholarships.

A major step toward realization came in April, when the International Olympic Committee granted provisional recognition to ballroom dance, to the general astonishment of the American sports world. (In Russia, there are already Olympic ballroom training camps.)

John Kimmins, president of the American Ballroom Co., which produces the U.S. Ballroom Championships, said this is something ballroom organizations have been working on for years.

“A lot of the reasons it wasn’t accepted have been overcome by growth,” he said. “The first was there weren’t enough countries doing it, the second that they didn’t want more sports with subjective judging. Now 75 countries are doing it, and all of them are members of the [International Olympic Committee]. I think they found [subjective judging] hard touse as an argument when they had so many things that already had it--boxing, diving, gymnastics, skating, synchronized swimming. If they’re acceptable, competition dancing is just as much so.”

Kimmins said he expects ballroom dancing to be part of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, or possibly in 2004.

There are other hints of ballroom’s emergence. “CBS This Morning” broadcast two stories from the Miami Beach competition, and early next year Savoy Pictures will release “Let It Be Me,” a romantic comedy set in a New York ballroom studio and starring Patrick Stewart, Leslie Caron, Jennifer Beals, Campbell Scott and Yancy Butler.

When ballroom finally breaks the surface, it just might explode. Not only does it have the elements--visual spectacle, showy grace, drama--that have made figure skating so popular, but this is the stuff of which cultural and romantic fantasies are made.

“I always wanted to dance like Fred and Ginger,” explained a thirtysomething woman at an Arthur Murray studio in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

And if not Astaire and Rogers, Americans have wanted to dance like Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron or John Travolta’s disco star or Patrick Swayze’s dirty dancer. In some ways, the more than 30 years of rock music that has left people dancing near--but not with--each other is an anomaly.

Now they seem to be edging back together. Kimmins estimates that the Arthur Murray and Fred Astaire studio chains, which have about one-third of the business, total 800,000 students a year. The average age of Arthur Murray students used to be 65, with 80% of them single. They now average 35 and are 60% couples. Ten years ago, there were 200 pro couples in the United States; now there are 1,600, plus 12,000 registered amateur competitors.

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That trend is borne out in the Greater Los Angeles area, which after New York leads the United States in ballroom activity. Many of the top professional couples are from the Los Angeles and San Diego areas, says Pete Taylor, 50, a former competitor who has been coaching and judging since the early ‘70s.

Taylor says the studio where he works out, Fred Astaire in Irvine, has seen a definite increase in students. It’s particularly popular among Asian Americans, as is the case in Los Angeles. The dancers’ ages have decreased during the last five years in Southern California, where many more studios have opened, he said.

He can’t offer a single explanation, although he has some educated guesses: the search for exercise alternatives, the presence of touch dancing in the movies, the swing revival among twenty- and thirtysomethings and more pop music with softer, more orchestrated styles.

Maybe fear of AIDS and a retreat from uninhibited intimacy have something to do with a return to more formal modes for boy to meet girl, or maybe it’s just a basic need people have to dance together.

“Ballroom dancing is what everyone wants, they just don’t know it,” said Clive Phillips, a tall 33-year-old Australian who looks like a young Pierce Brosnan and has been dancing since he was 9. He recently opened a 7,000-square-foot studio with 62 teachers in mid-town Manhattan; it’s bustling.

“There’s something that happens between two people dancing,” he said. “It’s like a drug. It’s give-and-take and compromise, it’s mutual respect, it’s like marriage. It’s a metaphor for life.”

The most common metaphors are that ballroom is like (or is better) than sex and that it’s addictive.

“Dancing by yourself is a high, but this is a double high,” said Suzanne Phillips, a former Broadway dancer who switched to ballroom after meeting and marrying Clive Phillips.

There is something mysterious and seductive about this union between two people. Redondo Beach resident Victor Veyrasset, who with British partner Heather Smith won the U.S. championships of the international standard style of ballroom dancing for the fourth year in a row, tried to describe it.

“There’s a chemistry between good partners,” he said. “I can feel that this is the person I want--there’s a body communication that’s better than with anyone else.” When he and Smith float through a waltz, the slightest impulse in his torso sends them sailing in another direction. “His body is my computer,” Smith said. “I get all my messages from him.”

The dances are divided into ballroom (waltz, fox trot, etc.) and Latin (cha-cha, pasodoble , jive and so on) divisions. These are divided into American and international styles, each with its own rules and dances, plus there’s theatrical or cabaret, showy adagio duets with lots of lifts and further divisions according to age, national origin, competitive ranking and so forth.

At the upper levels, ballroom is as physically complex and demanding as any other form of dance, and the dancers look gorgeously unlike regular folks. European pros have invariably been training since they were small children. In America, the pros tend to be studio-based teachers or dancers from other forms; they and the U.S. ballroom world are sustained by an elaborate “Pro/Am” competitive system, where students, mostly middle-aged to older women, pay substantial amounts for private lessons and to compete with teachers in events like the U.S. Ballroom Championships. A primary reason ballroom proponents here want television coverage and commercial sponsorships is that it would help them get off the student support system and bring the professional levels here closer to those in Europe.

This is a fully evolved subculture, with its own hierarchies, rules and styles and very little reference to the outside. “An underground palace,” one woman called it.

The residents wouldn’t live anywhere else. “It is a big place, our dance world,” said Bobbie Irvine, an imposingly elegant British woman known as “the Queen of Ballroom.” She and her husband, Bill, were a champion couple for years and now travel the world to judge competitions, teach and speak. Their standards are clear and demanding.

“This is an extremely difficult and intricate thing to do,” Bobbie Irvine said. In the 90 seconds they have to judge a dance, they look for clear silhouette, rhythmic exactitude, technical specifics and more ineffable qualities like musicality and movement quality. “Our techniques are just as exacting as ballet,” Bill added.

“What makes a good dancer in any form of dancing?” said Donnie Burns of Scotland, who with partner Gaynor Fairweather is a ballroom legend, having won the World Latin Championships 12 years in a row. “Expression, instinctive feel, dedication, guts, the ability to open yourself, to want to reach others, to enjoy being in the limelight. And I suppose at the end of the day it’s to have a dream and then fulfill it.”

Miami City Ballet Artistic Director Edward Villella, who came to the competition to research a ballroom piece he is considering for his company, was left open-mouthed, particularly by world ballroom champions Marcus and Karen Hilton, whom he called extraordinary. “You hear ballroom , you think social dancing on Saturday night,” Villella said later. “They have obviously taken this to another strata. I was amazed at the professionalism. And it had extraordinary style, which is a rare commodity these days.”

To reach a broader audience, ballroom would have to continue breaking out of its isolation. Meanwhile, it deals each day with things that may seem odd to outsiders, like the 17-year-old boy who insisted that Van Morrison’s “Moondance” was a fox trot (after all, it is in 4/4 time) or the strangest grimaces in the name of Latin sultriness and atrocities like dancing to an elevator-music version of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” And in the United States, there would have to be a greater emphasis on professional dancing, which offers a quality and entertainment value not present in the adult amateur competitions, which are now the primary source for financial support.

But all that would change with exposure. Once someone lifts the lid, ballroom will spring forth full-blown, bugle beads, false eyelashes, electrifying moves and all.

“Right now, people don’t like to admit they watch it,” said Peta Siddall, who with partner Marylynn Benitez runs the Fred Astaire studio in Irvine.

“The image is your parents dancing,” Benitez said. “But if people saw it on TV, they’d see how athletic it is.”

Their sentiments seem to be borne out by a dazed Lourdes Couce, 30, who had come to the competition’s final night because she had read about it in the paper and loved “Strictly Ballroom.”

“I loved it,” she said. “I love watching people dance. I thought it would be a lot of old people, but I was shocked. I don’t think young people have any idea it’s like this.”