A time to dance

It’s a rainy winter night in Everett, Wash., a city north of Seattle. But the dancers crowding the Girls and Boys Club basketball gym are working up a sweat, kicking and clapping, hopping and stepping, as “Footloose” blasts from a portable speaker.

When the song ends, a familiar country hit begins, and the dance lines dissolve into men and women standing around the makeshift dance floor.

A young man approaches a woman in a denim dress and cowboy boots. “Would you like to dance?” he asks, offering her his hand.

“Yes!” she says, beaming. She takes his hand, and they glide into a simple, choreographed Western swing sequence.

Men and women dancing together is nothing new, but for Gen Z—digital natives whose teenage years were marked by social distancing, masking, and pandemic-era regulations—line and swing dance meetups offer a way to bridge communication gaps and make friends in real life—or “IRL,” as they say.

According to Barna research on mental health, more than a third of Gen Z—people born between 1997 and 2012—feel uncertain about the future and anxious over important decisions. They are lonely too, with 29% reporting loneliness and 26% feeling ­isolated. In contrast, only 8% of boomers experience persistent loneliness or isolation.

But it’s hard to feel lonely when you’re twirling around the dance floor.

PETER KEEGAN, 24, discovered the social benefits of dancing while attending Benedictine College, a Catholic school in the Midwest. When the mechanical engineering major graduated and returned home to Washington state, he missed that rich social life. So did his friend, 24-year-old business management major Brandon Wozeniak.

Together, they decided to do something about it.

“We both really liked country dancing—swinging and line—and we wanted to create a space where we could meet other young adults, make friends, and just have a fun place to both dance and build community,” Keegan explained.

Kegan said the area already had a few dance clubs, but they wanted something different—a wholesome environment, one without the influence of alcohol or sexually provocative dance moves and “profane” lyrics.

In the spring of 2025, Keegan and Wozeniak launched Highpoint Swing, a country dance club with a simple idea—teach people the steps to popular dances and let them try. They bought a couple of speakers, rented a dance studio on Saturday nights, and started inviting their childhood friends.

Young adults began showing up for the biweekly events, coming even when the dance studio was occupied and Highpoint had to temporarily relocate to the Boys and Girls Club basketball gym.

They began posting videos on Facebook, and within a few months, some of the posts went “viral,” prompting Meta to begin paying them as content creators. By January 2026, Highpoint’s Facebook page boasted 15,000 followers.

Savannah Pratt, a 25-year-old kindergarten teacher, first came to Highpoint when a church friend invited her in the summer. Now, she’s a regular and invites other friends. She started a WhatsApp message group for people she met at Highpoint, and it’s already 40 strong.

Like many Highpoint attendees, Pratt discovered swing dance in college, but when COVID sent students home, she stopped dancing. She later tried to go to swing dance clubs in Seattle, but they were too far from where she worked and lacked a sense of community.

Pratt says Highpoint is different because Kegan and Wozeniak stop the music and break down new songs each week.

“One of the songs that I knew about was ‘I See Country Everywhere,’ but I could never catch on to it. I could never learn it. But then they were like, ‘Hey, we’re going to teach that one today,’” she recalls. “I got really excited, because I really wanted to learn that one. And they slowed it down, and I got the steps. And so then every time they play that song, I’m able to dance to it, and it’s really fun.”

The irony of Keegan and Wozeniak working as dance instructors is not lost on them. By day, Keegan oversees construction projects for an engineering firm, and Wozeniak has a landscaping business. Neither of them considered dancing until they were in college.

“I refused to go to dances in high school,” Wozeniak said with a laugh. “I wouldn’t do it.”

“And I went to an all-boys school,” Keegan added.

Keegan learned his first moves through YouTube videos, dancing alone in his college dorm room during the early weeks of COVID when social activities were canceled.

Keegan and Wozeniak were not alone in adopting line dancing during the pandemic. Many people credit lockdowns and viral TikTok dancing trends for renewing interest in line dancing. When in-person social activities resumed, line dancing clubs began reemerging.

That’s when Wozeniak also decided to try swing dancing, but his first attempts didn’t have much success. “The first time I danced, I dropped the girl! I dropped the girl, and she was mad, and then I was like, ‘I’m not going down like this.’ That was the spark.”

RYLEE STROVAS, a 22-year-old who spent the evening dancing with different partners, said if she were not at Highpoint, she would “probably be sitting on my couch at home.” Like many young adults at the meetup, she was grateful for the opportunity to interact with people in real life.

Jonathan Haidt, author of the influential 2024 bestseller The Anxious Generation, which exposed the harmful nature of social media on Gen Zers, blames much of young people’s anxiety and depression on their online experiences. He encourages people to participate in more real-world life, which he describes as embodied and synchronous—requiring an actual body and happening in real time.

These real-life, physical experiences, unlike disembodied online interactions, require people to engage in face-to-face interactions and navigate social situations.

Brandon Wozeniak says swing dancing fits that description perfectly. “It’s connecting with someone else. It’s not in any way that is demanding or intimate, but it still has physical touch, and it still has communication, and I think people really want that.”

He encourages newcomers, who sometimes only want to line dance, to give partner dancing a try.

“It’s little two-minute increments,” he said. “It’s not very demanding, but there’s a little bit of communication you have to have, and so it’s perfect.”

Addy Eaton took a ferry and drove for over an hour to get to the dance meetup after she found Highpoint on Instagram.

At 23, Eaton works full time at a Christian camp, but she said she is willing to drive a long distance to meet more Christians her age. And she was not disappointed.

“The first time I came, I met some really lovely people who have now become my main group of friends, and it’s really cool to see how connections formed out of getting to dance in community with fellow Christians,” she said.

Wozeniak sees Highpoint’s success as proof of the need for healthy social events. In the same way that faith-based media ­content has recently flooded Hollywood, providing high-­quality alternatives to immoral entertainment, he believes there is an untapped market for providing “wholesome” events. The business partners plan to expand to four more clubs in the Pacific Northwest and hope the idea will continue beyond.

Even though Highpoint attracts a Christian crowd, Keegan says they regularly have dancers from a variety of church backgrounds—Catholic, Protestant, and even a few with no church experience. Many attend congregations with very small singles groups. Others find that their young-adult church functions are stale, and Keegan says that, in his experience, most church activities are not designed to encourage intermingling between men and women.

Partner dancing requires it. Lead dancers have to approach a “follow” and ask if they want to dance, and that, Keegan points out, is good practice for men.

Malea Norman, a 22-year-old Highpoint attendee, uses Hinge, an online dating app. But she said she much prefers meeting people organically.

She said she is always surprised when someone she knows in real life asks her out via direct message rather than over the phone or in person, especially since she would be more likely to say yes if he asked her in person.

“I think it is really attractive when a man has courage,” she said.

The need to make real-life friends in a digitally dominated world is not limited to Gen Z.

“In adulthood, in general, it can be so difficult to make friends,” said Samantha Hricziscse, a 31-year-old experienced line dancer. She came to Highpoint to dance, but has already found a group of friends who meet regularly. This year, they spent New Year’s Eve together.

One of those friends, 36-year-old Vinh Do, says he wishes he had found swing dance earlier in life. “It teaches us things that are so important—to relate to one another, like as a man and a woman, to be able to lead, to initiate. It’s like an art form that has been lost over time.“

He looks over at his new friends and adds, “Life is kind of a dance.”