Students and community members are encouraged to stop by the Great Lakes Rooms at the Don H. Bottum University Center this Saturday and dance the night away at a formal swing ball hosted by NMU’s Swing Club.

The dance will take place from 7 to 10 p.m. on March 25 and will feature classic ‘20s tunes such as “Sing Sing Sing” and “In the Mood” along with songs from modern artists such as Ed Sheeran.

For the first hour of the event, members of the swing club will teach guests East Coast-style swing dances and will feature different styles of group dances such as Snowball and line dancing later in the evening. Experience nor a partner is required and those who are of age can enjoy a refreshment from the bar.

“I want it to be a promotion for our club so that more people can get involved in dancing because it is a lot of fun,” Swing Club President and sophomore zoology major Dana Shove said.

Shove was first exposed to swing dancing as a sophomore in high school and quickly took to it; much preferring swing over styles practiced by today’s youth, she said.

“Back home, the main reason it was started was so high schoolers wouldn’t start grinding on other people at dances and I loved it. It was so much more fun and more active to actually dance and know how to do things,” Shove said. “I really want that to be our club’s message that you don’t just have to hop up and down or grind or something—you can actually dance.”

At the Marc Moores Dance Group, the club’s adviser Marge Sklar has studied dancing’s effect on patients with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease and she believes that any sort of dancing is beneficial to health.

“People that have Parkinson’s, the symptoms are tremors and loss of balance and things like that. People that start dancing and take a dance class, their tremors decreased, their balance improves, the dopamine in the brain that was lost because of Alzheimer’s increases,” Sklar said. “It’s amazing what dance can do for your body and people don’t understand it—until they try it.”