“Look into your partner’s eyes. Make the connection. Helen, put your hand on your man’s shoulder. Bruce, put your hand on Helen’s waist. Get closer, so you can almost feel the other person’s heart beating. Then gently grasp your other hands with flat palms. Don’t interlace your fingers, or you will be unable to twirl her.”
I want to be twirled, so we do as Erik says.
We are in a ballroom in a recently refurbished castle in the Bavarian Alps, learning how to waltz. I’m 63, my husband is 66. Erik Dietrich, who moves like water over stones, is our instructor. As a teenager, he says, dancing saved his life. Now, at 27, he works as a dance teacher in a high school in Munich. He wants his pupils to enjoy the experience, to feel the joy that comes from moving to music, to have conversations with our bodies. To “make the connection.”
The ballroom (which doubles as a concert hall) is part of a hotel, spa, and cultural center called Schloss Elmau. There are many reasons why one might choose to vacation here: the views; the hiking; the Pilates and yoga classes; the eight swimming pools, most outdoors and heated even in the winter (I swam in the salt water pool with steam rising during a magical March snowfall); the concerts and lectures; the eight restaurants, one with two Michelin stars and another devoted to fondue. The G7 met here, twice. You might remember a famous alfresco photo of Angela Merkel, standing with her arms outstretched in animated conversation with a rapt Barack Obama lounging on a bench.
Schloss Elmau is an iconic Bavarian destination with 360-degree views of lofty peaks, verdant forests, and wildflower meadows.
Courtesy Schloss Elmau
But none of that has brought me and my husband to Schloss Elmau. The resort periodically offers weekend-long dance intensives and we have come to twirl! And, as Erik says, to make a connection—in my case, to some family history.
You see, this isn’t my first waltz lesson. Five decades ago, my grandmother, a Jewish refugee from this part of Middle Europe, taught me the dance. After my grandfather died, she moved into a studio apartment in the same Greenwich Village building where my family was subletting a one-bedroom apartment. Later, when we moved to the Upper East Side, she moved in with us. She had no money of her own and she was lonely. We ended up sharing a bedroom for much of my childhood, and well into my teenage years, until my sister went to college, and Grandma got her little maid’s room behind the kitchen. I remember one afternoon in the early years when Grandma was lying on her twin bed with her eyes closed, as I read a book sitting up on mine. The book’s main character had been to a party. I asked her, “Grandma, what’s a waltz?”