MSL Dancing – How it all began…………………….
Hello, we are Mark and Sue Lawrence, we have lived in Taunton for over 21 years, having moved across from Dorset, and have been married for 20 years. We both share a love for dance, which is how we first met, dancing to 90’s music at the weekends.
In his younger days Mark learnt to ballroom dance and prior to moving to Somerset Sue enjoyed going to line dancing classes.
We were introduced to a ballroom and latin dance class in 2007 and were instantly hooked. Unfortunately, the classes stopped after about a year, it wasn’t until 2009 that we joined Martyn Knight’s classes at Step in Time Dance School, which we attended for many years, more recently for private refresher classes.
As we gained confidence we enjoyed going to social dances most weekends and very quickly started to realise that most dance events are 50/50 (ballroom/sequence), and to fully enjoy them, we needed to learn some sequence dances. With a mixture of lessons and by following other dancers we very quickly mastered several of the more popular dances. We have now been enjoying sequence dancing, alongside our ballroom and latin for about 10 years and it’s not unusual for us to travel up to an hour to go to social events so that we can dance on a regular basis. We often wished that there was a venue closer to home.
Having spoken to several of our dancing friends it came to light that they were feeling the same, so as a trial we decided to hold a tea dance in September 2021 at Othery Village Hall which was very successful. Following the tea dance we set about locating a larger venue which we found at Creech St Michael Village Hall and have been holding monthly tea dances there on a Sunday afternoon and recently started holding a Saturday evening social dance at the same venue, both of which have been well supported and we have dates booked for the rest of the year. In addition we now have evening social dances at North Petherton Community Centre on the 3rd Saturday of the month, Oake Village Hall afternoon tea dances on the 3rd Wednesday of the month and also at The Lawns Social club on a Thursday evening every two months. Since we started running the regular dances it became apparent that some of the dancers were sitting out the sequence dances just as we did in the early days. We really enjoyed helping dancers to learn the sequence routines so, in April 2022, we started teaching and set up classes for beginners and improvers at The Lawns Social Club on Thursday evenings and now also at West Buckland Village Hall on Wednesday evenings.
We love seeing people enjoy dancing as much as we do, and it gives us great pleasure watching them master the new dances while having a fun social time.
If you would like to come to any of our dances or lessons, full details are on our website or get in touch for more information.
If you would like to know more about our dances and lessons, please click on the links below.
We look forward to meeting you soon. Mark and Sue Lawrence