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The Swing Dance Company - How it all began

Attending Royal Worcester Grammar School and graduating with a BA Economics from Durham University is not the sort of background that comes readily to mind when you think of the founder of a dancing company; neither is being the Commercial Manager for a Racecourse. Then again, entrepreneurs come from a wide range and Brooke Garvey, the founder of The Swing Dance Company could not even dance until he started attending classes with his sister after graduating.

When Brooke moved to Chichester to take up his new post as Commercial Manager at Fontwell Park Racecourse it seemed impossible to find swing dancing lessons. With the south coast dance scene dominated by Modern Jive, a salsa infused jive variant, it necessitated travelling to London or Bristol to continue his passion.

Friends showed an interest in Brooke's dancing, so just for fun he hired a hall at The New Park Centre in Chichester and began teaching his friends. "It was meant to be a one off event" said Brooke, "but it went on for 18 months and attracted about twenty people each week". Although his Brighton based friend Carina demonstrated during the first 10 weeks, his flatmate and talented tap dancer Rachel trained up quickly and took over teaching responsibilities when it was clear that the classes would become a weekly happening.

Once the regular attendees had become established and able dancers, Brooke then found it difficult to teach them new steps when new people were joining every month, so he decided to start a course for beginners. Word of mouth and flyers through local doors resulted in the first class starting in January 2002. "The plan was that when the beginners had completed their 10 week course, they could then join the established class and this would solve the original problem", Brooke smiled. Nobody joined the established group however, so he started an Intermediate 10 week course which proved as popular as the Beginners course!

Rien, who now teaches in Chichester and Bognor Regis was a student on the first Chichester 10 week courses for beginners and intermediates.

A change in ownership at Fontwell Park Racecourse was the catalyst Brooke needed to start focussing full time on his dance company, and one of his keen pupils and good friend Claire Arnott had already approached him to be his partner in the company. Claire had already gained experience organising several themed and charity dances in the area and was clearly destined to be a popular and successful dance teacher. Claire had worked for HSBC in personnel and training and it was not long before she too gave up the safety of working for a bank for the danger zone of running a small company.

The Swing Dance Company was born in September 2002. Offering a free trial for the first lesson to beginners, the company added venues in Fareham and Petersfield, as well as continuing the Chichester venue for its first term.

Jon, who is now a teacher at Petersfield and Alton, took part in the first ever class in Petersfield.