Since the beginning of summer, city slickers have been flocking to Front Street on the first Thursday of the month for the season’s hottest free party: the Downtown Hoedown. For many folks, the highlight of the evening is line dancing in the shadows of skyscrapers that tower above the block. Yes, the event draws seasoned dancers decked out in cowboy boots and hats, eager to show off their fancy footwork. But thanks to Joel Reske and Sean Sullivan, founders of Lower Haight Line Dancing, newbies can join in the country-western fun, too.
The friends and roommates teach beginner friendly line dances at the hoedowns. Not so long ago, they were new to line dancing themselves. So they get that it can be intimidating for first-timers to try boot scootin’ in a big crowd of experienced dancers.
Last year, Reske and Sullivan started offering free line dancing lessons in their Lower Haight garage. They cooked up the idea after their first visit to Stud Country, Verdi Club’s popular weekly queer line dancing extravaganza (an echo of SF’s pioneering Sundance Saloon), where they quickly realized that neither their fits or moves were ready for prime time.
“Sean was like ‘before we come back, we’ve got to learn a few dances,’” Reske tells 48 Hills. “So we decided we’d teach ourselves a couple in our garage. I’d gotten this projector off the street, so we set it up and invited a few friends over.”
Though the duo was new to line dancing, Reske notes that they’re both “very active, dancey people.” Sullivan is an avid salsa dancer. And they’re both musically inclined. Reske loves to sing and perform; Sullivan plays the piano.
“We started by just putting on YouTube tutorials, and then once we had learned some dances, we started teaching them,” Reske explains. “I think because of our musical training, we were able to teach pretty well. And the rest is history.”
Word about what they were doing quickly spread among their friend group who were down to line dance. Figuring the more the merrier, Reske and Sullivan eventually opened their makeshift honky-tonk to the public every Sunday evening from 6pm to 10pm.
For the first few weeks, only a handful of new folks showed up. Now, 50 or more cowboys and cowgirls mosey down to the Lower Haight to wrap up their weekend with some dancing and socializing, sometimes leaving other neighborhood residents joyfully agog (48 Hills Arts Editor Marke B. among them). There were only a handful of people in the garage, mingling under strands of twinkling lights that dangled from the ceiling, when I showed up at a little past six on a recent evening. But the space was packed by 7pm and the overflow crowd spilled out onto the driveway.
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“There’s something very eternal about people wanting to get together and dance,” Reske says. “Especially as we came out of the pandemic when a lot of people in the city were in their homes and working remotely. I think just walking by our garage and seeing the kind of energy we have here draws them in.”
Most attendees on the night I was there looked to be in their 20s and 30s. But Reske says they get people of all ages and skill levels. He kicked things off by guiding us through some easy dances. (Sullivan happened to be away that Sunday.) After practicing the first routine a few times, we were ready to put our moves to music.
Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song” filled the garage. Starting at a slower than normal tempo, most participants were grapevining, shuffle-stepping and turning their way around the concrete floor like pros by the time we graduated to a full-tempo version of the song. For reasons I won’t bore you with, at the last minute, I had to bring my dog with me. So I only got to bumble my way through a couple of dances. But I felt welcome just the same. The vibe in the garage was relaxed and friendly, even as the dances got trickier as the night wore on.
“Because it’s choreographed moves, line dancing is something I think anyone can get it if you stick with it for enough time and do the moves slowly and work your way up to it,” states Reske.
He added that it’s rewarding for him and Sullivan when attendees tell them Sunday nights in the Lower Haight have helped them rekindle a love of dance they had as kids or college students but put aside as the demands of adulthood increased. “It’s been super awesome to have a lot of different people with different backgrounds engage with it,” Reske says.
Besides teaching at the Downtown Hoedown, Reske and Sullivan can be found at other events around town, like weekends on Hayes Promenade. And they’re available for private parties, too. For more details or directions to the Sunday night garage sessions, hit them up on Instagram.
