ABOUT
Steps are borrowed. Dancing is yours.
Professor Jitterbug's School of Dance is not about learning steps. It's about learning to dance.
For over 26 years, this school has been built around one idea: that every person who loves music has the ability to move with a partner, regardless of the style they started in or the rhythm they grew up with.
We teach social dance - the improvisational, lead-and-follow kind that happens at real events, between real people, to whatever song the DJ decides to play next. That means swing, Latin, rhythm and blues, and everything in between. It means learning to listen to your partner as much as you listen to the music. And it means leaving class with something you can actually use.
Whether you've never set foot on a dance floor or you've been dancing for decades in one style, you'll find a place here. The floor is big enough for all of it - and all of us.
— Nick Peterson, a.k.a. Professor Jitterbug · Teaching swing & social dance weekly in Las Vegas since 2000.
About Nick Peterson, a.k.a. Professor Jitterbug
Founder & Lead Instructor
It started, like most great things do, with a girl who never showed up.
Well, honestly, before that, it started with a CD. In early 1998, a high school friend handed me Kings of Gangster Bop by Royal Crown Revue, and something in me began to jitter. I got my first job, at an ice cream store called Marble Slab, specifically so I could buy two tickets to RCR's concert at The Joint on June 18, 1998. (I still remember the date. That's how serious this was.)
In September of 1998, I was 16 and armed with a few off-beat swing steps I'd picked up at a friend's house party. A cute girl from my school dance invited me to see a swing band the next night. I showed up at Harrah's Carnival Court in my best Harris & Frank's "vintage" shirt and a bowler hat. Back then, the Court was a wide-open outdoor space: cobblestone floors, a water feature in the middle, a live swing band six nights a week, and best of all, all ages with no cover charge. To a 16-year-old kid, it was freedom.
The girl never showed, and I never saw her again. In fact, there were no women dancing there at all. Just five other guys, who decided the thing to do was teach the kid in the bowler hat his first Charleston steps.
I went back the next night. And almost every night after that.
I took my first real class in January of 1999. By May of 2000, I was teaching a weekly swing lesson in the clubhouse of a senior mobile home community. I was 18 years old.
I've been teaching ever since.
The mobile home community is still there, too.
Over 26 years, I've come to believe that the best thing a teacher can do isn't hand you a set of steps. It's giving you the tools to create your own dance.
To find your own freedom.