West Coast Swing is more than a dance style — it's a lifestyle for members of West Slope Westies, Durango's nonprofit swing dance community. Known for its fluid, elastic movement and ability to complement almost any genre of music, West Coast Swing has drawn a growing and passionate local following. When the group began outgrowing their rented rooms at the Smiley Building, leadership made a bold decision: find a bigger home and trust the community to fill it. That leap of faith led to the creation of The Durango Collective, a downtown studio that now serves as a shared hub for multiple local dance communities all under one roof. As the group's president describes it, the space was built for people to connect, create and celebrate — and for anyone willing to push through that first moment of vulnerability on the dance floor, joy is waiting on the other side.
It fills me up. Like it gives me like a sense of purpose in a way. Like I really look forward to it every week. I have friends that I would not have met otherwise, and people that are like a wonderful piece of my life. So yeah, I think it is, it is truly that. It's like a coming together and a place to have community.
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What makes West Coast swing different than a few other dance styles is its elasticity. So if you watch it, it's very expansive and it has a really fluid movement to it. The, the Durango Collective came about in a need from the Westslope Westies. We were dancing in the Smiley building and we were filling out the space. We were renting two rooms and we kept growing. So we made it a point at the end of this last year to find more space in order to grow our community. And just by happenstance, our vice president was cruising by this space and the the owner was here, the provider, and said, Hey, is this going to be for rent?
And it was very serendipitous. I walked in and I said, are you guys moving? Who owns this place? Tell me everything. And they told me everything. And two days later, we signed a lease. We signed a lease that we didn't have the budget for, but we believed in ourselves and we knew that if we created this, we really took the, if we build it, they will come approach. And so far they have come and people are beginning to make this their home too.
And just out of the blue, like, yeah, things came together and they moved awfully quickly After that, rotate, the followers almost, almost see if it's you. This space is going to help the West East grow our community in several ways. It gives us physically more space in order to, to dance and facilitate larger classes, but it also gives us a little bit more flexibility in our offering. So we can have multiple classes during the week. We can also host larger events.
What I'm loving and what I'm seeing is both digitally and in person in this space, the dance groups that were kind of siloed and occasionally had an overlap have come together under one roof and one umbrella, both in how we're communicating in our social channels and then how we're meeting in person. And I think that is a serendipitous moment of just the times and the space so that we can start to overlap and mesh. We created this space for people to come and do what they love, which is connect, create, celebrate, and make community. It is a very vulnerable thing to put yourself out there and to try something with your body in public, in front of strangers. But the one thing I've learned, if you walk through that cloud of discomfort, there's exhilaration on the other side and great joy to be found.
For more information, visit west slope west.com. And for more stories like this, visit Durango Local News.
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