On a trip to Austria in 2013, I took a drop-in waltz class at the Rueff Dance School in downtown Vienna.
I only paid for an hour, so I was limited to the basic steps, but even so, it was thrilling after just 15 minutes to actually be twirling around the floor in the arms of an Austrian for whom this dance was second nature, my instructor, Henry Karesh.
Like many Viennese, Mr. Karesh has been waltzing since childhood and knows all the variations that turn a simple three-step into something a lot more sophisticated, none of which I did that day.
But as he gently steered me around the polished wood floor in the dance studio, I was reminded that more than any other travel activity, dance connects visitor to local in a language that needs no words.
“Dancing with people breaks down barriers, and it doesn’t happen in another way,” said Mickela Mallozzi, a dance tour director who is also the host of the web and television series “Bare Feet.” “You make a connection physically. It is intimate, in an appropriate way.”
Eager for more encounters like those in Crete and Vienna, in the past year I traveled to three countries with a plan to learn local dances in even the most cursory way so that I might again make the kind of connection Ms. Mallozzi was talking about.
India
Any expectation I had about how easy it would be to shimmy like the Indian actress Freida Pinto in the closing scene of the Oscar-winning 2008 film “Slumdog Millionaire” vanished within 10 minutes of the warm-up at the Shakti School of Dance in Pushkar, India.
Colleena Shakti, 34, an American expat from Ventura, Calif., dabbled in Middle Eastern folk and belly dancing before beginning serious study of Odissi, one of the oldest forms of classical Indian dancing.
It was the colorful, joyful Bollywood movies that brought me to Ms. Shakti’s school thinking that I would learn those comely shoulder shrugs and graceful hand gestures that were synonymous with contemporary dance in Indian cinema.
“Everybody in the world loves Bollywood dance,” Ms. Shakti said, because it is beautiful and fun. Some Bollywood movements have their origins in Odissi, she said, but the similarity stops there because classical Indian dances are ancient, subtle and complex. “If people saw Odissi before they saw Bollywood, they would never think, ‘I could do that,’ ” she said, appearing not to judge me for having thought exactly that.
Ms. Shakti has been practicing Odissi for 15 years. It cannot be learned in a few days and it does involve serious effort and pain. The shortest class offered here is one month. (The cost for that is $700.)
Students from around the world come, some year after year, to study with Ms. Shakti. Elina Kiaili, formerly a ballet dancer in Greece, had already explored belly dancing in Turkey and tango, salsa and ballroom dancing at home in Greece. In 2010, while taking an Indian folk dance class in Pushkar, she saw Ms. Shakti perform for the first time. The performance spoke to her, she said: “I saw Odissi dance, and I said, ‘This is it.’ My heart was stolen.”
Music for each three-hour session is performed on a drum called the Odissi Mardala by Sudhansu Pohana, another instructor and a classical performer himself. The lesson begins with 90 minutes of the most grueling yoga I have ever tried — and that’s before the actual heavy leg lifting and feather-light arm movements begin.
Only the elaborate hand gestures and facial expressions seemed achievable, except for the fact that there are thousands of them — so many that a thick encyclopedia explaining the meaning of each is available for reference in a corner of the room.
“There’s an awareness when you use your hands in the dance, everything right up to fingertips has to be awake and alive,” said Katie Getchell, a 50-year-old student from Colorado.
Ms. Shakti’s students are required to learn how to tie a sari, which they must wear on their way to and from class, during their lessons and at Ms. Shakti’s evening lectures on the history of the dance and the deities depicted in it.
On the roof of the Vishnu temple that houses the studio, I took a break with Sarah Otto-Combs, 33, from Seattle. This was her second visit, but the first since Ms. Shakti instituted the sari rule in 2014. Learning to put it on was hard, Ms. Otto-Combs told me, though she said it was worth the effort because it helped her relate to local residents.
“The women really open up to you and connect with you in a different way because they see that you are coming to respect their culture, not just to look at it,” she said.
After the break, I made a few more clumsy attempts to join the class, splaying my bare feet in the ballet first position, and stomping as instructed until the pain in my feet and knees got the better of me. The takeaway for me was realizing that even without conquering the steps, I had accomplished one of the goals Ms. Shakti sets for her students: I’d had “an experience in the culture.”
Ethiopia
Before Erin Hummert’s wedding last summer, a group of her friends arranged a bachelorette party. They briefly considered taking Ms. Hummert, a 39-year-old doctor, bowling. But then the group of American and European expatriates now living in Addis Ababa had another idea: How about a dance class?
They knew from experience how important dance is at any Ethiopian get-together, so on a Saturday in June, they hired two professional dancers, Junaid Jemal Sendi and Addisu Demissie, to teach them a few tribal dances.
Earlier in the day, I attended a drop-in class the two men offer on Saturday mornings at Galani Coffee Warehouse, a restaurant, art gallery and performance space. When I heard that their next appointment was teaching at the dance party for the bride, I asked to tag along.
We arrived at an outdoor pavilion on the grounds of the British Embassy, and I watched while Mr. Sendi and Mr. Demissie patiently demonstrated some of the most popular movements among the many dances performed across the country.
Within minutes all the guests were shifting their weight from side to side, making great heaving lunges with their legs while pumping their shoulders up and down to the beat of a drum.
“It’s not just traditional dance,” Dr. Hummert told me. The steps are “part of modern dancing that young people do. Out at bars our friends try to get us to do the different moves.”
We drove from the party to our next stop, a show by disabled dancers in the Meskel Square neighborhood. On the way, Mr. Demissie told me there are more than 80 varieties of Ethiopian traditional dancing.
“All the north people, they dance with the head, the neck or the shoulder, and when you come south they use their hips, their legs. Further down they jump, so they use their feet,” he said.
Mr. Sendi, 31, and Mr. Demissie, 33, are childhood friends and partners in the Destino Dance Company, which has a goal of increasing Ethiopian appreciation for modern dance by creatively reinterpreting traditional steps. The men offer the Saturday 90-minute morning classes for expats and locals that I attended (about $6 per class) and a separate basic-steps session for children.
There were about 20 other adults taking lessons with me that morning, and we did floor-based moves I associated with contemporary dance and fewer of the jumps and swaying action of tribal dance.
Those were reserved for the bachelorette party, where we did it all, including Ethiopia’s trademark up and down shoulder shakes and enough neck extensions to make my muscles burn.
New Zealand
My class in India showed me that dance could be worship. In Ethiopia, I learned some of the many modern and traditional moves in the dances of that country. Now, I was as ready as I could be for New Zealand’s haka, dance that is often intended to intimidate spectators with its fierce movements.
“To scare the enemy away you had to portray yourself as an evil person,” said Terehira Mokena, a member of New Zealand’s native Maoris and a professional dancer at the village of Whakarewarewa in Rotorua, a historic center of Maori culture.
On my first visit to New Zealand, in 2012, I attended the Matariki festival, a national competition in which many tribes perform. I watched in fascination as team after team did its best to frighten the audience.
So when I went back last summer, I was hoping to at least learn the basics, not just of haka, but also the less well-known poi, a way of swinging balls in complex circles on strings of various lengths.
While only women use the poi in performances, both Maori men and women learn from childhood how to control the lightweight balls because poi is thought to be good for coordination and flexibility. I could not find a teacher before I left home, but was optimistic about finding one upon arrival.
I had arranged to stay with a Maori family, and when I entered the house, I discovered my hostess, Heni Herwini, had a traditional dress with an embroidered top on display in her living room, revealing that she had once been a dancer. I considered that a lucky break, but she confessed it had been years and that she could not teach me.
Instead, she directed me to Whakarewarewa, occupied by Maoris for the last 700 years and only a few miles from her home.
For an entry fee, tourists are welcome to visit the village. At the small community hall there are dance performances twice a day. When I was there, the men in the audience were invited to the stage for an impromptu haka class. To much good-natured screaming and dramatic gesturing, 20-year-old Matt Paterson of Australia squatted with the other tourists with his hands on his hips, a broad smile contradicting the intentions of the dance.
“Haka was used as an act of defiance,” Ms. Mokena, who leads the dance troupe, told me. “You had to be defiant. Your whole body, eyes and tongue are used just to frighten them.” By that standard the grinning men signaled the lesson was a complete failure, though they seemed to be having a good time.
Unfortunately for me, on the day I visited, women were not called from the audience to give it a try. So I would have left New Zealand having once again seen, but failed to learn, even the first step of either haka or poi if it had not been for the offer of a clerk in the Whakarewarewa Thermal Village souvenir shop.
I suspect that Tatiana Te Kowhai, who was working the cash register, determined that she could sell more poi balls if she taught tourists how to use them, because she offered to give me a lesson.
It took considerable concentration for me to keep the balls at just the right speed without having them smack into each other or fly off into space.
My clumsy attempts looked nothing like the delicate representation of the flight of birds and butterflies that punctuate the stories of nature and tribal life told in the Maori dances. Even so, I bought the balls, though I haven’t picked them up since that afternoon.
I prefer to believe, as Ms. Mokena had suggested, that Maori dancing is best left for the descendants of New Zealand’s first settlers to perform and for visitors like me to observe and enjoy.
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