When it comes to dancing, it’s the man who leads. When it comes to initiating dance lessons, it’s often the woman who takes charge.

“After their wives and girlfriends get them here, it takes one or two minutes for the guys to relax and start smiling,” Rody Broussard said.

Broussard is a local ballroom and country and western dance instructor who describes dance as an art and a science.

“Some people feel the music and some people, you teach the pattern,” he said.

“Maybe if you’d spit out your gum, it would help,” Clara Colvin tells dance partner Bob Rollins early on in the lesson. He grins and takes his red-headed dance partner, her comment and his first dance lesson in stride. He is having a good time, and it shows.

“It was his idea to take lessons. He’s never danced and wants to learn them all,” Colvin said. The couple travels quite a bit, and venues can include dance floors.

As if on cue, associate dance teacher Joe Davis ambles over in his boots and black felt cowboy hat to see how things are progressing.

“These women can make us look wonderful as long as we put them in their place,” Davis said with a chuckle. “No, I know better. You can’t make a woman do anything she doesn’t want to. I know. I’m married to one.”

His wife, Nancy, said she was scrolling through Facebook 17 years ago when she saw Broussard’s post for a free country and western, two-step dance lesson. They went, and never stopped.

Broussard is lean, buttoned up, professional and soft-spoken as he smoothly leads a student. Then he puts on a little music, and after the first couple of lines

Horace Trahan’s “That Butt Thing,” any remaining tension in the room seems to evaporate.

“I did that booty shaking thing for a while after I retired from the military,” said Gary Peveto. “My wife pulled me here kicking and screaming 40 years ago and I have enjoyed it ever since.”

Dance connects the brain and the body, and neuroscience is just now finding out what’s going on in the brain when a person dances. It’s more than exercise. Even better, dancing can connect generations.

“We have had an entire family come to classes, a grandmother with three of her grandchildren, husband, wife and college-age son. They’re learning ballroom dancing, having a blast,” Broussard said.

Broussard did not set out to get people off their feet and on the dance floor. In the 1980s, he was bartending at Copperfields, a bar by the Keg, when the management decided they wanted all-female bartenders.”

Broussard was hanging out in Grand Chenier when he saw an ad in the American Press for a job for someone who likes to travel and likes people.

“When I showed up, I found out it was work for an Arthur Murray Dance Studio. I was 22 years old and they taught me what all the dances were — the foxtrot, tango, osso bucco, waltz, chacha, rumba.”

His specialty was country and western dance. When the movie “Urban Cowboy” took off, so did Broussard’s career. Everyone wanted to learn how to walk, walk, step together – the two-step.

Broussard teaches competition dancing and social dancing, with lessons in DeRidder, Sulphur and Lake Charles – sometimes for free.

Singles and partners are welcome. Teachers and students mix and mingle to make the lesson work out for all. People that think they know how to dance unlearn habits, starting at the same place as someone who knows he or she doesn’t know how to dance.

No hat or boots required.

Just because you can’t dance, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t – and it certainly doesn’t mean you can’t learn.