Dance Off

Minnesota is home to the hottest reception trend: the wedding party dance.

Weddings are steeped in tradition, from candle lighting and glass smashing during the ceremony, to the bouquet toss and cake cutting at the reception. So when Sabrina Vogland and her fiancé Drew Ely were planning their August 2009 wedding, they knew they wanted to shake things up a bit.

A big fan of the former TLC show “Rock the Reception,” Vogland wanted to create the same energy and excitement she saw when a Minnesota wedding party wowed guests with a surprise dance performance. She decided to really kick off her reception by performing a choreographed dance with Drew and their attendants.

“I really liked the surprise element,” she says. “I wanted to throw in something that was not in every other wedding our guests had been to. We wanted people to have a really good memory.”

Sabrina, 27, and Drew, 30, both of Minneapolis, are at the leading edge of a wedding trend that started taking off this summer when another Twin Cities couple, Kevin Heinz and Jill Peterson, and their wedding party literally danced down the aisle to Chris Brown’s “Forever.” Thirty million people watched a clip of their dance on YouTube, landing the couple on the “Today” show.

For some couples a choreographed wedding dance is about giving their guests a surprise; for others it’s about expressing their joy. “People want something fun at their reception,” says Emily Paul, a Twin Cities choreographer who worked with Vogland and Ely on their dance. “It’s exciting and it makes it less about having everything be perfect and more about celebrating and setting the tone for a fun, laid-back wedding.”

At the Elys’ reception at the Holiday Inn Hotel & Suites in Bloomington, the bride and groom shared their first dance and the father/daughter and groom/mother dance. That’s when the fun really started. Announcing to their 200 guests that they had something to share, the women of the bridal party started performing their routine in a V-formation to Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel.” The ladies did some of their own moves, eventually drawing the guys into the dance, and the routine ended with the Elys paired up and surrounded by their co-conspirators.

“It was so cool to watch,” says Paul. “The guests were just laughing and cheering and loving it.”

Sabrina started thinking about the surprise dance right after the couple got engaged in the summer of 2008. But first she had to convince her fiancé. “I said I would do it because I just wanted to make Sabrina happy,” he recalls. “She wanted to do something new and different, and who am I to stand in the way of something like that?”

Drew was a little nervous about lining up the support of his groomsmen, but they were all game. Sabrina hired Paul, a lifelong dancer, as well as an instructor and choreographer, who was enthusiastic about the idea. It wasn’t anything Paul had ever done before, but she definitely wanted to get involved.

The wedding party held two dance practices where they learned the routine and went over steps individually while taking care of other wedding business. The couple stressed to their siblings and friends that they just wanted everyone to have fun with the dance—and keep it a secret.

The Elys couldn’t have been happier with the way the dance and reception turned out. “It definitely surprised people,” says Drew. “It was a fun, light way to start everything off and there was a lot of energy in the crowd afterwards. People were excited and it added something to our reception.”

WEDDING PRO TEAM