ROCKLAND — Check your calendar, get your tickets, clean the tux and oh yeah, don’t forget your dancing shoes. Friday, May 9, at the Camden Opera House is the sixth annual Dancing With the Local Stars to benefit the Wayfinder School (formally the Community School).

This year Swing and Sway Dancing and Kinetic Energy Alive join with local stars Rafi Baeza, Mimi Bornstein, Allie Bowen, Staci Coomer, Kerry Hadley, Justin Hills, Robin Jordan, Colin Page, Jennifer Ross-Boshes and Amanda Strong. Gordon Page will join the fun in his third year as emcee of the night.

The 10 local stars will be performing tango, hip hop, hustle, cha cha, salsa, samba, foxtrot and swing. Curiosity got the best of me and I dropped in Swing and Sway to catch a practice session. We were lucky enough to catch Allie Bowen going through a dance routine he will perform May 9, with his instructor Jessica Libby.

“We’re going to do the Hustle to a Whitney Houston song,” said Bowen. “I’m not an experienced dancer and really, it’s quite interesting. There’s a lot to it, and it’s very taxing if you haven’t done it like this before.

Bowen said everyone at Swing and Sway are great instructors.

“They’re easy to work with,” he said. “They’re a lot of fun and they know how to get you involved.”

I asked Bowen what he was going to do if he dropped his instructor. The room got quiet.

“I hope not to,” he said and the room got noisy all over again.

Steven James Rogers-Dones is the newest instructor at Swing and Sway. He hails from Australia and he joined Swing and Sway in December. He’ll be dancing with Christian Clayton and Jessica Libby, both of Swing and Sway and Kea Tesseyman, of Kinetic Energy Alive. In addition, he’ll be dancing with local stars Mimi Bornstein, Kerry Hadley and Amanda Strong.

“I’m a big believer that anyone is a dancer,” he said. “I’m lucky with Mimi because she knows music and she comes from a musical background, so dance is just the next element for her. It’s a lot of repetition and memory. The key I think for anyone who comes into dance is muscle memory.”

Mimi Bornstein is also the founder and artistic director of the Midcoast Community Chorus. Mimi said she and Steven are doing an Argentine Tango. 

“We’ve been keeping that a secret until now,” she said. “I’m having a lot of fun and no, I’m not an experienced dancer. I just need to get a really good looking dress so people don’t look at my feet. I work with singers who think they can’t sing, so I do what Steven does except with singers. It’s a wonderful and humbling experience for me to be in an element that’s not familiar to me.”

Jessica Libby is the manager and an instructor at Swing and Sway. She commented on her partner, Allie Bowen.

“Allie is nice and the Hustle number is fun,” she said. “He’s got a good personality and he makes it fun, so it encourages me to be really creative with things. He’s good in the routine. We kind of loaded the routine with quite a few tricks, so I think it’s going to be a big hit at the show. Because of the nature of this performance, it’s like people need to go on the fast track of learning. We don’t have the time to teach them a solid set of basics before we introduce them to choreography. It’s tough on these people because not only are they expected to look good, but to put together some complicated patterns.”

Jessica will be doing a West Coast Swing number with Colin Page, Salsa with Rafi Baeza and the Hustle number with Bowen. Jessica would not comment on the number she is doing with fellow Swing and Sway(ers), saying that she wanted it to be a surprise, but said with a big smile, it will be exciting .

Jessica agreed that students with a natural sense of rhythm catch on quicker.

“The biggest challenge is helping some one, especially someone who is inexperienced, how dancing works,” she said. “The steps themselves are complicated, but with enough repetition and muscle memory you can get them. It’s then applying those to the rhythm of a song that make it the most challenging. I think this year’s event is a very wide range of stars. They’re from all areas of the professional world, so it’s an interesting combination of people. It’s always nice to meet new people and people from the community that you wouldn’t get to meet otherwise.”  

Swing and Sway owner Christian Clayton said he had a good team of instructors for this year’s Dancing With the Local Stars event.

“I’m excited,” he said. “We have a great group of people this year, 10 different stars and we have a good line up of music and songs which makes it a good show, as well. It’s music that people can really get into. I always tell these guys, it’s like you’re in nursery school and you have to learn college material. It’s a steep climb for these guys because they skip all those basic things we teach people and we have to go directly to that entertainment quality right away.

“Dancing With the Local Stars is always fun for us. It’s a great way to break up your routine, especially in the spring after a long winter. We have a big competition in Boston in June and this year we’ve had a lot of requests to do events out in the public. We’re getting ready for a big car show/graduation at Medomak High School. We hope to do the Lobster Festival this year, too. It’s a busy spring and summer and that’s good for our students because it gives them a chance to get out and perform. And it’s wedding season, so we have a lot of wedding couples in right now.”

Kudos to the 10 stars in this year’s Dancing With the Local Stars. May 9, at the Camden Opera House.