A dancer exists inside of each and every one of us.

Walter Dill, a Whidbey Island dance instructor, helps his students discover this.

“Everyone is a good dancer,” Dill said. “But they have to find their own way of moving. Often people are too afraid to move so they never find that thing inside of them.”

Dill’s weekly dance classes at Bayview Hall have become extremely popular in a short amount of time.

“I just put the word out, and BOOM,” Dill said. Classes began to fill up quickly.

“There seems to be a real desire over here to have a good time dancing,” he said.

The instructor is keeping up the momentum with a new series of dance lessons starting on June 8.

“We’re trying to keep everybody dancing and inspire them,” Dill said. “It’s a very creative community here; open minded, diverse.”

In the upcoming class series, Dill will be accompanied by his daughters, Twyla and Celina, as well as his dance partner Janice Eklund.

Their instruction focuses on a fun, all-inclusive teaching method.

The three upcoming dance classes include both a beginning and intermediate level swing class, and a salsa dance class for all levels.

The first dance class Dill and his fellow instructors offered on the island was a “demystify dance” workshop. That class showed participants how all dances are interrelated.

Dill said that once someone learns a few practical dance steps, they have the basics for pretty much any type of dancing.

“People like to believe that there are different dance styles but there isn’t,” he said. “There’s very basic concepts that work that have been developed over the years.”

The goal for the demystify dance workshop was to teach people just how simple (and fun) learning to dance can be.

“It’s not a big mysterious thing. It’s accessible,” Dill said. “When you learn one thing, you learn another.”

Dill helped create and run Seattle’s Living Traditions dance instruction for 14 years. During that time he taught dance lessons to more than 14,000 people.

Dill recently moved to Port Townsend for a slower pace of living.

But during the past six months, Dill said his friends on Whidbey Island kept calling and saying “Hey, you should do dance classes over here.”

Now, Dill takes the Port Townsend/Keystone ferry to the island each week to teach dance lessons.

To prepare for his class, Dill decided to attend an event at the Holmes Harbor Rod & Gun Club.

“It was a fun night of dancing,” Dill said.

It was also the night he discovered his star students — Ferdinand and Diana Wagner.

“I was watching and I was like ‘Oh my goodness, look at this.’” Dill said. “They are a couple who have been together 46 years dancing beautifully — energetically — and it’s inspirational. This is what people need to see.”

Dill said right now most people have a skewed vision about dancing because of a popular television show. He said the Wagners are a good example of what dancing is really all about.

“People see ‘Dancing with the Stars’ — this competitive stuff. It’s all these perfect people with perfect bones. But they can’t get half as good as these folks, in my opinion,” Dill said. “The most inspirational people to me are down-to-earth dancers.”

“I think Walter’s mission is to find those kinds of people all over the country and focus on them,” said Ecklund, Dill’s co-instructor.

One major aspect of Dill’s dance classes is that they include people of all ages. He said there are cultures, such as Creole and Cajun, whose traditions always include the grandparents and grandkids.

“There is no separation of generation in that culture, there is no separation of dance and music,” Dill said. “If kids can learn it early, it’s bound to impact their relationships as adults.”

Dill’s experience as a dance instructor has influenced his view on American popular culture.

“The problem in our culture is the separation of age, the separation of dancing and music, and basically, the separation of male and female.”

Dill said that couples’ relationships can benefit greatly from learning how to dance.

“Men and women do not know how to move together in this culture. It’s pretty clear. And they’re afraid of it,” He said. “But there are basic skills that you can learn easily in the process of partner dance that lends itself to people learning to get along.”

The instructors have a social approach to teaching dance. They rotate their student’s partners. Dill said his current Swing dance class has a great time with this.

“The partner they came with could be 20 partners away, and they’re just having so much fun yapping with everybody in the room,” Dill said. “Most people don’t know the other person, they just know them on the dance floor.”

“To me, that’s what it’s about. Who cares about politics? Who cares about religion? Who cares what you believe in? We can all dance together,” Dill said.

“That’s the power about this approach to social dance. It’s just fun.”