In the basement of The New School University Center, below seven floors of classrooms, lecture halls, and sewing studios, lies a notoriously neglected fitness room. At least until the Concrete Cowboys, the school’s line dancing club, started using it to practice their routines. 

If you wander into the basement on a Thursday night, you might catch country classics followed by the sharp, synchronized stomp of cowboy boots. “Once you go and … [watch] the dances, you’re just kind of mesmerized,” said Emerson Fleurant, one of the club’s three co-founders and a third-year fashion design student at Parsons School of Design. 

Line dancing is a choreographed dance where a group of individuals perform a repeated sequence of steps while arranged in lines or rows. Typically, line dances are named after or associated with specific songs, but most steps include spinning, clicking heels, clapping, and lots of stomping. Line dancing can be traced all the way back to 19th century Europe, but it was popularized when disco was mixed with country-western music in the 1970s. Because of line dancing’s origins, western attire, like cowboy boots, is customary while performing. 

Line dancing has been on the rise all over New York City, with many country bars incorporating line dancing nights, such as Buck Wild at Desert 5 Spot in Brooklyn and Hill Country in Midtown. Big Apple Ranch, Stud Country, and Scuff offer queer line dancing events to bring together LGBTQ+ folks across the city. Stud Country started in LA in 2021. It was so successful that it spread to cities across the United States, while Scuff started on Sept. 18 of this year offering line dancing events in the bay area and New York City. 

“I feel like you only have to go once and then you can really find a love for it and almost be addicted to it,” Fleurant said. Originally from Wisconsin, she explained that she was first exposed to line dancing about a year ago, when her mother took her to an event. “And then I came back to the city, and I was like, ‘I want to see if there’s anywhere in the city that has it.’” 

Fleurant quickly fell in love with line dancing and began seeking out the city’s line dancing bars. She and her friends, Capri Lico and Anna Bolla — now the club’s co-founders — began attending Hill Country’s line dancing nights, which they host every Tuesday. “The three of us … [went] line dancing, and then we became super obsessed with it. Then over the summer … we were like, ‘Why don’t we start a club?’” Lico said. 

Lico and Bolla are also third-year fashion design students at Parsons, and all three club founders view line dancing as a necessary escape from the chaos of school, internships, and work. As a result, from 7-9 p.m. every Thursday, the Concrete Cowboys set aside their responsibilities to host line dancing classes.

Caption: Emerson Fleurant, Capri Lico, and Anna Bolla show off their custom Concrete Cowboys t-shirts. Photo by Lauren Schafer.

Alt Text: Black and white photo of Emerson Fleurant, Capri Lico, and Anna Bolla face the camera over their shoulder pointing their thumbs towards their custom Concrete Cowboys t-shirts. Photo by Lauren Schafer.

“I think we all know the program is really a lot,” Lico said, referring to the demanding reputation of the Parsons fashion design major. Not only do fashion design students have to spend hours in the studios sewing garments, but many also work internships during the school year to make headway in the fiercely competitive industry. Bolla currently works four jobs on top of being a full-time student. 

“It’s really nice to be able to not think about it [school] for a little bit and just have something else to focus on,” Lico said. “The community has a lot to do with it.” 

“It definitely is the community that I feel the safest within when we’re going out to bars,” Bolla said in reference to the weekly line dancing nights at Hill Country. “I think everyone is just so accepting and loving of each other.” 

The club’s first meeting was Aug. 28 this year, and the Concrete Cowboys haven’t missed a single week since. “Our first meeting was really memorable because it was just cool to see the turnout we had, and I just loved how excited everyone was. You could sense it in the room,” Fleurant said. “I noticed the first couple of weeks we would get a lot of new faces, just people trying it out. We’ve had a couple of people who consistently come to every single meeting, and then some people have even … come with us to other line dancing places outside of the club.” 

Even during midterms, the Concrete Cowboys had a good turnout, with about 13 students showing up to dance their stress away on Thursday, Oct. 23. The Concrete Cowboys started the night with a warm-up to “I See Country” by Ian Munsick. Club regulars, who knew the routine by heart, jumped into formation, joining Bolla, Fleurant, and Lico on the dance floor and moved in effortless synchronization, stomping their boots so hard the floor rattled. They played a few more line dance classics, such as “Footloose,” “Highclass,” and “Descarada.”

Once the warm-up was done, they transitioned to the lesson portion of the meet-up, where Bolla,  Fleurant, and Lico took turns teaching the students new line dances. Learning a new line dance takes anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes, depending on how complicated the choreography is. The group learned it bit by bit, watching the club leaders demonstrate each move as they explained the steps. 

“Scuff, twist, pivot, stomp!” Fleaurant said. Before long, every Concrete Cowboy was part of a flurry of arching boots and synchronized limbs moving to the rhythm of their new song. 

“It’s such an interesting concept that everyone has completely different day-lives and then they come together and all know the same exact moves and dances,” Bolla said. Rather than dancing individually to the same music, synchronized dancing can bring about a treasured sense of community. All three club leaders agreed that line dancing was unique in its ability to bring people together. 

Line dancing also acts as a safe space in LGBTQ+ community. “Queer line dancing is gaining a lot of traction right now,” Bolla said. According to Bolla, line dancing is popular among queer people for many reasons. “I think line dancing is something picked up a lot by people who did dance or musical theater in high school or show choir and had to quit … I just think it becomes a safe space to pick up something that you had to leave behind when you became an adult.” 

Bolla also recalled many queer friends from southern states who see line dancing as an act of reclamation. “I have … heard a lot of stories about people not feeling fully accepted in their communities or like they’re being shut out just because they’re queer. So it could be a sense of trying to kind of reconnect with where they grew up,” Bolla said. 

“I feel like in a way, it being pop and country has brought a lot of queer people who have listened to those kinds of things to line dancing,” Fleurant said, mentioning Beyoncé and Sabrina Carpenter as common names associated with line dancing. 

Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Beyoncé have become pop-country icons, earning them their popularity within the line dancing community. Sabrina Carpenter posted a line dancing tutorial for her pop-country single “Manchild” on TikTok, which got 13.4 million likes. Chappell Roan recently released the pop-country hit single “The Giver,” which already has a plethora of line dancing routines on TikTok, some of which have garnered up to 235,000 likes. Perhaps most notably in the pop-country scene is Beyoncé, whose album “Cowboy Carter” won her a legendary Grammy for Best Country Album in 2025. One of her most popular songs on the album, “TEXAS HOLD ’EM,” has line dance routines with over 500,000 likes on TikTok.  

According to Bolla, Fleurant, and Lico, a common misconception about line dancing is that it’s only about country music. “I would say most of our dances are to Pitbull or rap songs. It’s really not as country as people make it out to be,” Lico said. 

Two club regulars who have been attending since the first meeting — Cayla Le, a first-year fashion design student, and Wendy Wu, a first-year photography student — join the club leaders for Tuesday dancing at Hill Country. The two are now close friends, but started as strangers who first met through the club.

“Tuesdays, I go to the bar with them [the club leaders] … to go line dancing. All my friends [ask], ‘Why are you so excited?’ I’m like, ‘Because I’m going line dancing!’” Wu said, who has attended all but one meeting so far. 

Both Le and Wu first heard about the club from the “Boots Down Ass Up” flyers that were posted around campus in August, during the first couple weeks of the semester. Wu said she had done Chinese traditional dance in the past, but had never line danced before joining.

Le loves all kinds of dancing and also takes classes at the Broadway Dance Center. “I feel like a part of the reason why I got into line dancing was also because of TikTok,” Wu said, citing Sabrina Carpenter’s “Manchild” music video as one of her first impressions of line dancing. 

The Concrete Cowboys has become a coveted New School community for students from all walks of life. Whether it’s Thursday nights in The New School’s secluded Narwhal Fitness Room  or Tuesday nights at Hill Country, line dancing is a social event tasked with bringing students together and relieving them of the stresses of college life. 

Members like Wu and Le have made a habit of bringing friends along. “The friend that I brought today, it’s her first time dancing,” Wu said, “but I was like, you should just come try.”