“Left stomp, right stomp, grapevine, turn!” Izabella Smolnicka-Dos Santos ’26 called out, microphone in hand. “Keep going!”

Dozens of students followed her lead as they practiced each dance step across the Old Union patio, standing alongside each other in rows. When Smolnicka-Dos Santos played “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” by Shaboozey over a speaker, the dancers set their moves to music, stomping their feet and swiveling in the air.

Held on Wednesday night, the dancing marked this year’s final installment of a new and widely beloved campus event: line dancing workshops hosted every other week by the Stanford Rural Engagement Network, or Rural Club, in partnership with On Call Café.

“It brings people from all corners of campus,” said Georgia Walker-Keleher ’26, a member of On Call’s team and Rural Club who grew up in Missoula, Montana and helped launch the workshops this winter.

The inspiration to bring line dancing to Stanford came when Walker-Keleher and Smolnicka-Dos Santos crossed paths at Westwood, a country music bar in San Francisco. “She was killing it on the dance floor,” Walker-Keleher recalled.

The following winter, after Smolnicka-Dos Santos returned from studying abroad, the pair worked with Rural Club to bring their idea to life. Since then, Smolnicka-Dos Santos has led the dancing at On Call for every workshop, drawing on choreography she learned at a concert hall in her hometown of Fort Myers, Florida.

“I never thought that I would be doing something like this,” she said. “I love teaching people, in whatever way it is, and it just so happens to be line dancing now.”

Since the first event, “People have gotten better,” Walker-Keleher joked. “There are much fewer collisions than there were.”

The event not only brings people together but aims to “elevate rural experiences, especially for non-rural students,” said Isaac Nehring ’26, co-president of Rural Club and a line dancing organizer from Helena, Montana.

An overarching goal, Nehring added, is to give community members “a taste of rural life, and maybe just get the word rural in their heads.” He hopes that students who enjoy the workshops will take an interest in Rural Club and “learn more about substantive issues impacting rural communities,” such as water policy, agriculture and misunderstandings across the urban-rural divide.

As the night continued, a growing number of students joined the dance floor under the patio’s string lights. Friends laughed together as they worked to commit the newest moves to muscle memory.

“Step, clap!” Smolnicka-Dos Santos called out while teaching the dance to “Watermelon Crawl” by Tracy Byrd. “It’ll get better, don’t worry.”

Smolnicka-Dos Santos aims to represent a wide range of difficulty levels and musical genres in the songs she selects, encompassing country, rap and pop. Earlier in the night, she played “Hillbilly Hippie” by Lainey Wilson. “There’s a line dance for everything,” she said.

For Walker-Keleher, the open spirit of the event also served to complicate “one-dimensional” images of rural America and country music as “white people in cowboy hats.” Line dancing, she noted, is a long-held tradition among many Black communities.

Echoing her perspective, Nehring said that uniting many people from across campus around dancing could “combat this idea that rural [culture] is monolithic, conservative, uninclusive.”

In between songs, dancers made their way to a mobile stand where Zarrin Askari ’26 served free cups of tart, chocolate and apple-pie flavored frozen yogurt. Askari was there representing Froyo-Cycle, a student-run frozen yogurt shop she co-founded with Smolnicka-Dos Santos. The shop, which uses leftover ingredients from campus events, was making its line-dancing debut.

Katherine Rodriguez ’27, a current officer for Rural Club from Klamath Falls, Oregon, told The Daily that the club plans to continue the tradition next year.

Arin Iverson ’27, who grew up in Walla Walla, Washington and will serve as Rural Club’s outreach director next year, said it was “nice to see more people getting excited about something that I personally associate with rural culture. People are not always super excited about farming.”