Stanford University has been a driving force for technology companies starting in 1939 when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard founded Hewlett-Packard, and its graduates have created many giant companies in electronics, software, and other fields. But Stanford is also on the cutting edge of couples dancing, perhaps most notably through the vision and energy of Richard Powers. One of the innovative groups that has sprung from this supportive environment is Decadance (a subtle pun on “decadence”), which bills itself as “a social dance performance group that strives to make traditional couple-dancing less traditional”. This team is unlike many of the other teams you can see on TV or YouTube, whose choreography is either secondary to their crazy costumes or outrageous-but-baseless dance steps, because they craft their performances from time-tested dances like waltz, swing, tango, and cha cha. Wilddancer attended their Spring Show 2013: “how I met your mother” tonight. It was terrific! The members of the group had created all of the 15 professional-grade routines (though some of them came from previous performances); such good choreography takes a lot of skill and a lot of time. And the quality of the dancing matched the quality of the choreography. (We could parse many of the figures using our own social dance training, and they were often advanced ones.) You wonder how they can do it AND keep up their studies at a demanding university like Stanford.