There is an arm wrapped around my neck which threatens to snap it in half if I make a wrong move, my torso is impossibly contorted and I can't even begin to think what my feet are doing.
"Step it out," urges Joe Howell as I squeal helplessly. I would glare at him balefully except that he appears to have me in some kind of headlock which makes eye contact impossible. No one warned me self-defence skills would come in useful when I signed up for ballroom dancing lessons. But, I gingerly put one kitten heel back and miraculously hurtle out of our stalemate, spinning like a top as I am flung energetically around the dancefloor. Howell says we are swinging so I will have to take his word for it, although I suspect I am being swung rather more than playing any kind of active role.
It is not a promising start at the newly opened Arthur Murray dance studio in Dubai, but I have high hopes. After all, the school, which originated in the US, promises to teach three dances to novices in just 20 minutes and turned the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, the Duke of Windsor, John Rockefeller Junior and Elizabeth Arden into svelte creatures who glided around the dancefloor with ease. Arthur Murray dance schools have been an American institution for nearly 100 years with the motto: "If you can walk, we teach you how to dance." Teachers guarantee they can coach pupils to become completely proficient on the dancefloor within 10 lessons.
Murray himself started teaching dances such as the foxtrot and waltz in 1912, so his particular method has taken considerable time to come to the UAE. But teachers at the new school in Jumeirah Lake Towers are no less confident they can get even the most left-footed people moving in time to the beat. Just over the threshold of the studio in Reef Tower, a doormat proclaims I will be "walking in, dancing out". There is a brochure with a rather orange-looking man on the cover in high-waisted, pleated trousers and impossibly white teeth, dancing with a woman with the same radioactive glow. "What a feeling!" shouts the slogan above their heads.
Inside the pamphlet there are more tangerine folk having what appears to be the time of their lives, dancing the conga and laughing with their pearly-whites on display under the words: "Stepping out! Having fun!" Howell, thankfully, looks considerably more normal than the people in the flyer, although one might wonder what inspired a 28-year-old from Illinois to embark on a career as a dance instructor six years ago.
"I was watching the film Dirty Dancing with my girlfriend at the time and there is a line where Patrick Swayze tells Baby he trained at Arthur Murray, so I was curious to find out more," he says. Presumably his girlfriend either swooned at the thought of having her very own Johnny or wished he would do something manly like reaching for a power drill and putting up shelves instead. He is not the only one fascinated with the Murray phenomenon. About 40 million people have passed through the doors of studios around the world to learn dances ranging from traditional ballroom to Latin, tango and even "nightclub" for real wallflowers who are awkward in social situations.
So legendary is the founder of the company, he has earned numerous mentions in film and television. Johnny Mercer and Victor Schertzinger wrote the 1942 song Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing In A Hurry, Fred Astaire credited his dancing to Murray in the 1943 film The Sky's The Limit, Jack Lemmon introduces himself in the 1960 film The Apartment as "junior executive, Arthur Murray graduate, lover" and in The American President in 1995, Michael Douglas woos Annette Bening by slow dancing and telling her: "It's Arthur Murray. Six lessons."
Murray was born in Austria-Hungary in 1895 and taken to New York by his parents as a toddler. An awkward, shy teenager around the fairer sex, he discovered dancing was an ideal ice-breaker and became something of an expert, attending numerous weddings in his neighbourhood to practise. At 17, he began teaching by night while working as a draughtsman by day. By the 1920s, he was teaching ballroom dancing full-time and came up with the brilliant notion of a mail-order business offering numbered footprint diagrams, which had to be laid on the floor to show the student where to place their feet for each type of dance.
Within a couple of years, he had sold more than 500,000 footprint packages. "Don't be a wallflower!" exclaimed a 1922 advertisement. The mail-order instructions eventually waned in popularity but his third and most successful enterprise, launched in 1925, involved selling branded lessons through franchises. At the height of his success in the 1970s, there were more than 3,500 Arthur Murray studios. Murray died in 1991 but there are nearly 300 schools still operating under his name.
Thanks to TV shows such as Dancing With The Stars and So You Think You Can Dance in the US and Strictly Come Dancing in the UK, taking a twirl has become cool once again. Safwat Gerges, 56, an Egyptian former child ballet star, opened the Dubai school in February this year after stumbling across the institution while looking for fame and fortune in New York in the 1970s. He runs seven other franchises in the US, Beirut and Cairo.
"Ballroom dancing has become a household word," he declares. "It is a stress reliever, one of the best forms of exercise as all the muscles are working and it helps you become more graceful and confident." While it is popular with couples wanting to practise for a first dance at their weddings, about 40 per cent of members in Dubai are single, range in age from 18 to 60 and come from a variety of backgrounds, from Emiratis to Australians, Iranians and Lebanese.
The Arthur Murray method is based on a combination of individual tuition, group classes and "supervised practice parties", which sound like a grown-up incarnation of the dreaded school disco. But Gerges says the practice parties give students a chance to apply their knowledge in a fun setting. "If they only had private tuition, they would never be as good. We introduce dancing in a format that is similar to walking in simple combinations, such as walking to the side and taking two steps back.
"We find the barrier to learning is psychological more than anything. Dance is simply steps to music and absolutely anyone can learn to dance." Gerges says practice creates a "muscle memory" where your limbs automatically remember combinations of movements. However, I'm not convinced 20 minutes will be enough to imprint any memory on my ungainly frame. Sophie Touchette, a coltish 18-year-old French-Canadian, says: "It allows me to be more confident and meet new people, plus it is very elegant."
As she has legs up to her eyebrows, I'm not taking her word for it. I go in search of other novices and come across Rami Sanad, 30, an account manager from Egypt, who is staring studiously at his feet while counting steps. "My wife and I missed our chance for a first dance at our wedding as we did not have time to practise, but we are making up for it now. It is a lot of fun - I'm over the stage of treading on her feet."
It is my turn and as we take to the dancefloor, Howell tells me we are going to take two steps back and one to the side. "The same box step is used in a number of dances, from rumba and salsa to the waltz and foxtrot," he tells me. He bombards me with questions as he steers me around the floor to distract me from counting steps, telling me my feet will simply know what to do. When we manage a song without me stumbling over my own toes or missing a beat, he tells me we have been waltzing.
"But we were just walking," I protest. Howell wiggles his eyebrows at me. "Exactly," he says. A package of three 45-minute lessons (one private, one group and one practice party) costs Dh367. For a free introductory lesson, see www.arthurmurraydubai.com or call 04 448 6458.