Night at the Dance: An Evening at One of the Few Remaining Dance Halls in Texas

There were once over 1,000 dance halls in small Texas towns, from Temple to Anhalt. Today, less than half of them are still open. An epicenter of social life for previous generations of locals, the halls are now largely frequented by elderly dancers who come to polka. In Night at the Dance, filmmaker Annie Silverstein, then a student in the Department of Radio Television Film at the Moody College of Communication at UT Austin, chronicled the scene and the dancers at Sefcik Dance Hall in Seaton.