East Hartford, Conn. ? Judge Herbert Barall is bent over doing “monkey knees” as he calls out encouragement to his young students, “That’s it! That’s it!”

The group of mostly 9- and 10-year-olds at Silver Lane School in East Hartford delightedly cup their knees and move them back and forth. “It’s butterfly knees,” one calls out — a hip-hop move that is similar to the 1920s Charleston dance move.

So what’s a retired Hartford Superior Court judge — now a judge trial referee — doing here? It may seem like a long leap from the bench to the dance floor, but it doesn’t seem that way to Barall.

A pas de deux of law and dance has always shaped his life.

He and his wife, Regina, met at an open-air dance at Colt Park in Hartford. It was the 1940s, and their dances were swing and the fox trot.

The couple soon married and sought out dance lessons when they could. Once, when Barall was a law student at Harvard University, they were paid $35 — equal to a whole week’s pay for his wife, who is known to most as Reggie, a secretary at the time — to showcase the mambo at a dance and dinner club.

When their children came along, they danced less. But 25 years ago, they began entering ballroom dancing competitions and walking away winners. Dancing lifted their spirits during troubled times and helped keep them fit. Reggie attributes her 72-year-old husband’s health — after a quadruple bypass — to all his dancing.

Several years ago, Reggie had the idea of transforming an old storeroom space at the East Hartford Community Cultural Center into a community dance and art studio. “The Circle of Life” opened three years ago, offering low-cost dance lessons to people of all ages, and also offering free dance lessons in various schools. They have taught high school students and sixth-graders and this fall, for the first time, are teaching younger children. The lessons at Silver Lane School are sponsored by Silver Lane’s Educational Resource Center.

Reggie didn’t have to do much convincing to get her husband to come along to the schools and volunteer his help.

For decades, Barall’s encounters with children and young people had often been in the courtroom. There, he sentenced them to jail or sent them off to detention centers or settled custody disputes.

He hated to see kids come back time and again, in some cases mere youngsters committing serious crimes. He took child-development courses to try to understand and to help.

One thing he knew was that if kids had other interests, healthy interests in the arts and sports, it helped to keep them out of trouble.

So these days on Monday afternoons, you’ll find Barall, Reggie and another teacher, Kathy LaBella, passing on their love of dancing to East Hartford kids.

After the Charleston, Barall leads them in one of his favorites: the meringue. “I want you to pick a partner,” he tells the kids. A few groans are heard, and Barall assures them, “We can switch partners later.”

He has a new step for them. A walk-around turn, not unlike the kind of spin a partner might do in a waltz.

“Now hold your hands loosely,” Barall instructs, demonstrating with Reggie, showing how first one partner can spin, then the other, and then both at the same time.

“Oh, that’s cool,” says Idalis Arroyo, a fourth-grader.

The kids try it, and soon, Donna Brown, a fifth-grader, is balancing on one leg as she spins. It’s a hip-hop move called “the tootsie roll.”

“That’s fine; you can put that in there,” says Barall, who encourages them to add their own flourishes to the dances.

He likes the idea of broadening their experience of dance beyond the hip-hop they often see on television.

He also sees dance as a means of building self-esteem, helping kids stay in shape, and teaching them about manners.

“How you treat people on the dance floor is how you should treat them in life,” he says.

Learning steps and putting them together in patterns, he believes, also helps to stimulate the brain in a way that probably enhances the rest of a child’s learning.

The kids may not be so aware of all that dance might potentially do for them, but it’s clear they do think of it as fun.

“I like dancing; it keeps us motivated,” Donna Brown says later. “It keeps us from hanging out in the street. … It’s interesting because I never really dance that much like that.”