Paul Collins laughs acknowledging that newcomers to his folk-dance group, Ethnic Dance Chicago, might be taken aback. “They walk in and find two black guys setting up—some must think they’ve ended up in hip-hop dancing by mistake.” Occasionally his group’s inclusiveness also raises eyebrows: “In my country, women don’t do that dance,” a Bulgarian guest instructor protested one night. But no one here’s going to tell the young woman executing the foot-stomping, scarf-snapping male part in the West African ibo that it’s verboten. “We just say, ‘We dance in a different village,’” Collins says with a shrug and a grin.
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Ethnic Dance Chicago meets every Friday evening in the parish hall at Saint Josaphat’s church in Lincoln Park. Gatherings begin with an hour and a half of beginning- and intermediate-level instruction, during which Collins has been known to drag the diffident out onto the floor. Then from ten to midnight, Collins plays selections from his library of more than 12,000 tracks, filling requests and mixing accessible dances with advanced patterns that, in the words of one regular, “can get pretty heavy.” A typical night’s session might range from the baffling triple time of a Macedonian dance in 7/16 to the familiar two-step of the Charleston; from the trite puti, a Balkan circle dance that accelerates into aerobic exercise, to the courtly shifting quadrilles of a contra dance; from the subtle sway of the Hungarian lassu sergo to a serpentine Israeli dance that could teach an old Deadhead new tricks.
A burgeoning Hyde Park folk-dance circuit allowed Collins to pursue his interest throughout the 60s. At Phillips High School, a teacher nicknamed “the Mad Russian” organized an evening of Russian dance performed by African-American students in a show emceed by Dick Gregory. There was ethnic dancing at the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club and the University of Chicago International House; other groups specialized in German dances, Israeli dances, or English country reels. Says Collins, “You could dance every night of the week.”
—Kate Schmidt
