Summer Dance ends this year's program with a big swing in Grant Park

Last dance

09/01/2010 10:00 PM

By GREG SKINNER
Editor

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Leonard Ratcliff leads Kat Hayven though the International Fox Trot and down the sidewalk near the Spirit of Music Garden, as scores of dancers in the background learn the East Coast Swing, Sunday evening during the last night of Summer Dance in Grant Park.
Photos by GREG SKINNER/Staff






Looking the part, Robert Amaya and Valentina Norcross swing across the 4,600-square-foot dance floor in the Spirit of Music Garden Sunday during the final night of Summer Dance in Grant Park.






The dance day started Sunday in Grant Park with a couple of hundred people working out the steps for East Coast Swing as instructors from the Fred Astaire Dance Studio demonstrated from the stage.

“Three step, three step, rock step, then left hand up and spin,” was the mantra Astaire instructor Caleb Aleman repeated into his microphone, again and again.

By the time the live band started playing for hundreds of public dance students, most had the essential moves under control and were well into the swing of things

“It seems like they have experience,” said Aleman as he watched a sea of pupils rock and spin partners during a free dance time following the hour-long instruction that precedes every session of the 11-week Chicago Summer Dance program, which concluded its 14th season in Grant Park’s Spirit of Music Garden on Sunday

Learning to dance East Coast Swing in a crowd during a single afternoon among hundreds of others seemed like a light-hearted affair to many, who later danced from partner to partner across the 4,600-square-foot outdoor dance floor, while the Sam Burckhardt Nonet played a range of swing tunes. A crowd of dancers representing every pattern and stripe consumed Chicago’s dance floor with just-learned steps and spins.

Chicagoan Andrew Gilmore caught the year’s last night of Summer Dance as his first of session this season. A new baby kept Gilmore and his wife from the 38 previous dancing nights in the garden this summer. Sunday was daughter Gillian’s introduction the public dance in the music garden. Father and daughter spun, whirled and hopped through a unique version of swing dancing, not at all like the instructors leading other dancers along in a more organized fashion.

“It was the last chance,” Gilmore said. “It is the end of summer.”

Learning swing dancing in a mass of others is not all that hard, according to Aleman. The real key to it is having the right music to dance to, he said.

Over the course of the summer, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs dance program hosted 39 bands for live music and dancing four nights a week, starting June 17. Dances ranged from tangos and milongas to Chicago steppin’ and klezmer dancing. Instructors from all quarters led sessions from the stage.

After dancing “as many weeks as possible” throughout the summer, Chicagoan Valentina Norcross said that the last dance is possibly the most important one of the summer. She and dance partner Robert Amaya showed up in 1950s fashion for the last swing of the summer.

Taking a break among the gathered wall flowers watching the busy dance floor, Valentina said, “That last dance has to last.”

Contact: gskinner@chicagojournal.com




















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