Chicago SummerDance ran from July 15 to August 29, with the historic Spirit of Music Garden at 601 South Michigan hosting Thursdays through Saturdays from August 13 to 29, six to nine in the evening. Earlier dates ran in neighbourhood parks including Riis and Harrison. More than thirty dance styles across the season. A live band each night, a free lesson before the dancing, and no admission of any kind.
If you have never been, the format is worth describing properly, because it is unusual to the point of being strange. You turn up at an open-air floor in a downtown park. Someone teaches you the dance for about an hour — actually teaches you, badly and patiently, in a crowd of people who are equally bad at it. Then a band plays and you do it. That is the entire thing, and it has been running for years.
Thirty Styles Is a Portrait of Who Lives Here
The number is the part that repays attention. More than thirty dance styles in one season is not programming variety for its own sake. It is a fairly precise census of who is actually in this city, because each style arrived with a community and stayed because that community is still here to dance it.
You cannot book a season like that out of a catalogue. It requires knowing which neighbourhoods will send people, which bands can carry a floor of beginners, and which traditions have enough living practitioners in Chicago to teach them. The programme is a municipal document about the city’s population, delivered as a series of Thursday evenings.
The Regulars Are the Institution
The other thing nobody covers is the people who have been on that floor for twenty years. Every SummerDance night has a core of dancers who know the steps, who arrive early, and who — and this is the part that matters — spend the lesson hour quietly helping strangers who have never done it.
That is a volunteer teaching corps the city never recruited and does not pay. It is also the mechanism that makes the whole thing work, because an open-air lesson for two hundred people cannot function on one instructor with a microphone. The regulars carry it.
Set that against the rest of this summer’s calendar. ARC charged up to $549 for four days in a park. Lollapalooza put 170 artists behind a $329 wristband and left Grant Park in mud. SummerDance used a corner of the same parkland to teach people to dance, for free, and handed the floor back intact every night.
The city’s page carries the format, the Park District lists the neighbourhood dates, and Choose Chicago has the best imagery of it.
Grant Park gets rented to promoters for most of the summer and torn up for the trouble. For six weeks it also had a wooden floor on it where anybody could turn up at six and be taught something by a stranger. Chicago does not shout about that one, which is a shame, because it is the best thing on the list.
Cover image: Courtesy Choose Chicago