By Cynthia Robertson
SDUN Reporter
Every Friday evening at Eveoke Dance Theatre in North Park, 20-70 people come together to jive to the strains of whatever the DJ is playing. The fun starts at 9 p.m., lasting until midnight.
Todd Zipp, one of the regular DJs who has played there off and on for 10 years, explained that the music’s genre cannot be pinned down.
“It’s movement music,” he said.
Zipp spins everything from Techno and Celtic to World Beat and New Age. The dancers move around on the hardwood floor, sometimes coming together and moving with the other dancers in their reveries.
“You can’t really label a DanceJammer, either,” said Mel Lions, who facilitates the Friday evening dances.
“Everyone from artists to CEOs feels comfortable here,” Zipp said.
“DanceJam really runs itself,” Lions said. “We don’t have to tell people how to dance.”
What exactly is DanceJam?
“It’s a byproduct of the post-modern dance movement since the 1960s,” participant Cara Cadwallader said. “I like to call myself an improvisational dance artist.”
South Park resident Suzanne Simmons said she de-stresses from her job when she cavorts around on the wooden floor.
“I put everything into it when I dance. It’s like letting go of everything,” she said.
Simmons studied Ecstatic Dance and Belly Dance Meditation in Massachusetts before moving to San Diego.
“It took me two years to get to DanceJam,” she said with a laugh. “I’d drive every day by the studio and kept saying I ought to try it. Now [I’m] a regular.”
Another east coast transplant, Andrea Sperling, moved to University Heights from New York five years ago, discovering DanceJam two years later.
“I had danced in an improvisational dance community in New York, so when I came out here I looked for the same thing,” Sperling said. “It’s not like a club where you have to look cool. There’s no style you have to follow, and there’s no drinking or smoking.”
Lions had been reluctant to try it at first. “I’d never been a dancer in my life, and I was afraid to let go,” he said.
On his 44th birthday, he wanted to try something new. At DanceJam, he found people who didn’t care how he looked when he danced.
“And I discovered how great it was to move my body,” he said. “Plus, I had come into an entire community of people—everybody from businessmen and lawyers to hippies and children, and people in wheelchairs.”
Judith Greer Essex is considered the mother of DanceJam—she hosted the dances during their early years in the El Cortez Hotel ballroom. In the ’90s, dancers grooved at the Center for the Moving Arts on Fifth Avenue.
Yet DanceJamming had its origins outside San Diego. The first free-form jam occurred in the basement of a Cambridge, Mass., church during the summers of 1967 and 1968, with the wild drum music and dancing attracting multitudes. The drummers and dancers connected with Father Kenny of Christ’s Church on Garden Street, agreeing on a Wednesday night gathering where the dancers could move in free-formed creative movement, which the dancers dubbed “Dance Free.”
By 1978, the 10th anniversary of the free-form DanceJams, the movement had spread across the country from New York City to San Francisco and even Honolulu.
In San Diego, free-form dancing finally took hold, and is still holding strong.
“It’s like a rave party for adults without any of the bad stuff,” Simmons said.
Don’t have dance shoes? No problem. Bare feet and a free spirit are all that are needed. Cost is $5 for dancing on Friday nights before 9:30, and $7 after, at Eveoke Dance Theatre, 2811 University Ave. For more information, go to movingarts.net.
