In the alley next to the Edgewater branch of the Chicago Public Library is a red door that opens onto a small enclosed garden, where another red door and a flight of creaky stairs lead to a tai chi school. On Fridays and Sundays it’s also a flamenco dance school, with classes taught by 76-year-old Edo Sie, a wisp of a man who’s almost always dressed head to toe in black when he teaches. One Sunday not long ago four students, who ranged from beginner to advanced, watched as Sie demonstrated a move, spinning twice clockwise, then abruptly reversing direction and spinning counterclockwise. The students tried it, but they were all at least a little clumsy. “The change must be–a blind man must be able to see it,” Sie said gently. “We must meditate on the duende within us.” Duende, he explains, “is a spirit, a devil, a force that enters from above. You must depart to let the duende in.”
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Sie–who also dances with, coaches, and choreographs for the Ensemble Espanol Spanish Dance Theater, a company in residence at Northeastern Illinois University–has been dancing most of his life. He was born in Java in 1929, and when he was nine his Chinese father and Dutch mother had him take lessons in modern and Balinese dancing. The teachers were strict. Right after he started, his modern-dance teacher put him through an hour and a half of what she called arm dancing. “I thought my arms were falling off my body,” he says. The teacher asked if something was wrong. He said his arms hurt. “She looked at me and she said, ‘You forget that you have arms, and you do it.’” Obediently, he raised his arms again, and he says they began to sway as if independent of his will. “I’ll never forget the force. Only afterwards I understood that’s what they say–‘When the duende enters you must be out.’”
Sie never went back to Java. He began taking private lessons in Spanish dance with Antonio Marin, who’d lost a leg in an accident at the start of a promising career. Sie saw parallels between flamenco and Balinese dance. “In Balinese dancing the musician follows the dancer,” he says. “In flamenco it’s the same. In Balinese dancing, before the dancer dances there are ceremonies, rites. They burn incense, they fall into a trance. When the duende comes into the dancer it is similar.”
Asked if he ever considers retirement, Sie laughed. “That is a word that doesn’t enter my vocabulary,” he said. “We leave this world dancing and we continue in the next one. I know who I will dance with in the next one.” He laughed again. “The devil, of course.”
