It’s a dry, hot Thursday evening, and the man his dance students alternately call “Sugar” and “the guru” pauses to call to a curious passerby, “come dance!” Students who have attended the weekly free classes in Washington Park are accustomed to this — Schukr “Sugar” Basanow wants everyone to delight in dance.
“People are happy when they dance,” he says. “I always say it’s $10 to watch, but dancing is for free.”
Basanow has been teaching free folk dancing classes every Thursday from 7-10 p.m. adjacent to the Boathouse Pavilion in Washington Park since 1971. He’s 82.
The self-taught dancer was born in 1933 in former Yugoslavia, a member of the Mongolian Kalmyk tribe (he says he’s a direct descendant of Ghengis Khan). Basanow hasn’t exactly had an easy life, but standing next to him — despite using a cane to ease the ache of bursitis in his knee, he has an energetic spirit and contagious giggle — it’s hard to imagine it. Basanow, who stands five-foot-five and now primarily leads classes sitting down, due to his knee, was born into a poor family, and spent a year in the hospital as a baby. He began dancing when he was 4. He lost his father when he was 5.
The Basanows bounced from slave labor camp in the early ‘40s in Hungary to various displaced persons camps (seven total, he says) from 1945-1951 throughout Germany. He landed at Ellis Island in 1951.
He didn’t speak English, didn’t attend school after being in the camps and permanently lost his sense of taste and smell due to near starvation. In 1952, Sugar landed at Fellowship House, an interracial and inter-religious community center in Philadelphia, where friend Dick Barnes asked him to perform in a theater production of “Unborn Child.” He began teaching folk dancing at Fellowship House and other places in Philadelphia, where he met his wife, Bettina Basanow, who convinced him to move to Denver.
“One reason I wanted to marry Sugar was that I was guaranteed to have a partner that liked to dance,” she jokes.
Just three days after moving to Denver, Basanow began teaching folk dancing classes for free (donations are accepted) and has continued to do so every Thursday evening in Wash Park from May through September — thanks to his old friend Barnes, who became the Executive Director of the Washington Park Community Center.
Ever since, Thursdays have been Sugar’s day. In 1991, for the 20th anniversary of dance classes, there was a 500-person celebration in the park with a tree dedicated to Basanow (now affectionately called “Sugar’s Tree”). There, Mayor Federico Peña announced that Basanow would be allowed dancing in the park for life. “As long as I was alive, Parks and Rec gave me permission to stay and teach,” he says. A plaque on the wall of his Montbello home from the Denver Department of Parks and Recreation (from September 1995) reads: “In honor and thanks for 25 summers of fun and dedication in teaching folk dancing in Washington Park to the citizens of Denver.”
Now, with his knee, he isn’t able to stand or dance as much, but he still leads the class sitting down, and has other seasoned students help.
“When I came to America, I remember when I started teaching, people said, ‘why don’t you charge? You can make money,’ ” says Basanow, who worked on an assembly line for 23 years. “ ‘Why charge?’ I tell them. I like to teach for free. I don’t want money. I want to teach people that there is more to life than hamburgers and hot dogs. There’s China, Japan, and Russia and other countries. I’m teaching them to love life, learn about other countries, be nice to people and be compassionate through dancing.”
For the lessons, Basanow used to play old records and tapes spanning folk dance from Russia, Germany, Africa, Greece, Romania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Now, he has help with equipment and set-up from various students, as well as his daughter, Nora Nye, who he hopes will continue the legacy in Wash Park.
“We have built up a core group of about 40 dancers and more join every year,” she says. “Everyone loves to dance under the stars. Plus, my life was directly influenced by it — including meeting my husband, Dean Nye, there when I was 3 and he was 5. We started dating when I was 23 and he was 25, and now we have been together for 25 years and still go to folk dancing every single Thursday in the summer. I can’t imagine my life without it, and I know my dad really wants us to continue after he is gone.”
Basanow breaks the ice by asking everyone to hold hands in a circle.
“I always say, if you can walk, you can dance,” he says. “And, after 46 years, I’m still talking to my students, and people walking by, and telling them that people are equal and the same, and that prejudice is in here,” he says, pointing to his head, “but not in your feet.”
