Dirty dancing

Last fall, as Chicago-area high schools began hosting their usual slate of back-to-school dances, administrators were incensed when scores of students busted out a hyperkinetic, often sexualized Chicago-born dance form known as “juking.” In response, many schools now post NO JUKING signs in their gymnasiums, and some have hired security guards to enforce the policy. Like smoking in bars, juking has essentially been banned.

This is precisely why Maurice “Reese” Fulson is the new Ren McCormack. Like Kevin Bacon’s character in the 1984 film Footloose, Fulson, the leader of the nonprofit Final Phaze juke troupe and dance school, is freeing the feet (not to mention the hips, asses and crotches) of teens, showing them that they should be proud to juke and juke well. Besides booking shows for his dancers at events like the Bud Billiken Parade, every Friday 31-year-old Fulson and his friends host Chi-town’s Weekly Jukathon, in which Final Phaze members and other jukers battle for $100 and a new pair of Air Jordans. It all goes down at Final Phaze dance studios, a small storefront space Fulson found in the Calumet Heights neighborhood on the South Side.

As we learned on a recent Friday night, the juke parties are frenetic, bass-heavy affairs teeming with ecstatic adolescents like 17-year-old Alexandra James, who spent much of the evening in hyperdrive, gesticulating to tracks from revered local DJs such as Slugo and Gant-Man. There’s also a generous helping of juked remixes of radio hits like Soulja Boy’s “Crank That (Soulja Boy).” “[Final Phaze] feels like a second family,” says James, who joined the group when she was 13. “I could be doing a lot of negative things on a Friday night, like getting pregnant like a lot of girls, or getting into gangs and getting killed, like I’ve seen a lot of people do. But instead I’m here dancing and having fun.”

Though Final Phaze’s main objective is to mold kids of all ages and skill levels into swift-footed, nimble footworkin’ (another name for juke) machines by showing them steps like the ballerina spin (which looks like Baryshnikov on meth), move busting isn’t the only item on Fulson’s agenda. Signs outside his studio announcing J.U.K.E.—JESUS UNITING KIDZ EVERYWHERE 4 LIFE betray his organization’s other motive: to shepherd his 70 dancers away from drugs, gangs and crime and toward the Lord. One Sunday a month, Fulson—himself a former gang member and drug dealer who logged prison time—leads the troupe to Bethlehem Star Church to attend mass.

“I grew up gangbanging, slanging drugs,” Fulson says, “and I wish I had had an older person like me to give me guidance. I probably wouldn’t have ended up where I did. You know, it might sound stupid, but it really does take a village to raise a kid.”

Show off your footwork at Chi-town’s Weekly Jukathon 9pm Friday 18 at Final Phaze studio (1702 E 87th St at Langley Ave, 773-749-7140). The cost is $8.