SPOTLIGHT on - Paul Paradis (C'89)

by Mike and Emily Maixner

Sports?  Oh, yes!  Football.  Baseball.  Golf. Waterskiing.

Dance?  Hardly.

“Dance was not a thought in my head!” Paul Paradis laughs, looking back at his college years.  “I did date a dancer once, but that was as close as I got.” 

Admittedly, Paradis was never far from the arts.  While at Principia College, Paradis played sax in a jazz band that performed in the Pub on weekends.  At one point, he even played during his then-girlfriend’s piece for Dance Production, so he admits he had a taste for performing.  Yet after graduating from Principia in ’89, he moved back to Traverse City, Michigan, in the aftermath of his father’s passing.  Despite his degree in English and his minors in music and business, he began working for his brother, a woodworker who needed the help.  He enjoyed the work (which developed into a passion that he continues today), but he describes his life at the time as “stuck”.

It wasn’t until 10 years later that dance would enter his life.

“I was sitting with a couple friends at a bar, listening to a really good blues band. A girl sitting next to me started telling me about swing dancing, and I thought ‘Oh, you know, I bet this is kind of fun!’”  This chance encounter was all it took, even though Paradis knew literally nothing about it.  “I couldn’t have been greener than I was!” he recollects.

But he started dancing anyway.  “I took a few beginner classes, and then I saw a couple from Detroit who were really awesome and thought ‘Wow! I want to do that.’  After the constant activity of Prin, his life in Michigan felt isolated.  “I was starved, you know?” he laughs.  “Plugging into this dance world helped fill that kind of void.  Everything about it – the music, the dance, the social aspect – made me think, ‘This fits.  This really fits.’”

But the next steps were not quite so easy.

“At the time I thought, ‘This won’t take me that long.’ I had the music background, the athletic background – shoot, I was gonna kill this!  Three years later, I realized, ‘I’m not there, no way!’  It took a lot longer than I thought before I was moving in any kind of a dance-like way.”

Above right, Paradis dancing with Chrissy Calkins Steele in the Principia College Alumni Dance Production 2010

Paradis has a quiet, easygoing vibe, yet he radiates a focused energy.  That focus was critical to developing his skills as a swing dancer, which took him another three years before he reached a level that satisfied him.  He attended a number of international workshops, and as the years passed, he gradually developed into one of the best swing dancers in Northern Michigan – although in his opinion, he was a big fish in a small pond.  The region lacked a strong dance community, and it didn’t take long for him to grow frustrated with the lack of professional instruction that was holding him back.

This frustration inspired in Paradis a “natural desire to share” — to bring even just a little of the joy of swing dancing to unsuspecting Northern Michigan.  He created and hosted swing dancing events, slowly building a community on his own. Unfortunately, however, his limited time and resources prevented it from growing into the exciting, vibrant community he had envisioned.  “I couldn’t do more,” he admits.  “It would have had to have been a full-out job.  I wasn’t trying to make a living or money or anything.  But it was all good experience.” Nevertheless, the community had been born.

In June of 2010, Paradis attended and taught at the Principia College Alumni Dance Retreat and Production, directing a swing number based on a common swing dance called the Shim Sham.  He also continues to dance at occasional adult events at the Leelanau/Kohana camps in northern Michigan.

Above, Paradis dances with girlfriend Liesl Ehmke at a local dance competition, 2011

However, these days Paradis’s priorities have shifted.  “I’m not trying to build the dance community as I was.  For years I was all over the country attending workshops and classes.  But there’s no such thing as certification in the swing world.  You just attend workshops, events and camps and develop on your own.” 

Though he still loves dancing, he now mainly focuses on his business, working with exotic, often massive, slabs of wood (see some examples of his amazing work below!).  He specializes in furniture, occasionally stretching into glass, steel and stone.   He also retains a love of sports.  In fact, the interview for this article took place during his son’s soccer game on a bright Saturday morning.

But we all know the dancing bug never truly lets go.  When asked what he loved about dancing, Paradis spoke like a lifelong dancer.

“When I got to a point that I didn’t have to think about what I’m doing, it became this form of self-expression – very spontaneous, very creative, that nothing else could match.  Dance for me was self-expression at its purist.”

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Paul's "day job" self-owned business, Symmetree Design, takes large pieces of exotic wood and brings out amazing pieces of furniture:

Check out Paul’s woodworking company, Symmetree Design, on Facebook!