Danish dancer's lust for life reaches from Moulin Rouge to McAllen

Gretha Sullivan knows how to make an entrance.

Her platinum blond hair hangs close to her waist. She steps through doorways one bare shoulder first, slow and calculated. Each move is glamorous, like a star in a black and white film. She carries a hand bag and a bottle of Fiji water, the rim stained bright red with lipstick.

During a different time, Sullivan made entrances at movie premieres. She strutted across New York City dance floors in the 1950s and the Moulin Rouge in Paris. On this recent day, she makes the entrance in a conference room, backlit by fluorescent lights and the hum of office equipment. She struts through the offices of a non-profit group dedicated to helping at risk students in McAllen.

She takes a seat, setting down the bag and stained bottle, and she begins to describe a life of bright lights, big cities and dance. It’s her life.

“They said I danced before I could walk,” Sullivan says, a vague Danish accent making her words exotic and sharp, “which I don’t believe.”

She does admit that she started dancing young and never stopped. These days, she teaches the art. She works with the non-profit group Communities in Schools.

Communities in Schools came to McAllen in 1989. The Virginia-based outfit describes itself as the largest dropout prevention organization in the country. About 2.3 million students in 27 states participate. In the Rio Grande Valley, Communities in Schools works with hundreds of young people from four school districts.

The group provides students with guidance counseling, health info, and other help. They also encourage the young ones to participate in extra curricular activities such as dance. And that’s why they enlisted Sullivan. About once a month, she visits each school and teaches students dance. She says they’re usually receptive, except for little boys who refuse to touch little girls.

Valerie Rivera has worked as Communities in Schools’ program coordinator for the past seven years, and she says Sullivan is invaluable. The group rarely finds help as experienced as she.

“Gretha’s a special one,” Ramirez says. “We’re not going to let her go.”

Indeed, there are few in the world like Sullivan. She was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, before World War II. She started dancing at 8 years old. She landed her first professional dance gig at 16.

“I was really ugly, I thought,” she says. “Skinny skinny. I looked like I was 12.”

Show producers must have disagreed, because opportunities opened for her everywhere. Within 10 years, that skinny 16-year-old would take the stage at Paris’ world-famous Moulin Rouge cabaret, widely believe to be the birthplace of the can-can dance.

During two years on that stage, which is now immortalized by the 2001 Academy Award-winning film of the same name, she also appeared in French films, including 1954’s French Cancan, which starred Mexico’s María Félix. Sullivan also fell in love with an American soldier in a bistro.

By 1957, she had moved to West 85th Street in Manhattan, and she married Bill Sullivan, the soldier she fell for. She gave birth to a son, and settled into life in the United States. A stack of black and white photos and yellowed press clippings illustrates her story.

So how’d she get here? What brought an international and acclaimed ballet, tap and ballroom dancer to the Mexican Border?

It started at the Moulin Rogue.

“When I walked in, I saw this handsome dude,” she says. “He looked very Mexican, but I didn’t know that. I was Scandinavian.”

Doria Avila was that man, and he was a Valley native. They talked and became friends in France. Later, she moved to New York and taught ballroom dancing at the Fred Astair Dance Studio. He went home and started a dance school in McAllen.

In the 1960s, he invited her to teach with him. Sullivan agreed, and she moved her husband and son to the Valley. She has been here ever since.

She started teaching at Avila’s school and her husband found work as a travel agent. The family later opened the Gretha Sullivan School of Dance at 350 Main St., which is now in the heart of McAllen’s Arts District. She taught there for 22 years, instructing about 400 students.

She closed her school in the late ‘80s and began teaching private lessons. For half the year, Sullivan also teaches ballroom dancing to Winter Texans in Donna’s Victoria Palms RV Park.

Sullivan doesn’t want to stop. She loves meeting new students, and she says dance makes her feel young. It’s a glamorous life.

“It’s good to be a celebrity,” she says. “I’m exaggerating, but a lot of people know me.”

Zack Quaintance covers features and entertainment for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4447.