Jordan Elrod

Jordan Elrod has been dancing since a young age, instructing for the past 25 years, and was the director at St. Mark Greek Orthodox Church in Boca Raton, Florida for ten of those years.  He has taught and participated in many workshops across the United States and Greece, as well as organized workshops in South Florida including The Winter Dance Conference in 2005 which had over 250 dancers attend seminars taught by instructors brought in from across Greece.  He was on the executive board for the Metropolis of Atlanta’s Hellenic Dance Festival and has taught workshops across Florida and the U.S. (Chicago, New York, California, Georgia, and the Carolinas among others), as well as performed with, and played music for multiple award winning groups at the Metropolis of Atlanta’s “Hellenic Dance Festival”, the Metropolis of San Francisco’s “Folk Dance Festival”, and “America’s Greek Dance Competition” out of Chicago, where he also served on the board.

While Jordan enjoys all aspects of Greek dancing, he has focused most of his time researching and studying dances from the Dodecanese and Crete while attending college at the University of the Aegean in Rhodes through a scholarship earned from the “Hellenic Society Paidea” through the University of Connecticut.  While attending school in Greece, he spent much of his time meeting local musicians and researching the music and dance traditions of the different islands and villages they contain.  He spent most of his energy researching the island of Rhodes, as well as the island of Kos in the Dodecanese, but traveled, learned, and danced throughout the Greek Islands during his time spent there.  While many of the traditions and variations of dances and music across this stretch of islands are being “homogenized” in a sense, it has been Jordan’s effort to try to find and record the differences, not only from island to island, but from village to village.  Such extensive efforts are the main reason that he feels he has only truly “researched” a few islands of the Dodecanese. 

In addition to his time spent in Rhodes, Jordan knew and met many Cretan dancers, musicians, and instructors while he spent nearly six months living in the Western part of the island.  Jordan has also participated in many workshops on men’s styling of Western Crete alongside Dr. Mary Coros.

Jordan still travels to Greece annually to visit his wife’s family in the northern Greece province of Serres where he continues his passion for Greek dancing and studies in the many villages that Serres has to offer.  He says he has come to the realization that he could spend a lifetime researching Serres alone, and still only “scratch the surface”.

Jordan has received an A.S. degree in Emergency Medical Services, as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration.  He currently lives in Boca Raton, Florida where he works for the Broward Sheriff’s Office Division of Fire Rescue and Emergency Services as a firefighter and a paramedic, as well as serving on the regional Technical Rescue Team and on FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue Task Force II.