All that's Jazz - the art of jazz dance

Dance Magazine, August, 1999 by Bob Boross

Jazz dance can express the pulse of society while expressing the longings of an individual. It has undergone myriad changes throughout its short existence, evolving a variety of techniques to express many moods in a wide range of styles. Here are a few of the innovators who have developed jazz dance.

"Jazz is a feeling," Nat Horne, veteran of sixteen Broadway shows. "Jazz" says teacher Matt Mattox, "is a skillful combination of both rhythm and design." Jazz dance, according to choreographer Danny Buraczeski [see page 45], is a melting pot of countless styles and influences.

Like a child of mixed heritage, today's jazz dance retains aspects of its multiple roots. But despite its dual parentage in African and European traditions, jazz dance is strictly an American creation--a twentieth-century invention that personifies the social, technological, and visual history of popular American culture.

Jazz dance and music originated jointly, at the beginning of the century, in a lower-class neighborhood in New Orleans called District Storyville. Their heightened rhythmic qualities charmed the American public and by the 1920s, aided by mass migration of Southern blacks to Northern cities and mass media inventions such as the radio and phonograph, jazz reigned supreme in America and Europe. The rhythmic punch of jazz music and dance provided the perfect accompaniment to the accelerating pace of the Roaring Twenties.

At that time jazz dance was performed by individuals at dance halls, at rent parties during the Depression, and on Broadway and vaudeville stages by dance "acts," who recreated social jazz dancing into formalized routines. Many reviewers criticized jazz for not having artistic dance value, while others, such as early jazz dance writer Mura Dehn, saw it as both high art and folk art. She believed the golden age of jazz dance was from the 1920s to the 1940s. Dehn proposed that the movement of jazz dance was improvisational and was an individual's reaction to the rhythmic feeling inherent in the interplay of jazz music's steady and syncopated beats.

In the 1940s, when American society was transformed by World War II, jazz music evolved into a more complicated form known as bebop. On Broadway, jazz dance that was derived from social styles vanished with the emerging popularity of ballet and modern dance. Dance no longer was seen as spectacle, but rather as a vehicle for advancing the plot.

From 1936 through the 1960s, choreographers from the ballet and modern dance worlds--George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Jack Cole, Hanya Holm, Helen Tamiris, Michael Kidd, Jerome Robbins, and Bob Fosse--created a very demanding offshoot of jazz dance that surpassed the technical skills of the chorine or dance act and required instead a trained dancer. In this form (loosely termed modern jazz, theatrical jazz, and sometimes "freestyle"), the dancer was more imitative than individual. The ability to execute movements set by the choreographer was more important than the dancer's skill at improvisation.

At the same time, concert choreographers Alvin Ailey, Katherine Dunham, and Daniel Nagrin were setting pieces inspired by jazz but still dependent on ballet and modern dance techniques. Since the application of jazz dance had veered from improvisation to imitation, there was a demand for a dancer who could quickly digest this hybrid of jazz and concert. A variety of techniques designed to train the new dancer materialized to meet this demand. Modern jazz dance was "in," hitting every studio like wildfire in the middle 1950s. Like a fledgling chick whose wings had not fully sprouted, the modern-jazz class was a hodgepodge of influences--ballet, jazz, jazzy jazz, or just about any style of ethnic dance done to jazz music.

TEACHERS AND CHOREOGRAPHERS

Teacher and choreographer Ruth Walton, who identified more with the concert stage than with Broadway, was a modern jazz dance innovator. She taught a technique class in the early 1950s that consisted of floor movements, a barre of stretching and limbering exercises, center floor exercises, across-the-floor locomotor movements, and jazz footwork. Her class culminated with two short dance phrases composed by the teacher and two student improvisations.

Jack Cole was a film and Broadway choreographer working in this new jazz form. After being trained at Denishawn in the 1930s, Cole struck out on his own, adding classes in East Indian and other ethnic dance forms while jiving with Lindy dancers at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. From 1944 to 1948, as a choreographer at Columbia Pictures in Hollywood, Cole was permitted to train a group of dancers under contract for studio film assignments. Some of those dancers in his daily classes were Gwen Verdon, Carol Haney, George and Ethel Martin, and Bob Alexander. It was, in effect, a Jack Cole dance company, with technical training that included classes in Cecchetti ballet; Humphrey-Weidman modern dance; gymnastics; and East Indian, Cuban, and flamenco ethnic forms. Although there has never been a codification of this technique, his extraordinary standard became synonymous with the highest level of modern jazz dance training.