All that's Jazz - the art of jazz dance

Dance Magazine, August, 1999 by Bob Boross

In 1954 Bob Fosse burst onto the Broadway scene with his show-stopping "Steam Heat" in The Pajama Game. It generated a demand for classes in a Broadway style of modern jazz dance. Peter Gennaro, a dancer in "Steam Heat," gave classes that began with a ballet barre and progressed to across-the-floor combinations and a jazzy center combination that emphasized his unique fast footwork.

Teacher Frank Wagner added precision and isolation to his jazz classes. Jon Gregory taught without a set format, preferring free-form general warm-up exercises that led to a wild jazzy combination. Although popular, these classes also did not result in a codified jazz technique and therefore are no longer practiced.

New York City was not the sole mecca for jazz dancing. Hollywood provided work for many dancers in the film industry. Eugene Facciuto, now known the world over as "Luigi," was a youthful tap dancer, acrobat, and singer who moved to Hollywood in the mid-1940s. There, he studied with renowned ballet teachers--Adolph Bolm, Bronislava Nijinska, Eugene Loring, and Edward Caton--but in 1946 he suffered a near-fatal car accident that resulted in paralysis. His rehabilitation consisted of ballet exercises executed with particular attention to body placement and positioning. Classes with "Miss Edith Jane" returned him to health and a career in films performing with Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor. Dancers on the movie lot would do his class as a warm-up. By 1951 Luigi was giving classes in his movement technique in Hollywood. Then, in 1956, he came to New York City as an assistant on a Broadway show and began teaching his modern jazz dance technique at the June Taylor Dance Studio. Many dancers have adopted his technique, and his work has been codified and taught worldwide.

Also in the 1950s, Eugene Loring's American School of Dance in Los Angeles provided an opportunity for Cole and Matt Mattox to teach jazz. Loring himself gave classes in "freestyle"--a combination of ballet and modern, taught with a jazz-based vocabulary to jazz music. But of the three--Loring, Cole, and Mattox--it was Mattox who established a technique that has had global impact. After a stellar career as a dancer in films, he came to New York City in 1955 to work on Broadway, choreograph, and teach. He devised a series of exercises to train a dancer in body isolations with a jazz feeling, while still maintaining the format of a ballet class and a relationship between the barre and center floor combinations. Mattox's technique, in the Cole tradition, is demanding mentally as well as physically. He settled in France in 1975 and has codified his work, producing teachers who train jazz dancers in his technique throughout Europe and America.

In Chicago, Gus Giordano, who based his technique on modern dance, has become a mainstay on the educational scene since the 1970s. Influenced in his childhood by the music of Jelly Roll Morton, Giordano moved to New York to work on Broadway and study with Holm, Alwin Nikolais, and Dunham. In 1953, he relocated to Evanston, Illinois, and began a school. Giordano developed a class that started with strong floorwork in the Holm tradition, emphasizing the qualities of strength from the floor and including an undulating movement that emanated from the pelvis and rolled through the chest and arms. Codified in the mid-1970s, his technique now stands at the forefront of training in studios and universities throughout the world. In 1990 he established the yearly Jazz Dance World Congress, which includes training sessions and festival performances by internationally renowned jazz dance companies.