Matt Mattox a rare interview: the future of jazz dance is no joke to its champion - Interview

Dance Magazine, August, 2003 by Allan Ulrich

Where, these days, can you find Matt Mattox?

Historically, he reigns as a major figure in the development of a distinctive American jazz dance, but he's not singled out in the two most recent English-language reference works in the field--in Oxford's "authoritative" six-volume The International Encyclopedia of Dance, he doesn't rate his own entry (although you will find him under "jazz" and in Jack Cole's entry), and the one-volume Oxford Dictionary of Dance doesn't mention him at all. You will, however, find an entry on Mattox in Who's Who in the American Theatre, a citation that makes him smile in contentment, and you will also find him listed in the encyclopedia of dance published in 1999 by Larousse, one of the leading reference book publishers in France, where Mattox, a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, has lived for almost three decades. Of course, if you hurry to Becket, Massachusetts, through August 17, you will find Mattox in the still-vibrant flesh. At the invitation of Chet Walker, who directs the jazz program at the Jacob's Pillow Festival, he is teaching and giving master classes in jazz dance this summer. "Perhaps," he says with a note of hope in his voice, "jazz dance will get a bit of the attention it deserves." This will be one of his rare trips to his homeland.

Most of the time you will find Mattox in the Mediterranean city of Perpignan, which is French by the map but Catalan by culture, and less than ten miles from the Spanish border. He moved to the area of France known as Roussillon in 1980. He is not here because of the rich cultural possibilities of Perpignan; on the contrary, a minute after he fetches you from the railway station, he is dodging other cars on the astonishingly narrow streets, cursing the absence of major dance festivals here, and envying Montpellier and other, more dance-savvy cities up the French coast. He is here because he has made a good life with his second wife, former dancer Martine Limeul Mattox, whose family hails from one of the hill towns in the area. They met in the mid-1970s, and she clearly adores him. They both maintain intense teaching schedules in the area, interrupting these activities several times a year to direct what they call stages, combinations of demonstrations and master classes all over Europe.

AT 82, MATTOX REMAINS A tall, dashing figure and a serious charmer; despite a major heart operation a few years ago, groans about acquiring a spare tire (invisible to all but himself), and chronic arthritis, he moves with the agility and purposefulness of a veteran dancer. For all his extended French sojourn, he claims to have failed to master the language, but he still punctuates every third English sentence with an interrogatory "Oui?"

Mattox loves to reminisce and he comes by his memories honestly. Probe his past and he will tell you about the young woman who came to a beginners' class in New York in the early 1960s. "She was wearing a long, white shirt and jeans and had hair down to here. She asked me to teach her to dance for a song she was going to audition with. So, first I asked her to sing." Pause. "Barbra Streisand. She was going into I Can Get It for You Wholesale. It made her a star. If only I had known."

Mattox will also inform you with feigned chagrin that he once chewed out French immortal Roland Petit in a Hollywood dance class back in the 1950s, when Petit was in town to choreograph the film Hans Christian Andersen. Tell him that you remember with much pleasure one of his major movie appearances, animating Michael Kidd's electrifying choreography in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and he laughs. "Funny. MGM didn't think this movie was anything special. They ran three sneak previews in Culver City and tossed it into general release without fanfare."

However, you will not raise a chuckle from Mattox when you mention the current reputation of the kind of movement--he prefers "freestyle" to "jazz dance"--that he has refined for the past half century. "Here in Europe, it is absolutely unrecognized as a technique. They think jazz dance is what they see on television. Of course, when I was working on TV, on the Bell Telephone Hour, I threw in a bit of classical ballet, tap--anything I wanted. I have the reputation here of being the only dance teacher in Europe who can instruct people in how to move."

Mattox came to evolve his own movement style (he shuns the term "syllabus") through a melange of inspirations. He had been teaching Jack Cole's method for two years when he decided it was time to put his own stamp on things. "I went home, I sat down, and I drew one line on a blank piece of paper," he recalls. "The body is a straight line and you can do everything with it. Then, there was a Life Magazine photographer who was experimenting in the early 1950s by shooting a man holding two lamps, which he moved against a black background. When the photo was developed, all you saw were these curving lines of light, and I thought, 'That's the way the body should move.'"