All in the family - jazz dance choreographer Gus Giordano and his daughter Nan who conceived 'Le Firebird de Jazz' together

Dance Magazine, Nov, 1998 by Don McDonagh

Le Firebird de Jazz, a radically reconceived interpretation of Fokine, Stravinsky, and Golovine's 1910 ballet, received a preview performance in Phoenix by Gus Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago as part of the final evening of the Jazz Dance World Congress '98. "It was the last project I did for the company," observes Giordano as he reflects on his current position in the organization that bears his name and creative imprint. "I conceived the idea and put together the music and the script but cochoreographed it with my daughter Nan. She is now in charge of the company, the school, and the congresses. I'm a founder-director, and can go around doing what I really enjoy doing: teaching the technique of jazz dancing." The transition has been smoothly made over the past several years, and now all the pieces have been placed in the next generation's hands.

The senior Giordano started dancing when he was five years old and stayed with it through World War II service in the Marine Corps, where he was assigned to a performing group that did gigs at the Hollywood Canteen and military bases. After leaving the service, he went to New York City to break into show business. He studied with Hanya Holm and Alwin Nikolais and joined the dance corps at the Roxy Theater, where he did four shows a day between screenings of the feature film.

"It was professional dancing but it was not Broadway so I decided to finish college first," says Giordano. He returned to St. Louis to do so, and then, with some G.I. Bill eligibility left over, he tried his luck on Broadway again. He married his college sweetheart the day a national touring show he was in closed in Detroit. Back in New York City, after a lean six months of some club dates and lots of auditions, he finally landed a part in the long-running musical Wish You Were Here. Because the locale was a summer resort in the Catskills, Jo Mielziner's eye-catching set featured a swimming pool, and dancers were required to swim, play basketball, and sing.

The paycheck was welcome, but performing became routine for the restless Giordano. He began choreographing and moved back to Chicago to open a studio in 1953 and pass on his own distinct approach to jazz dance. Ten years later, critic Ann Barzel asked him to organize a welcoming performance for visiting Bolshoi Ballet dancers who wanted to see jazz dancing. The senior students Giordano assembled did so well they earned an invitation to do a three-city tour of the USSR the next year. The company he formed then is now in its thirty-fifth year of existence.

The format for joining remains: (1) study at the school, (2) spend an apprentice period, and (3) be invited to join the first company. "There are no exceptions," says Nan Giordano. "I went through that three-stage program with no special privileges. I started studying in the school and went to college at Southern Methodist University because it had the only jazz dance courses being offered twenty years ago. I didn't get much out of that, but the three-hour classes with my father were special. He is very good but very hard and demanding, and those classes were exhausting. Today they've been cut down to two hours. My generation was the last to have that intensive exposure to my father. He was always integrating his ideas and philosophy of dance into the class. I look back now and don't see how we did it. Eventually I got into the company and promptly had a recurrence of a knee injury that kept me out for a year. The doctor said that unless I had surgery I would never dance again. So I had the surgery and did physical therapy, including lots of swimming.

"There are four of us--two older brothers and my sister, Amy, who works on the congresses. I was the only one who went into dancing, though I hated it as a kid. I was very shy and put a lot of pressure on myself. I didn't want anyone to know who I was because people expected a great deal from me as his daughter. I wanted to prove myself, and worked very hard. My father didn't hand me anything on a silver platter.

"We were touring a lot, and I had a major back injury that really ended my dancing career. It was then that I got into the other side of it. In 1986 I was made associate artistic director. I really didn't care about the title but then I saw that it did have meaning to people outside the company. My father is a very positive person and generates a lot of ideas, but then it is my job to implement them. Sometimes I say no and he accuses me of being negative and we get into it. When I was named artistic director, I was still unsure of myself, but I learned how to deal with a board, write funding applications, commission new work, cast, and balance repertory. I made some mistakes but learned from them. I still marvel at how my father, and mother when she was still alive, did it all themselves: family, school, and company.

"My dancers are team players, not just onstage or in rehearsal, but in all ways. In the midst of this congress with everything else that had to be done, everyone pitched in to get out a five-thousand-piece mailing that had to be done here in Phoenix announcing our home season and fundraiser in Chicago. The mailing got out on time, and they made it possible.