All That’s Jazz
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," says Nat Home, 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.
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 floor work 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.
CONTEMPORARY JAZZ DANCE
The 1950s witnessed the birth and explosion of theatrical jazz dance, but the evolution of Broadway, film, and television and the emergence of MTV and videos have changed its execution and personality. Although Luigi, Mattox, and Giordano continue to teach, many teachers and choreographers have either used these masters' inventions as a starting point and adapted their techniques or have created training methods that reflect visions of their own. A short list would include Charles Kelley, Frank Pietri, Joe Tremaine, Roland Dupree, Camilla Long Hill, Lou Conte, Frank Hatchett, Phil Black, Lea Darwin, Rhett Dennis, Liz Williamson, and Lynn Simonson.
Modern dance and ballet have supported contemporary choreographers with an interest in jazz dance and music, among them Danny Buraczeski, Margo Sappington, Twyla Tharp, Garth Fagan, and Peter Pucci. The Toronto choreographer Danny Grossman has drawn from his teenage interest in the "beatnik" jazz of the late 1950s and a decade of work with Paul Taylor to create modern dances accompanied by jazz music. He has set his piece Higher to a suite of bluesy Ray Charles songs and Magneto-Dynamo to a pulsating, hard-driving score by bassist Charles Mingus.
Although jazz dance's evolution in the last fifty years has traveled from social and traditional forms to collaborations with the concert techniques of ballet and modern, a recent trend has seen the renewal of jazz's authentic rhythmic feeling. A recent pioneer is Billy Siegenfeld, a professor at Northwestern University, who advocates a return to the philosophy of traditional jazz dance where rhythm is the motivating factor for movement. His Jump Rhythm Jazz Technique focuses on making the body a total rhythm instrument by instilling in his dancers a razor-sharp rhythmic sensibility. This allows for the exploration of various parts of the body as instruments in displaying the accents and "hits" of jazz music. Siegenfeld seeks to lay bare the emotional content of the rhythm; therefore, technical virtuosity as in standard movement vocabularies is not the goal. Instead, his movement, a genuine reaction to syncopated jazz rhythms, signals a return to the heritage of classic jazz dancing.
Because of the complexity of rhythms and isolations, many jazz teachers advocate that the serious study of jazz dance begin in a student's teen years, when the dancer is better able to grasp its intricate nature. A few years of prior training in ballet or modern can be beneficial to the progress of the student. Jazz dance radiates a musicality, a physicality, and at times a sensuality that requires some maturity.
But in order to understand and master jazz dance, a student must be open to the variety of its expression. Because jazz is many things to many people, it cannot possess a single technique. As in modern dance, jazz takes shape in techniques that have withstood the test of time. From its folk origins and the innovations of the masters to the work of today's classic and contemporary artists, jazz dance lives in the techniques, styles, and personalities of many practitioners. Individuals have used the form to train dancers for the concert and commercial stage, as well as to provide an outlet for recreational dancers who want to express their joys and pain, hopes and sorrows, and all of the feelings within their souls.