![]()
| BILLY SIEGENFELD is the founder, artistic director, principal choreographer, and ensemble performing member of Jump Rhythm Jazz Project, celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2010. JUMP RHYTHM is a national and international touring company of dancer-singers known for its exuberant, percussive musicality and story-based dance theater performed to the sounds of swinging jazz and the blues, hard-hitting funk and hip-hop, and boundary-crossing world music. Siegenfeld is also the creator and, with JUMP RHYTHM's company members, developer of Jump Rhythm® Technique, a unique system of movement learning that transforms the dancing body, accompanied by the scat-singing voice, into a dynamically expressive, rhythm-accurate percussion instrument. This pedagogy guides students to work holistically: based on the movement-efficient, gravity-directed approach to alignment called Standing Down Straight®, it promotes connecting to the earth, connecting to oneself, and connecting to others. He received an Emmy Award in the category of "Outstanding Excellence On Camera/Performer” for his work in the multiple-Emmy-Award-winning documentary Jump Rhythm Jazz Project: Getting There, produced by HMS and aired on PBS. He is the recipient of Chicago's most prestigious dance honor, the Ruth Page Award, which cited him for “his vibrant dance artistry, development of a unique dance vocabulary, and the exciting choreography created in that dance technique,” and the Jazz Dance World Congress Award for making “major contributions to the art of jazz dance.” The United States Fulbright Commission made him a Fulbright Senior Scholar, an honor that took him to Finland where he introduced the theory and practice of Jump Rhythm® Technique to the Arts Academy of Turku University of Applied Sciences and where he now teaches the technique annually with other members of JUMP RHYTHM. The magazine Dance Teacher placed him on its Twentieth Century Timeline of Choreographers and Innovators for “develop[ing] the Jump Rhythm Jazz Technique and found[ing] Jump Rhythm Jazz Project,” and the magazine Dancer credited him with “inventing the first genuine jazz technique in forty years.” Choreographic honors include the National Performance Network Creation Award, which led to the productions of The News From Poems and Sorrows of Unison Dancing; the Ruth Page Dance Achievement Award for Outstanding Choreography, citing the pieces Romance in Swingtime and No Way Out; and the Jazz Dance World Congress Gold Leo Award for Outstanding Choreography, citing Getting There. Billy Siegenfeld is also a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University where he teaches Jump Rhythm Technique; Jump Rhythm Tap; Movement Awareness; Choreographing Music; and American Rhythm Dancing and the African American Performance Aesthetic, a video-discussion course which surveys and analyzes filmed excerpts of Africanist-influenced jazz-rhythm-, rock-rhythm-, and hip-hop-rhythm-based choreography, dancing, and singing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His most recent article, “Standing Down Straight: Jump Rhythm Technique’s Rhythm-Driven, Community-Directed Approach to Dance Education,” appears in the December 2009 issue of Journal of Dance Education.
|
