Jump Rhythm Jazz Project: Technique

Coda

There is one other idea that dance artists might also want to consider in relation to this rhythm-first approach to movement. This other idea, which I contribute as a coda to the educational text above, encourages the dance artist to acknowledge that rhythm is more than just a technique only choreographers and dancers use. Rhythm is also that specifically human part of the dance that people can take hold of and achieve satisfaction in doing whether they are trained technicians or not. In the history of humankind, dancing to non-professionals has most often translated into getting up and moving rhythmically when someone started playing or singing a piece of music. One didn't have to "know the steps" to dance.

It is only during the last 300 years that dancing in the West has become transformed into a theatrical activity, one that only specialists - called "dancers" - are meant to do. But this, I believe, is why we continue to go back to the films of Astaire and Company. We revisit these performers because their way of moving in that conversationally fluent, seemingly unpracticed manner returns us to the fresh, ever-young place in the heart that pre-dates specialists - to where dancing figures not as an academic activity reserved only for those people who look good doing it, but where it's treated, as in the canvases of Bosch and Brueghel, as one of those very few guaranteed-to-be-delicious activities in human life that people engage in because they feel good doing it. We keep watching those rhythmically hard-hitting dances preserved like diamonds in the middle of Hollywood's movie-musical fluff because they strike us not as displays of what we can't do, but rather as invitations to what all of us who love to get up and boogie at parties or in the privacy of our living rooms can do. Rhythm, after all, being a kinesthetically sensed event, is one of those human experiences that, like emotion itself, is felt inside. It is an experience that anyone who delights in interiority can feel right doing, irrespective of what's mandated by long-standing codes of proper dance conduct.

The Jump Rhythm Jazz Style attempts to use this inside-felt phenomenon as a link between what happens up on the stage and what is received out in the dark of the theatre or by a classful of students. Borrowing Gary Giddins's phrase from Satchmo, his book on Louis Armstrong, the performances and workshops in this point of view try to continue the "democratization of artist and audience" that characterized the relationship between artists like Armstrong and the people they performed for. Rather than awe audiences with feats of prowess, a presentational strategy that can often end up distancing viewers by subtly suggesting in them inferiority ("amazing, but I can't do that"), this approach chooses to subsume displays of expertise into the desire to connect. The Jump Rhythm Jazz Style prefers to invite people in - invite them to feel part of the "urban folk dance" community (to use Jack Cole's words) that grows from people taking delight in sharing charged rhythmic energy with each other.

"Whether Billy's point of view will be adopted by the mainstream of jazz dancing remains to be seen. It is true, however, that he has become increasingly in demand as a choreographer and teacher in recent years, and people all over the world have been joyously re-introduced to the classic rhythms of jazz dance through his efforts. Billy Siegenfeld has used the components of the classic performances of jazz dancing as the basis of his Jump Rhythm Jazz Technique, successfully inventing the first genuine jazz dance technique in forty years. With any luck, his use of the methods of the masters of jazz and modern dance in creating a company will spread the Jump Rhythm credo of rhythm and expression, allowing dancers and spectators worldwide to rediscover their inherent wellspring of dance emotions." FULL ARTICLE Bob Boross, DANCER

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Jump Rhythm Jazz Project

Technique & Style

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