Copyright © Billy Siegenfeld 2001-2004
Photo: William Frederking
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Jump Rhythm Jazz Technique "the first genuine jazz technique in forty years."Dancer This innovative approach to studying jazz focuses on using the entire body to express the offbeat accents and dazzling energy shifts of rhythm-rich jazz dance.
Jump Rhythm Tap Technique explores how ease and control of footwork combine with an expressive upper body to create sparkling swing in both sound and motion.
The Jump Rhythm Jazz Style of teaching and choreographing dance is an approach to movement that both honors and extends the tradition of jazz dancing featured in the performances of artists like Fred Astaire, Fayard and Harold Nicholas, Michael Kidd, Bob Fosse, Carol Haney, Gwen Verdon and Sammy Davis Jr, among many others. The chief aim of the style is to communicate the pleasures of moving in a musically expressive way - of being able to create dancing that makes visible the syncopated, dynamically rich rhythms of swinging jazz, the blues and Latin jazz.
The Jump Rhythm Jazz Style embraces a rhythm-first approach to teaching movement. That is, the classes taught in this style are devoted to transforming the entire body - not just the feet - into a rhythmically articulate musical instrument, one that is as sensitive as a jazz musician's to split-second timing and dynamic shading. By teaching the body and all of its parts to move away from the downbeat as well as hit it square, to move with speed as well as delay, to punch out energy in angular percussive hits as well as explosive dissolves, this style puts the dancer in control of the music s/he is producing through the dancing body.
Since total-body rhythm-making requires positioning the center of gravity low to the ground, the Jump Rhythm Jazz Style de-emphasizes the strongly vertical, gravity-defying aesthetic that distinguishes ballet and the other dance techniques based in the danse d'ecole. In another departure from this aesthetic, the Jump Rhythm Jazz Style also concerns itself less with matching the look of the body to an established vocabulary of epaulement and leg "line" than with shaping the energies and emotions that propel movement from within. Indeed, for practitioners of this style, technical development is based primarily on disciplining inside-sensed energy into rhythmic and dramatic expression. Working from this frankly expressionistic model, one that is related to all art-making that proceeds from the inside out, this approach attempts to define dance clarity in terms of the full-bodied articulation of that inner phenomenon called rhythmic energy. The primary task is to feel rhythmic accents fully and let these, not a codified set of shapes, determine the way the body should look as it moves through space.
The style is also based on two other ideas. For dancing to be considered "jazz" dancing, it has to incorporate that essential ingredient of all classic jazz performance - swing. In simplest terms, swing in jazz is formed from the interplay between downbeats and offbeats and between a "cool" energy of motion and the explosive gestures that spring from it. The choreographic goal in this style is to discover how to exploit the contrasts inherent in these rhythmic and dynamic interplays to build emotionally compelling dance theatre. Because of this emphasis on jazz expressivity, on mixing sparkling edge-on rhythms to convey dramatic intent, the Jump Rhythm Jazz Style veers from the contemporary tendency to exploit dancing as an advertisement for gymnastic virtuosity.
The second idea follows organically from the first. For dancing to swing, it has to be performed in rhythmic relation to the music jazz musicians have been swinging to for decades - the great standards of jazz and popular songwritten by composers like Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Fats Waller, Cole Porter, Thelonius Monk, Clifford Brown, Neal Hefti and, more recently, Wynton Marsalis and Christian McBride. This great music makes such a terrific partner for jazz dancing because it's full of the rhythmic punctuation dancers, if they're listening, can use to transform dynamically flat movement into sequences of musically sharp dance-thought.