Rooted Jazz Dance, livre ebook

National Dance Education Organization Ruth Lovell Murray Book Award

UNCG | Susan W. Stinson Book Award for Dance Education

An African American art form, jazz dance has an inaccurate historical narrative that often sets Euro-American aesthetics and values at the inception of the jazz dance genealogy. The roots were systemically erased and remain widely marginalized and untaught, and the devaluation of its Africanist origins and lineage has largely gone unchallenged. Decolonizing contemporary jazz dance practice, this book examines the state of jazz dance theory, pedagogy, and choreography in the twenty-first century, recovering and affirming the lifeblood of jazz in Africanist aesthetics and Black American culture.

Rooted Jazz Dance brings together jazz dance scholars, practitioners, choreographers, and educators from across the United States and Canada with the goal of changing the course of practice in future generations. Contributors delve into the Africanist elements within jazz dance and discuss the role of Whiteness, including Eurocentric technique and ideology, in marginalizing African American vernacular dance, which has resulted in the prominence of Eurocentric jazz styles and the systemic erosion of the roots. These chapters offer strategies for teaching rooted jazz dance, examples for changing dance curricula, and artist perspectives on choreographing and performing jazz. Above all, they emphasize the importance of centering Africanist and African American principles, aesthetics, and values.

Arguing that the history of jazz dance is closely tied to the history of racism in the United States, these essays challenge a century of misappropriation and lean into difficult conversations of reparations for jazz dance. This volume overcomes a major roadblock to racial justice in the dance field by amplifying the people and culture responsible for the jazz language.

Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

List of Figures

List of Tables

Preface

Editors’ Note

Introduction
Lindsay Guarino, Carlos R. A. Jones, and Wendy Oliver

I Am Jazz
Cory Bowles

Part 1. The Place of Jazz Dance in Twenty-First-Century North America

Chapter 1. An Overview of Jazz Dance in the Twenty-First Century
Melanie George

Chapter 2. Professional Jazz Dance in North America
Wendy Oliver

Chapter 3. Whiteness and the Fractured Jazz Dance Continuum
Lindsay Guarino

Chapter 4. The Morphology of Afro-Kinetic Memory: A Provocative Analysis of Marginalized Jazz Dance
E. Moncell Durden

Part 2. Analyzing Aesthetics

Chapter 5. Africanist Elements in American Jazz Dance
Julie Kerr-Berry

Chapter 6. Jazz Dance Technique, Aesthetics, and Racial Supremacy
Carlos R. A. Jones

Chapter 7. Where’s the Jazz? A Multilayered Approach for Viewing and Discussing Jazz Dance
Lindsay Guarino

Part 3. Choreography and Performance of Jazz Dance

Chapter 8. Must Be the Music
LaTasha Barnes

Chapter 9. Riding Rhythms and Designing Space: Jazz Dance Composition
Carlos R. A. Jones

Chapter 10. Jazz Is a Feeling . . .
Adrienne Hawkins

Chapter 11. A Strange Place to Find Jazz . . .
Kimberley Cooper

Chapter 12. The Duality of the Black Experience as Jazz Language
Pat Taylor

Chapter 13. Performing Gender: Disrupting Performance Norms for Women in Jazz Dance through Gender-Inclusive, Human-Centric Choreography
Brandi Coleman

Chapter 14. Considering Jazz Choreography
Melanie George

Part 4. Teaching Jazz Dance

Chapter 15. Valuing Cultural Context and Style: Strategies for Teaching Traditional Jazz Dance from the Inside Out
Karen W. Hubbard

Chapter 16. Cultivating African Diasporic Ethos and Cultural Values in Contemporary Jazz Dance
Monique Marie Haley

Chapter 17. Jazz Dance Pedagogy: Its Own Thing
Paula J. Peters

Chapter 18. Reframing the Jazz Narrative in the High School Classroom
Jessie Metcalf McCullough

Chapter 19. Countering Cultural Dissonance in a Graduate Jazz Dance Course
Patricia Cohen

Chapter 20. Preparing a Lecture-Demonstration on the History/Styles of Jazz Dance for K–12 Students
Lynnette Young Overby

Chapter 21. To Topple, Not Maintain: Changing Pedagogical Practice in the College Jazz Dance History Course
Karen Clemente

Part 5. The Future of Jazz Dance

Chapter 22. Connective Threads: Jazz Aesthetics, Jazz Music, and the Future of Jazz Dance Studies
Lindsay Guarino and Wendy Oliver

Chapter 23. My Truth, My Self, Our Way Forward
Carlos R. A. Jones

Appendix 1. Jazz Music Glossary
Wendy Oliver, Rubim de Toledo, and Joanne Baker

Appendix 2. Experimenting with Time Signatures
Vicki Adams Willis, Joanne Baker, and Jamie Freeman Cormack

Appendix 3. Music Inspiration

List of Contributors

Index