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Jazz dance, a uniquely American dance form, is rooted in and informed by African movement idioms and aesthetics that travelled to the United States with the trafficking of African peoples, commonly referred to as The Middle Passage or the trans-Atlantic slave trade. During the enslavement era, African dances were transformed to African-American dances with the addition of various movements derived from whites. Post-enslavement and throughout the 20th century, African-American dance evolved in several different directions, one of which was jazz dance. While the term “jazz dance” was not coined until the 1920s, the primary “ancestry” of jazz dance can be found by studying African dance forms and how they changed in the context of plantation life. By decentralizing the primacy of non-African cultural contributions, jazz dance can be more appropriately understood as an amalgamation of cultural influences that informed and created this uniquely American dance form, which remains persistently African at its core.

This chapter develops an understanding of the links between the conceptions of race and culture, colonial history of rhythm and its suppression, the literature and the persistence of rhythm in the literary and intellectual discourse of the French Caribbean islands, and the role played by rhythm in perpetuating them by shifting the focus from the Caribbean to the United States. Reflecting primarily on James Brown's development of a distinctively rhythmic musical style, it demonstrates how black radicals interpreted these rhythms as manifestations of living African aesthetics and also how recent critics such as Fred Moten have rejected these interpretations. It concludes with the fact that there is a sense of the ongoing, though often obscured and seldom acknowledged, connections between African American and Caribbean cultural politics and the ways in which the rhythm has been at the heart of conceptions of race, culture, and subjectivity.

What connects African-American concert dance and jazz dance? On the one hand, both forms derive from the same root: African vernacular dance. It is easy to identify elements of African aesthetics in both genres. John Perpener contends that African-American concert dance was created to “effect socio-political change for African-American people, bring together aesthetic and cultural elements that had, previously, been posed as polar opposites, forge a positive identity for black people in the midst of a hostile environment, express a contemporary ethos, and create work that was multi-vocal, articulating simultaneously different worldviews.” Jazz dance, on the other hand, has usually been seen as a form of entertainment. Pearl Primus, Talley Beatty, Alvin Ailey, Chuck Davis, Diane McIntyre, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar are African-American concert dance artists who are discussed within the chapter.

Dancing expressed from a core of rhythmically articulated, intensity-infused energy is the hallmark of African-American-originated dance. Forms driven by strongly rhythmic body-dynamics are aesthetic cousins, which can be grouped under the umbrella term “American rhythm dancing.” This genre includes people as diverse as the krumper Lil’ C, jazz innovator Jack Cole, and tap dancers Fred Astaire and the Nicholas Brothers. When choreographers and dancers build movement from rhythmically accented dynamics, the energy of the movement more than its spatial organization impacts on the viewer. This is in contrast to space-organized movement that concentrates on re-shaping the body parts to achieve geometrically defined lines, as well as moving bodies through space in straight or curved paths. The author proposes a rebalancing of dance curriculums to focus more on the aesthetics of energy and body dynamics.

This author’s perspective on jazz dance is centered on four core principles derived from an African aesthetic. These principles are: 1) rhythmicity, 2) formidable relationship with the music, 3) improvisation, and 4) dynamic play. Within rhythmic expression, the choreographer or dancer attempts to produce complex articulation of the body, demonstrating multiple tones simultaneously. The movements in jazz dance convey the nuances of rhythm, including the color tone that musicians produce in playing the music. Artists pursuing jazz dance today should bring to the field their own individual styles as choreographers, a deep connection with music, an ability to improvise and to develop that skill in others, and finally a sense of play, which manifests itself through precision, simultaneous movement and music invention, supple dynamic range, a risk-taking outlook, individual personality, irony, wit, and satire.