UC Irvine

During the 1920s, jazz dance and live music emerged together in the United States as part of a larger body of Black Diasporic vernacular traditions. The originators of jazz were African American dancers and musicians, who collectively created jazz within an audial-somatic and social dance experience. This tradition was connected to their West African culture, which prioritized improvisation, polyrhythm, individualism, isolation of body parts, and a social spirit, including interaction with live music. However, during the decades that followed, influential entertainment genres habitually appropriated their dances and made them more suitable for White audiences. As a result, jazz dance (the focus of this thesis) became separated from musicians’ interactions, blended with ballet and modern dance, and codified by White male choreographers. This style became known as theatrical jazz. Importantly, this process of claiming and defining jazz was made possible by pervasive patriarchy and legal segregation. First, the communal experience of jazz was usurped by a codified rendering of a technique that extracted African American ideas. Subsequently, jazz was framed with the orderliness of formal uniformity.

Theatrical jazz constitutes my background in dance. In other words, the elements of my skills and artistry (developed over decades of training) represent the mode by which jazz was overwritten with the notion of a singular innovator, namely specific White men deemed to be the fathers of jazz dance. Following this complicated history, my thesis aims to render ballet-based and codified theatrical-jazz styles less central to the core of my “jazz” choreography by implementing original jazz traditions that honor the culture from which they initially emerged. As such, I depart from a common approach to jazz-styled choreography, which centers on codified movement and prescribes exactness to the dancers’ performance while eliminating improvisation. In contrast, by implementing a praxis that centers on West African traditions, my creative process emphasizes improvisations with dancers and musicians collaboratively. Ultimately, I center live music, improvisation, polyrhythm, individualism, and community–the original African American jazz traditions.