#emancipationto1970

[hrstaubin-blog]

Jazz Dance From Emancipation to 1970 - Hannah St. Aubin

This chapter included a lot of similarities between jazz and modern dance, as well as differences. In jazz dance, according to the book, “the dancer becomes the musician.” In modern dance, that’s not always the case. The dancer mainly focuses on internal emotions. Also, jazz dance was blended into modern and ballet dance, which kind of surprised me. George Balanchine and Katherine Dunham contributed to jazz dance by adding their styles of movement. This is how the “melting pot” of jazz dance came to be. To me, this chapter made me realize that there are two divisions of jazz dance: the Africanist roots and the modern jazz dance aspect (or white theatrical concert dance). Although, I kind of feel like some people might be offended that “white” dance is being incorporated into the original African jazz style. This is kind of what we talked about in class; the cultures blending, or if it would be acceptable to stick to the roots of jazz dance.  This reading was nice for me to understand. I loved how it informed the reader of all the jazz branches that came from original jazz dance, such as bebop and swing. It was nice to know of all the people that contributed to such a happy, great style. Since this chapter was only ten pages, it was not difficult for me to read at all, and I sped through it. I understood all of the concepts with ease, and really enjoyed this chapter.

Art Parade: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzqKQESuHsU .. This is a video of a dancer performing “modern jazz dance.” As the chapter talks about, there are two branches of jazz dance: Africanist, and modern jazz dance. Africanist is more about sticking to the roots of jazz dance, connecting with the musician, and using improvisation techniques. Modern jazz dance has a blend of ballet and modern dance. As you can see in the video, this dancer is performing modern jazz dance. You can see this because she is not really connecting to the music, using improvisation techniques or vocal encouragement. 

Open Ended Questions:

- Why are people saying that jazz dance should be embraced for the cultural differences, but yet people are getting offended that white dancers are not showcasing the African roots of jazz dance within their style of jazz movement? - Would jazz dance be any different if a certain branch of the style, such as bebop, swing, etc. was taken away? How/why?

[duetdancer97-blog]

Jazz Dance from Emancipation to 1970 - Bethany

It’s surprising to me after having read two other chapters of this book already, and this being the third, that there is not a lot that I accurately know about jazz dance, even though I have been dancing some jazz style since I was a young child. I had no idea that there was a such thing as modern jazz dance or that tap was considered a style of jazz. Also, I guess I never really put much thought into dances like the Lindy Hop, the Susie Q, the Charleston and others because in my mind, those were their own styles of dance and were independent of every other style of dance. In my mind, those were not considered jazz. I just thought of them as a social dance that everyone knew because to me, not everyone could do jazz or tap nowadays because it’s something dancers are trained in, but the Lindy Hop and others was popular to everyone and everyone did it. So, finding out that the Lindy Hop and tap and all the other styles that are social dances are branches of jazz caused me to hesitate and stop and think. My whole life I never would have thought to consider social dances being an offspring of jazz. It definitely has changed my view of what jazz is and many times while reading this chapter, I stopped and set the book down and thought about how this changes everything, for the most part, that I know about jazz. To me, jazz was always only what dancers were taught in a jazz class at a dance studio, and what happened at Sock Hops or Homecoming Dances wasn’t jazz because the crowd of students weren’t dancers, but normal people who weren’t trained in jazz.

 The reading also caught my attention towards the end where ballet was mentioned. Jazz started to merge with other styles like ballet and modern, which turned jazz more into a concert stage form. At my dance studio back at home, if we wanted to take a jazz class, we had to take two ballet classes a week. This was because we were told that Ballet is the root of jazz and we had to know ballet in order to do jazz correctly or the directors just wanted us to have that ballet background. I never thought much of it because I have always taken ballet and jazz my whole life at the same time, but I remember thinking that in order to be a good jazz dancer and to be considered a jazz dancer, one had to have a background in ballet. I don’t know why I would think something like this, but at the time, it seemed to make sense. So, while reading this chapter, I thought back to my young days and the rules of my studio when it came to signing up for jazz classes and it made me pause when I read about ballet being merged with jazz after some time of jazz being around. I hesitated and thought that I always thought that jazz came from ballet. From the sounds of the book, jazz was independent of ballet at the start, and then later worked its way in the style of jazz. I had always thought that it was the opposite. I never really thought much of the history of dance, or jazz, ever and just did the dances I was taught and worked on my technique. So learning about all this history of jazz is really changing jazz as I know it.

 Questions:

 Why were their taxes on dance floors to help support World War 2?

Was the start of jazz dances mostly due to improvisation?