Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches

30. Jazz Dance as American Export in France and the United Kingdom

30 Jazz Dance as American Export in France and the United Kingdom Sheron Wray American culture is readily identifiable within the idiom of jazz music, and it has penetrated every continent in the world. Jazz is global, and the intimate relationship between the dance and the music has, over time, formed localized movement vocabularies. Both social and theatrical dances have been integral to these transcultural formations of jazz, which have been achieved through the impact of migrations of people, world wars, colonization, and technological modernization. The UK and France are two centers that demonstrate the progression of jazz dance outside of the United States since the early twentieth century. This chapter examines two genres of jazz dance in Europe: concert jazz dance and pedagogy in France, and club jazz dance in the UK with its extension into Japan’s dance community. Historical Antecedents American forms of culture, including dance, impacted the European landscape in parallel with its popularization across the United States in the nineteenth century. Blackface minstrelsy had reached European stages by the mid-nineteenth century. For example, African-American entertainer Billy Kersand was afforded an audience with Queen Victoria in 1879, performing dance, song, and comedy seamlessly.1 Forms of theatrical performance grew into specific genres such as vaudeville, musical comedy, and burlesque that led to the creation of the modern musical. Concurrently, the social dance explosion was made possible through the advent of sheet music being readily 249 available in America. By the early 1900s, new popular forms of music were emerging, riding on the crest of technological invention that produced the phonograph. Much of this popular music was dance music, which described new dance steps and styles that in turn birthed new modes of expression in dance halls across the globe.2 America’s development of jazz dance and music began in New Orleans, a city founded by the French in 1718 “which had gained a reputation as a wild town and a colonial failure, a reputation that has endured.” Consequently, the acceptance of this New Orleans licentious music was no straightforward endeavor. This southern Louisiana city was a melting pot of influences. Ethnographer Shannon Dawdy states that by 1740, parts of New Orleans had become more African than European, as evidenced in patterns of habitation and the continual migration of people between Africa, the Caribbean, and New Orleans.3 As with all merchant trade between and within nation-states, exchanges of peoples meant exchanges of ideas. Similar exchanges went on between the UK and the United States; to this day there is a special relationship between these two countries because of their intertwined histories, which manifests in formal continuities and exchanges with language, economics, art and politics. Despite these shared identities, America’s jazz music and dance was persistently scrutinized by other European nations as to its societal value.4 In France, the contestation came to a temporary halt in 1937 when the government chose to include jazz music in the Exposition City as part of its international exhibition. This was a showcase created to demonstrate the “superiority” of all things French, concentrating on the applied arts and modern industry. By this time, the much-lauded black American dancer Josephine Baker was well established in Paris, having debuted there in 1925. She beguiled audiences with her pseudo-African-styled stage performances combined with her sophisticated chic. She performed black American social dances that were perceived by the French to embody representations of primal African culture. French intellectuals’ interest in African masks and other religious artifacts was ignited by the appropriation of African aesthetics into the visual art of Picasso, Gaugin, and Matisse, and so Josephine Baker’s body, a proxy for African sauvage, had become a site for French “voyeuristic jubilation . . . towards African Americans.”5 In Britain, the Lindy Hop or jitterbug flooded the country in the years between World Wars I and II, and today it still has a strong presence in its classical forms, practiced most fervently in social dance arenas. British practitioners established and maintained a standard of practice that has been recognized as having the essence of the original spirit of the dances created in the United States. American film producers 250 · Sheron Wray have sought out British artists to consult, choreograph, and dance in Hollywood movies and Broadway shows.6 For example, choreography by Ryan Francois, one of the founders of Zoots and Spangles, was featured in the...