Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches

26. Jazz Dance in Higher Education

26 Jazz Dance in Higher Education Kim Chandler Vaccaro There exists a potent intersection between an argument for the inclusion of jazz dance in higher education and the work of dancer and anthropologist Mura Dehn. Multicultural valuation, Gardnerian Theory, the National Standards of Dance, the influence of African-American and Popular Culture Studies programs, and a growing attention to professional preparation have influenced the prevalence of jazz dance in U.S. college and university dance programs. Although the growth of jazz dance classes offered has occurred mainly in the past two decades, Mura Dehn advocated for its inclusion in dance education as early as 1934. Jazz dance is an amalgamation of every variable that existed in the creation of the United States, including the African diaspora. At the core of the diaspora—the ideology that allowed European governments to enslave “other” peoples—was the devaluing of the black and brown body. Curriculums in higher education in this country often mirrored that philosophy. The first dance programs in the United States were begun in the 1920s and were dominated by white, female modern dancers. Ballet, with its air of European aristocracy, soon followed and fit neatly into the system as dance began to move from physical education departments to theater and dance departments . Even as tap enjoyed some early success in college dance programs as part of the American folk/clog dance tradition, there was, until the 1990s, a curious absence of jazz dance. Though jazz dance emerged in roughly the same era as modern dance in the United States, the jazz dance vocabulary and body was created, in large part, within African-American social venues and later adapted to the studio, stage, and screen. It was not typical, prior to 207 the development of African-American Studies and Popular Culture Studies programs, to learn about subjects such as social dance that had relevance in everyday lives. Social and folk dance were thought of primarily for entertainment or recreation. They were “low art” or “popular culture,” hence unsuitable for academic rigor and critical investigation. The first jazz dance courses in higher education emerged in the 1960s at the New School of Social Research, University of California Irvine, but only a handful existed before the 1990s, and still today only a third of college dance programs surveyed required the study of jazz dance as part of their degreegranting programs.1 Yet as early as 1936 at the First National Congress for Dance, Mura Dehn was making the case that while “there is a clear tendency to regard jazz dancing as something unfit for the ‘artist’ of the dance,” it is both a high art form and a dance of the folk, worthy of consideration in art and academics.2 In 1919, Mura Dehn’s family fled Russia during the civil wars that followed the Bolshevik Revolution and eventually relocated to France. She studied classical dance, then became a celebrated dancer in the Isadora Duncan style, one of the earliest types of modern dance. With an international performing career, she often traveled from Europe to New York and became an American citizen in 1932. Captivated by the spirit of African-American social dance, the original style of jazz dance that was developed alongside jazz music, Mura Dehn began a lifelong quest to document, direct, and teach jazz dance. The American debut of her choreography The Wise and Foolish Virgins in 1932 featured the Zora Hurston Negro Chanters, and she founded the Academy of Swing with Asadata Dafora in 1943 in New York City. Dehn spoke five languages and published magazine articles in three, while her dance films were viewed across Europe and the United States. She is best known for her film The Spirit Moves, which was remastered and released by Dancetime Publications in 2008. But her entire collection—327 folders in 24 boxes entitled Papers on African-American Social Dance ca. 1869–1987— covers over a century of the annals of American dance. Preeminent jazz scholar Marshall Stearns had this to say: “Mura Dehn has the distinction of being the only artist in the jazz field who has analyzed, classified, and assembled the essential material of jazz dance and thus made it possible to present a panorama of the entire art.” Dehn immersed herself in black culture when racism was still at a zenith in this country. She wrote in 1946 that “jazz was ignored by the academic and purist world that looked down on the jitterbug with condescending smiles.”3 According...