Jazz dance grew from Black vernacular before Broadway renamed it
Early-twentieth-century U.S. jazz dance spans social vernacular forms and staged dramatic jazz, both expanding African American styles tied to jazz music. Charleston, Lindy hop, and later Broadway names such as Jack Cole and Bob Fosse carried the label far from nightclub floors.
Vernacular jazz absorbed ragtime moves, Charleston, Lindy hop, and mambo; remembered performers include the Whitman Sisters, Frankie Manning, Norma Miller, and Katherine Dunham. Dramatic stage jazz was pushed by Cole, Fosse, Eugene Louis Faccuito, and Gus Giordano. From the 1940s, Hollywood and Broadway often used jazz dance for Fosse or Robbins choreography with little link to jazz music; by the 1990s some college PE classes meant dancing to pop under the same name.
Roots run through African dance traits—bent knees, complex rhythms, body isolations—into late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Black performance, then the 1920s Harlem Renaissance with figures such as Josephine Baker and the Nicholas Brothers. Spencer Williams’s 1917 Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble inspired the shimmy’s alternating shoulders. James P. Johnson’s 1923 Charleston for Runnin’ Wild helped a dance named for Charleston, South Carolina, peak around 1926–1927; it could be done alone when ballroom still assumed partners.
After the Depression began in October 1929, social dancing surged and swing vocabularies thickened. Improvisation and riffing let dancers personalise patterns inside communal tradition. Later contemporary and commercial jazz—Mia Michaels, Sonya Tayeh, Mandy Moore, Hubbard Street; 1980s pop-video hybrids—travelled through TV and films such as A Chorus Line and Saturday Night Fever.
Individual pioneers shaped the stage form. Jack Cole, credited with popularising theatrical jazz through a large body of television and Broadway work, influenced Matt Mattox, Jerome Robbins, Gwen Verdon and Fosse, whose suggestive style marks Cabaret and Chicago. The anthropologist Katherine Dunham built a technique around isolations, simple lines and a wider spread of tempos, while Faccuito, known as Luigi, created the first codified jazz method. In 1931 a New Negro Art Theatre recital staged dances drawn from Southern spirituals, and Hemsley Winfield's 1933 Forum Recital asked what Black dancers should dance about. Josephine Baker's banana skirt at the Folies Bergère became an emblem of the 1920s.
Source: Jazz dance
