Uprooted is a documentary film that traces the origins of jazz dance, giving long-overdue credit to the creators who brought the style to North America and the prime movers who developed it. The film leaves us reckoning the good with the bad sides of jazz becoming codified and the Dance Boom of the seventies and eighties.
But Uprooted, subtitled “The Journey of Jazz Dance,” is more than a timeline. It is a parable of economics, access, recognition, and loss. The film is acutely aware of the historic brutality that brought jazz to North America through the slave trade and the makers that remained invisible while the form became popularized and monetized.
Filmmaker Khadifa Wong (interviewed here for loveDANCEmore) takes a stand early in the film on the importance of knowing who the historical figures are – their names, their contributions — showing clips of innovative social dancing at The Savoy Ballroom during the Harlem Renaissance; Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers in Hot Chocolate (1941); and Norma Miller in the Marx Brothers movie, A Day At The Races (1937).
The forty-two-person “cast of experts” Wong interviews suggest a number of valid reasons for educating dancers on the roots of jazz. Yet, none so relevant as when an hour into the film Thomas F. Defrantz (Chair of African and African American Studies at Duke University) elucidates this achingly pointed reality:
African-American movement does get appropriated… And the people who created the work, can’t benefit from all of the things that might be available from this other space — Broadway or Hollywood, or there might be money or work, or the possibility to live in a neighborhood where schools are good for children — like that’s not available for the Black people who are developing these dance forms and creative addresses. So, it’s important to understand — this is what jazz is too.
Narrated clips of the Nicholas Brothers, Josephine Baker and others remind that the era did produce some hard-won notice. Choreographer and academic Danny Buraczeski, laments that in her time African-American dance pioneer Katherine Dunham was “completely devalued… even though what she was doing was extraordinary. She was a scholar, a researcher, and she made phenomenal movement. The Dunham technique is just breathtaking”
The documentary touches on why and when jazz dance and jazz music parted ways. Buraczeski is one of the few post-modern era jazz choreographers to meet the challenge of jazz music, with such works as his 1986, Lost Life: Four Scenes from the Life of Art Pepper (1986). He created the piece to the music of jazz saxophonist Art Pepper and Hoagy Carmichael. The top dance critics at the New York Times fumbled about trying to critique Buraczeski’s concert-style jazz work — asking more questions than providing analysis.
Wong and her collaborators bemoan the lack of informed criticism, delve into the foundational myths surrounding Hollywood and Broadway, and uneasily seek to define jazz — before pivoting to the Dance Boom of the seventies and eighties.
As a jazz dancer of that era, I avidly sought out class from many of the experts interviewed in the film and some that were not — Lynn Simonson, JoJo Smith, Frank Hatchet, Matt Mattox, Ronn Forella, and Betsy Haug. I went to Chicago to audition for Gus Giordano, and took class at Hubbard Street (how did Lou Conte get left out of a conversation about jazz?).
Of those teachers: 1. Lynn Simonson and anyone who taught at her studio (Laurie De Vito) taught a style not easily categorized and Lynn was one of the best and possibly only wholistic jazz teacher in the city; 2. Betsy Haug taught class with a cigarette burning, as she incorporated inspired and complex tap rhythms into her across-the-floor-warm-up (always with a live drummer); 3. The film thoroughly and accurately describes JoJo, Mattox, and Hatchet; 4. As the film sadly punctuates, Ronn Forella died of HIV-AIDS in 1989. Forella seems to have left no historical trace even though his class was genius — the perfect blend of a classical lifted upper body, Horton Technique strength, and the cleanest of leg lines, straight from the top of the hip bone. I do know that Chita Rivera took class with Ronn, as did Chicago’s award-winning musical theater choreographer Jim Corti.
The interviews with more than forty experts must have been tough to edit down to less than ninety minutes. But I wonder how any conversation about Black dance history did not include the Bessie Award-winning Dayton Contemporary Dance Company. Founded fifty years ago in Dayton, Ohio by a Black woman — Jeraldyne Blunden, who died 1999 — the company continues to train top-notch dancers and produce “contemporary” work. In 2007, the artistic leadership was handed down to Jeraldyne’s daughter, Debbie Blunden-Diggs.
Sekou McMiller teaches an Afro-Latin Fusion class at Ailey Extension NYC. Photo by Vibecke Dahle.
Uprooted is fundamentally a look back as a way to look to the future. Hip hop seems the closest to the original intentions of jazz where the “uprok” brings the community together and precipitates improvisation and insider humor. The University of Southern California’s Glorya Kauffman School reminds of JoJo’s Dance Factory pulling it all under one roof. And choreographer Mandy Moore suggests that there is hope for another dance boom.
Wong and her collaborators appeal to viewers to sharpen our focus on the future as we continue to honor the people who were at the mercy of their times.
Kathy Adams, formerly the dance critic for The Salt Lake Tribune, writes about dance nationally as well as having been a mentor to us at loveDANCEmore over the last ten years. She is also active in local politics.
Click here to learn more about the film, which will be available to watch here and elsewhere soon.