He's got rhythm

It’s been a great couple of years for Chicago choreographer and Northwestern University dance professor Billy Siegenfeld. In ’05, he was awarded the Jazz Dance World Congress Award for “making major contributions to the field of jazz;” in the fall, he went to Finland as a Fulbright Senior Scholar to teach; and on Thursday 22 he’ll be presented with the 2006 Ruth Page Award for his “vibrant dance artistry, development of a unique dance vocabulary and the exciting choreography created in that technique.” You can see that unique style in action when his company, Jump Rhythm Jazz Project, performs on Saturday 17 and Sunday 18.

Siegenfeld’s approach may be called “jazz dance,” but it’s much closer to the exuberant expression of swing dancing or the smooth gliding of Fred Astaire than it is to the hypersexy hip articulations or infamous “jazz hands” favored by Bob Fosse.

“I came into dancing by playing jazz music as a drummer,” says Siegenfeld. “As a drummer, your body turns into a conduit of vibrations. Your hands, feet, even your head is bopping.”

When he was growing up, Siegenfeld’s parents had Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson on the turntable, and his father loved swing dancing. “My first dance partner was my dad,” says Siegenfeld. “He was a fabulous tennis player and had an impeccable sense of rhythm.”

As a kid, Siegenfeld also saw a lot of terrific dancing on television: “The Astaire specials in ’59 and ’60 were really exciting for me,” he says, “and I watched variety shows: Perry Como, Jackie Gleason, Gary Moore—these shows had dance numbers for a solo, individuated dancer: fabulous three-minute routines.”He also loved dancers like Carol Haney, Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera. “They nailed the hell out of rhythm,” says Siegenfeld. “I felt kinesthetic sympathy, if not empathy. [These dancers] concentrated energy into bursts called accents.”

In the 1970s, Siegenfeld danced with NYC choreographer Don Redlich. He found Redlich’s approach simpatico with his own sense of motion: “Don’s work was grounded in space/time/energy concepts, it wasn’t step-oriented,” Siegenfeld explains. Although Redlich was an exponent of the great German modern dance pioneer Hanya Holm, he had a sense of vernacular American dance from dancing on Broadway during the 1950s and ’60s.

As the 1980s dawned, Redlich’s approach and Siegenfeld’s taste were decidedly not in fashion with the internationally influential New York dance world. Siegenfeld began to feel alienated, artistically. “There was the [Merce] Cunningham revolution,” he says, “completely divorcing dance from music. And rhythmic motion is very emotional for me. Also Balanchine was huge, with his emphasis on overextension [of the limbs]. I felt like, What am I doing?”Siegenfeld considered quitting dance altogether. But instead, he went deeper within. “I did my own version of Isadora [Duncan]’s apocryphal story of standing alone in an apartment by the Louvre and finding the solar plexus was the center of her movement,” he says. “I wanted to move the way I moved when I was a kid.”

In 1985, he was teaching at Hunter College, and decided to use one of his jazz classes to work out his own style and approach with the students there. “I tried to build a class on joyous, exuberant, rhythmic dancing.” He succeeded.After a few years, Siegenfeld began applying his ideas to choreography, and started Jump Rhythm Jazz Project, based in Chicago since 1993. “It’s a constantly exploratory trip,” he says, “yoking the ancient language of rhythm with this new world we’re in.”

Jump Rhythm Jazz Project performs at the Josephine Louis Theatre Saturday 17 and Sunday 18.