JAZZ DANCE WORLD CONGRESS
A few nights later, at Northwestern’s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, Kitti did a very different kind of dance. Jazz pianist Viro Rantala, performing onstage, provided intricate, swinging cascades of notes, and Kitti transformed the jazz-dance vocabulary, accenting yet softening such details as the high, hunched shoulders, the sinuous lateral curves. Distilling its asymmetrical, dynamic yet cool essence, he made it look like something else, something unfamiliar.
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New York’s Jump Rhythm Jazz Project also has a retro look; its artistic director, Billy Siegenfeld, won the congress’s gold Leo Award for his choreography in Getting There, part of which was performed on the final night: a miracle of inventive energy, and very well danced by students from Northwestern. Jazz Dance by Danny Buraczeski explored the roots of jazz in Swing Concerto: beginning with klezmer music from Brave Old World and ending with Benny Goodman, this accomplished, likable company from Minneapolis made swing and Eastern European folk dance inhabit the same universe, committing wholeheartedly to Buraczeski’s high-voltage choreography.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Trudie Lee, Frank Gimpaya.
