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| Jazz Dancing History The term "jazz dance" has been used to describe a forever-changing form of popular and creative dance movement ever since the 1920s. It represents our popular culture, and as the culture changes, so does the appearance of jazz dance. Jazz dance has character and the ability to make changes as a main fragment. It is this element that allows itself to shed its skin and take up another for every passing era. This means that the social dances of the 1920s like the Charleston and Back Bottom are known as jazz dances, but so are the theatre dances of choreographer Bob Fosse. The style of Fred Astaire comes from jazz dancing, as well as many dances by the modern dance choreographer Alvin Ailey. The shortened sounds of tap dancing can be considered as jazz dancing, but so can the body popping movements of breakdancing. The common subject binding these obviously different things together is rhythm, or to be more exact, rhythm that is composed in African influences.
The Roots of Theatrical Jazz Dance The next major change in vernacular dance after minstrelsy came with the advent of ragtime music and ballroom dancing after 1910. The Stearns say that before 1910, there were only two types of songs, happy or sad. During this decade, black composers were writing songs whose lyrics specified how to do a dance. Many animal dances, partly inspired by African animal dances, swept ballrooms. Some of these dances were the Turkey Trot, the Bunny Hug, the Monkey Glide and the Chicken Scratch. Irene and Vernon Castle made the Turkey Trot in the Broadway show The Sunshine Girl, and dancing popular in the upper class levels. The raid of ballrooms with vernacular inspired dances set the stage of the same process to happen in the white world of Broadway.
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