He doesn't say the J. word.

To Lou Conte, jazz is a four-letter word. Conte is the founder and artistic director of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, a company that performs works by jazz choreographers, such as Margo Sappington, and is the proud preserver of some of Twyla Tharp's explorations of jazz music.

Conte himself was a show dancer on Broadway and on tour before moving to Chicago and settling down, he thought, to run a studio. He taught ballet, tap, and (shhh!) jazz. The four women on whom he choreographed the thirty-five-minute program that was the foundation of Hubbard Street, back in 1977, were taking his (shhh!) jazz class. Hubbard Street dancers take ballet as company class, but during the troupe's early days they also had (shhh!) jazz class, taught by Conte himself.

Despite all that, the man doesn't like that four-letter word. It "connotes frivolity in the dance world," he says. "People think of jazz as lacking technique and not to be taken seriously. It's unfair but that's the way it is. We've been fighting it since the beginning."

We would do well to listen to Conte. He has built one of the most successful dance companies in the country; it works all year round. Although Hubbard Street did begin as a (shhh!) jazz company, it has a repertoire that ranges far beyond traditional, or even atraditional, definitions. By mixing jazz choreography that demands a strong technique with ballet-based choreography to jazz music (the Tharp pieces) and what Conte calls "ballet-based contemporary dance," he has avoided being grouped with the frivolous of the dance world.

'It Ain't What You Say ...'

Conte knows jazz well enough to take it seriously. He expresses immense respect for Jack Cole, for example, and regards Bob Fosse as "a genius." (Indeed, Gwen Verdon staged Fosse's Percussion 4, from the Broadway experiment Dancin', for Hubbard Street.) Over coffee, while his company was performing in New York City, Conte wondered whether dances extracted from shows could be successfully translated to the concert stage. The choreographer--company director also said he was talking with Tharp about the possibility of her making a jazz ballet for the troupe, but, he added, "not a funky, disco dance; maybe the music will be by Duke Ellington, or someone like that."

In other words, he's talking about serious choreography to serious music, and if the resulting dances are fun to watch, that doesn't make them less significant. Tharp, Cole, Ellington, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Jerome Robbins, Donald McKayle, and Danny Buraczeski are not frivolous artists. Yet, Conte points out, the minute you say that four-letter word, audiences are likely to dismiss the enterprise as insignificant.

It isn't jazz that Conte finds dangerous; it's the way people perceive it. Whose fault is that? The fault of teachers and choreographers, and presenters who, unlike Conte, don't know and respect jazz; they lack the skill, the knowledge, or the dedication needed to demonstrate that jazz dance requires a definite and difficult technique that can serve serious expressive purposes. Conte knows it, you know it, I know it; but as long as "jazz class" means cutesy little routines and "jazz dance" means more of the same for a paying audience, the public's attitude isn't going to change. It's the work, not the word, that needs alteration.

Unsophisticated Gentleman

Which brings us to the strange case of Smuin Ballets/SF, which played at Manhattan's Joyce Theater a week before Hubbard Street Dance Chicago moved in. Michael Smuin was director of San Francisco Ballet from 1973 to 1985. He received twin Tony Award nominations for directing and choreographing Sophisticated Ladies (1981) and won a Tony in 1987 for choreographing the Lincoln Center revival of Anything Goes. In other words, he should know what he's doing.

Yet Smuin Ballets/SF (which sounds remarkably like Feld Ballets/NY, but that's beside the point), presented a program called "Dances With Songs" that suggested that Conte was all too right. Using recordings, mostly of pop music with some verging on jazz, the choreographer put his women in pointe shoes and set them and their partners to performing unimaginative steps that had nothing original to say about the songs. It wasn't just Broadway dance watered down; it was Broadway dance as seen from Noah's Ark. The problem wasn't that one can't dance to pop on pointe but that most of the dances were pointless.

Give Smuin a long-legged, long-haired woman and a red folding chair and suddenly he's actually choreographing. After a few blinks to wake up, you realize that he hasn't forgotten how to make steps, how to surprise us, how to be sexy and smart and sophisticated. But take away his chair and we're back to pas de potatoes, please--uninventive academic steps that don't suit the music--and to movement that goes by as routinely as escalator steps, telling us nothing we didn't know already.

Second Try

American theater dancing is a respectable, reputable, and valuable style of what we call jazz dance. (See Cole, Fosse, McKayle, and Robbins, noted above.) Had "Dances With Songs" been topgrade, Tony-winning Smuin, it might have helped move that style into the concert arena. If numbers from shows aren't transferable, someone might try making numbers that stand on their own without the support of a book musical; I think that's what Smuin had in mind.

I'd like to see him try again, this time seriously thinking jazz, thinking theater, thinking music and steps. He can make a strong effort to prove that classical steps can illuminate pop music, if that was indeed what he set out to prove; but more important, he can try moving Broadwaystyle choreography toward a secure place in concert dance. That is hardly a frivolous (or even a trivial) pursuit.