Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance.

Having started out as an actor, I learned young that the only sensible answer to any question beginning with the words "Can you" is "Of course." I was a theater critic for Women's Wear Daily when the arts editor asked, "Can you do dance?" "Of course," I replied. I'd seen New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre (in Europe), the Royal Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet (once), and Martha Graham: what more did I need?

A few years ago, Richard Philp asked, "Can you do a column about jazz dance?" and, by reflex, I answered, "Of course." To help ensure that I didn't make a complete fool of myself, Richard lent me a book (that I still haven't returned)--Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance by Marshall and Jean Stearns. I never returned it because it was absolutely fascinating and it also was out of print.

Marshall Stearns, who taught college English, specializing in Chaucer, loved jazz, thought about jazz, taught about jazz, wrote about jazz, and, as the foundation of all this, took jazz seriously. His The Story of Jazz became a standard work in its field, and he then went on to document the dancing that went with the music. With his wife Jean, he spent seven years doing research, not only in libraries but among the living archives of dancers' memories. They conducted interviews with every jazz dancer they could find, at a time when jazz dancers seemed to be members of an endangered species.

Now, thanks to Da Capo Press, Jazz DAnce is again available, as a paperback ($16.95), augmented with a new foreword and afterword by Brenda Bufalino, artistic director of the American Tap Dance Orchestra. Although the book takes its subject only up to 1966--when Marshall Stearns died of a heart attack shortly after the manuscript was completed--it's still essential reading for anyone interested in jazz, in dance, and in the American musical theater.

Tracing the Traditions

Perhaps the most important point made in the book--remember, it was published nearly thirty years ago--was that jazz dance, like jazz music, derives from African traditions. The Stearnses describe an evening in the early 1950s when they brought together Asadata Dafora from Sierra Leone, Geoffrey Holder from Trinidad, and Al Minns and Leon James from Harlem's Savoy Ballroom: "One dancer hardly began a step before another exclaimed with delight, jumped to his feet, and executed a related version of his own."

The authors make it clear, as did dancer and historian Joe Nash in a recent interview ["Jazzdance," March] that the fishtail, the mooche, the shimmy, the snake hips, and other jazz steps are defined, definite, specific movements; that jazz, like ballet, has a specific vocabulary. Indeed, in an appendix, the book records selected jazz dance steps in Labanotation.

Going on, the Stearnses record the history of American vernacular dance (jazz dance) as it moved from social venues into the theater. They begin with the minstrel show ("the most popular form of entertainment in the United States for more than half a century--1845 to 1900a approximately") and continue through the years of the "Negro musical" vaudeville, and Broadway.

The influence of the Theater Owners' Booking Association (T.O.B.A.)--performers said the initials stood for "Tough on Black Artists"--is discussed, as are the contributions of songwriters, choreographers, and the performers, black and white, themselves. As the authors chronicle the absorption by the white theater of black vernacular steps, they describe the work and the personalities of the comics, the eccentrics, the tappers, and the class acts. One of the joys of Jazz Dance is that it's a book for browsing through as well as for studying.

|Nobody' Was Somebody

History is all too easily forgotten, and theater history fades faster than most varieties. Last year, when the Boys' Choir of Harlem appeared on Broadway in a show staged by Geoffrey Holder, guest artist Carmen de Lavallade sang the classic vaudeville song "Nobody." I wondered how many audience members would have recognized the name of the great dancer-comedian Bert Williams, whose trademark it was.

The great names--Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Fred Astaire, Frank Condos, Buck and Bubbles, and Coles and Atkins, among others--are recorded, and their achievements analyzed as well as honored. Josephine Baker, the Stearnses report, "exploded rather than emerged," when she appeared, at the age of sixteen in the musical Shuffle Along, which had lyrics by Noble Sissle and music by Eubie Blake.

The show opened in New York in 1921 and, the Stearnses write, "Negro musicals were in demand thereafter and dancing in musical comedy finally took wing." Katherine Dunham is given far less attention than she deserves, but in general Jazz Dance provides a detailed, loving history of a part of our dance heritage that until recently has been given far less than its due.

Bufalino's foreword and afterword are concerned largely with tap; she writes with passion about the revival and rediscovery of the form, starting with the appearance by the Copasetics at the State University of New York at New Paltz in 1973: "a courtship and a new history of tap had begun."

Jazz Dance is a social document as well as the history of an art. It records--without polemics, and in a simple, factual style--the belittling of black artists by white culture. (There was a time when black performers had to cover their faces with burnt cork, in imitation of white dancers' caricatures of blacks.) Yet those performers were essential in shaping American theatrical dance, and anyone involved in that art form should know who they were and what they did, and how their work brought us from "Jump Jim Crow" to Jelly's Last Jam.