Not just her father's daughter: Nan Giordano carries on the family business--jazz dance--her way.

Imagine growing up with dance as a family business. That's what happened to Nan Giordano, who was "very little" forty years ago when her father, now a legendary teacher, started the school and unique concert dance company that came to be called Gus Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago. Performing more than ever with Nan at the helm, the company has gone in new directions while maintaining her dad's vision. [] "I grew up just in awe of my father," she says. "It was such a wonderful upbringing. We were always going to performances. We lived in Paris for three months. We went to Germany. And the dance company--I thought it was the coolest thing in the world."

Internationally known and respected, the troupe founded and has sponsored the Jazz Dance World Congress since 1990 and this spring was negotiating on performances in China, Italy, and Brazil.

A dancer with the company for six years, its associate director for seven, and artistic director since 1993, Nan has a warm manner, animated features, and a pleasantly ragged voice. She describes the Giordano school and company as having been a mom-and-pop operation in which her mother was the "behind-the-scenes doer." Peg Giordano (who died in 1993) didn't want any recognition, Nan says, while Gus, now 79, was "always in the limelight. So they were a good team." The mother of 6-year-old Keenan, Nan adds, "I don't see how they did it, I really don't. They raised four children, ran a dance school, ran a dance company; she organized my father's personal schedule, and my father taught ballroom in all the schools on the North Shore of Lake Michigan in the Chicago area--sixth, seventh, and eighth grade." He also traveled much of the year, teaching master classes in Giordano jazz technique for every major dance teaching organization in the United States. And in the late 1960s and early '70s, he choreographed the Waa-Mu shows--music and comedy reviews--at Northwestern University, where one of his dancers and a teacher at the studio, Judi Sheppard Missett, founder of Jazzercize, earned her degree. (For many years, Northwestern dance and theater students have enjoyed a discounted class rate at the Giordano school, and quite a few company dancers have been students at the university. Northwestern's dance chair was co-sponsor of the first three Jazz Dance World Congresses, providing dorms and venues for classes and performances.)

Today Nan has the help of several people. Her sister, Amy Curran, is treasurer of the school and the Congress, while brother Patrick, an Illinois attorney, helped form the board. Her brother Marc is spearheading efforts to document their father's career on video. Ben Hodge, a longtime family acquaintance with a master's in theater who had been the CEO of a video-film distribution company, joined the board in 1986 and is now executive director of the company and the Jazz Dance World Congress. (Gus says, "He's like Nan's mom, and Nan is like me, the artistic one.")

Jon Lehrer, a dancer with the company for five years who was recently made associate director, says, "You never feel you're an employee, but part of this big family." Coming from a modern dance background, he didn't really know what to expect with the Giordano company. "I found this wonderful world," he says. "They're cultivating jazz, not letting it die but redefining it."

Even the company's studio, about to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, has a history. Ensconced on the top floor of a building in downtown Evanston, a northern suburb of Chicago, it was once a bowling alley--and you can still see the lanes in the polished wooden floor. This is where Nan took classes as a child, beginning at age 8. She didn't warm to the discipline right away. "I loved my modern and hated my ballet," she says. "Even at that age, I didn't like the rigidity." She was also afraid of her teacher--a theme that continued in her first year at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Forced into a pointe class when she'd never danced on pointe, she says she had a professor who reputedly put burning cigarettes under his students' legs to get them higher during barre exercises.

Nan didn't begin jazz classes until the age of 14, because at that time the Giordano technique wasn't taught to children. "Until young dancers find their center, which is in the pelvis in our technique, they can only go to a certain level," she says. She's careful to add that the Giordano style isn't sexual, but it is sensual. "The kids come in so talented and so well trained now, but they don't have a sense of where the movement comes from. It's what my father calls `artificial.' Once you get the passion and the soul and the feeling, that's what carries it over to the next place." Though they now start teaching jazz at 8, they try to do it "in a tasteful, age-appropriate manner."

Nan remembers several experiences as formative. She came home from college with "that first-year weight gain." Then dancing with Giordano Dance Theater, the training company, she was told by its director, "in front of all the dancers, that I was fat and that I wouldn't be dancing unless I got the weight off. I was crying, I was humiliated, I hated her. But I never had a weight issue again." When she has to deal with the same problem among her dancers, however, "I tend to do it differently, because I know how mortified I was."

Plagued by knee injuries in high school and during her early years with the company, Nan underwent surgery--which kept her from touring to Italy, a big disappointment. But her doctor told her having a good attitude would speed healing. "And I did," she says. "I asked myself, `Am I going to enjoy this process or feel sorry for myself?' So for one year I had a ball, with my friends and parties. I just kept hearing the doctor's words, and now I'm a firm believer in that positive energy."

She also recalls that when she first joined the company, "there was an older group and a younger group of dancers--and a lot of friction between the two camps. I saw that it does matter what happens offstage. Not that everyone has to love everyone else, but to have that respect and camaraderie. Now we hear all the time, `Gosh, your dancers are relating and really having fun, and it's not forced.'"

A self-described perfectionist, Nan says, "I didn't just jump into the company--my father was really, really hard on me. I earned it." Yet Gus was so proud of a review that focused on Nan's dancing that he had it blown up and framed. "Was I going to hang it in my home?" she asks. "No way. But I kept it in my closet for years."

In 1998, her father talked her into collaborating on one of the first pieces she choreographed for the company, a jazz version of Firebird. "It was a battle," she says, "especially at first. I hated some of the music." (The score contained some of Stravinsky's original music plus Charlie Parker's 1940s variations on it.) "But finally he got me to do it, and I loved it."

She describes the Giordano style as strong and clean, with an impulse that starts in the dancer's pelvis and moves out to the limbs. She is carrying on that tradition, with an emphasis on "very basic, raw" technique that can be adapted to different choreographic styles in the repertoire and a wide variety of music. Her own choreography, she says, is more feminine and fluid than her father's; he notes that it's also more contemporary.

Partly to challenge the dancers, partly to offer the audience variety, Gus Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago is more of a repertory company than it was in Gus's day, when he did most of the choreography. It now performs works by Lehrer, Mia Michaels, and Tony Powell, among others. Nan has continued to choreograph, if somewhat reluctantly. "I'm so critical of what I do," she says. "But I really love Taal," the sensual piece with an Eastern theme she made last fall. "The response I've gotten to it is just what I wanted: beautiful.

"We need more beauty. My mom used to say that my father and I lived in a dream world. She would say it in a loving way. My father's a real romantic, as am I. For me to be carrying on his life's work yet putting my own stamp on it--I know he's very proud of me. I like that."

AT A GLANCE

Gus Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago 614 Davis St., Evanston, IL 60201 847/866-6779; fax [phone] www.giordanojazzdance.com [e-mail]

Founder/Director: Gus Giordano

Artistic Director: Nan Giordano

Executive Director: Ben Hodge

Associate Director: Jon Lehrer

GUS GIORDANO JAZZ DANCE CHICAGO BEGAN IN 1962 AS Dance Incorporated Chicago, becoming the Gus Giordano Dance Company in 1966. Once the company identified its mission as the development and preservation of American jazz dance, its name changed again, to Gus Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago. In 1974, it became the first jazz dance company to tour the Soviet Union.

Many of the company's early performances were broadcast on Chicago's public television station, WTTW; one of them, a seventeen-minute pas de deux called The Rehearsal, choreographed by Gus Giordano, won an Emmy Award in 1980.

The company's repertoire includes works by Gus Giordano, Nan Giordano, Jon Lehrer, Richard Arve, Randy Duncan, Liz Imperio, Mia Michaels, Tony Powell, Billy Siegenfeld, and Margo Sappington.

Each summer, GGJDC serves as the host performing company at the Jazz Dance World Congress, alternating years between the United States and other countries.

* Concert jazz dance company of 10 dancers (apprentice company: Giordano II, 10 dancers)

* 30-40-week contract

* Non-union company

* Annual budget: $500,000

* Age range: 21-30

* Height range: 5'-6' 1"

* Auditions: Main company: Spring, at Giordano Dance Center. Giordano II: Summer, at Jazz Dance World Congress

* Affiliated school: Giordano Dance Center, Evanston, Illinois. Classes are open to the public, ages 3 to adult, and include jazz, ballet, tap, modern, hip-hop, and ballroom. Levels: Beginning to advanced, children, teens, and adults.

* Scholarships: Awarded by audition only, for dancers ages 18-23

* Music: Recorded

* Venues: Varied, from large theaters to school gymnasiums

* Touring: Performances and lecture-demonstrations in the U.S. and abroad. Past tours have included Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Russia, the Bahamas, Brazil, Canada, and Japan.

* Outreach: "Jazz Dance Beat ... Then and Now," a lecture-demonstration offered at schools and community centers in the Chicago area and on tour. Also college teaching residencies.

Company members pictured:

Nan and Gus Giordano (page 24), Jaret Ditch and Lizzie MacKenzie (page 26), and Filomar Tariao (above left).

Laura Molzahn is an editor and dance writer at the Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly.