The real thing.

Most of what we're accustomed to call "jazz dancing" isn't, according to Joe Nash. We'd be more accurate if we described it as "American theater dance"--the style familiar to us from Broadway and Hollywood musicals.

"True jazz," Nash explains, "doesn't have a vocabulary except the one you find in the black community; it uses vernacular movement. Just because you use jazz music doesn't mean you're making jazz dance. For example, Talley Beatty's Road of the Phoebe Snow isn't jazz--it's modern dance. His The Stack-Up, though, is jazz: it uses the shimmy, the fishtail, the mooche, and the shorty george." All those steps are taken from the vernacular and are as precisely defined as an arabesque or a battement tendu, Nash points out, and they make up the foundation of true jazz.

Nash's career in dance spans more than four decades--which comes as something of a shock when you see his compact body and his young-eyed face. When he tells you he appeared on Broadway in Showboat in 1946, your first reaction is a silent You're putting me on--you can't be old enough. These days he's a consultant and lecturer for The Black Tradition in American Dance, a project of American Dance Festival (ADF). and a leading archivist of black American dance. During his performing career, he danced in the companies of Pearl Primus and Donald McKayle, as well as on Broadway. As a result, he has practical as well as scholarly knowledge of both authentic jazz and theater dance, and he likes to make a distinction between the two.

Which doesn't mean that he's calling one style good and another bad. He's simply pointing out that choreographers have taken elements of true, vernacular jazz and incorporated them into a wider-ranging form of presentation. According to Nash, Katherine Dunham, who toured the United States and Europe with opulent revues that employed black American dancers doing Caribbean steps, and Jack Cole, a major Broadway choreographer, "simultaneously discovered isolation techniques," the ability to keep one part of the body still while others moved.

Dunham, born in 1912, is an anthropologist as well as a dancer; she taught a specific and influential technique and her work inspired Alvin Ailey and other artists who were striving to bring black dance into the American mainstream. "When we heard the name Dunham," Nash says, "we all ran to the theater to pick up tickets."

Cole (1913-74), who began his career with Denishawn, influenced an entire generation of theater choreographers and jazz dancers. When Nash was a young dancer, he recalls, "Jack Cole was a god; nothing like his dancing had ever been seen on Broadway. He used the total body; he had the freedom of movement everybody was striving for. [However] Cole was seeking a theater technique, not a jazz technique. From his work Hollywood and Broadway picked up the isolation."

|JAZZ IS AN ATTITUDE'

In a sense, the historian continues, can't teach jazz because jazz is an attitude and you can't teach attitude. To dance jazz you have to think of yourself as being bluesy or jazzy. To understand it you have to go back to the brothel: the women used their individual walks to attract customers. They moved with a sense of freedom, of contempt for everything. of relaxation. Real jazz is folk dancing; it came from the juke joints. There was no space on the dance floor so couples leaned on each other's bodies and did the grind--and that's where the slow drag came from."

Like any other form of folk dance, Nash explains, "jazz must be theatricalized" for stage presentation. That's where major choreographers--black (Dunham, Primus, Ailey, Beatty) and white (Cole, Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse)--come in. Those artists took elements of a folk heritage and expanded it, developed disciplined, specific techniques, and made the style we think of as jazz dancing.

The future of jazz--the theater form, that is--"will be in the hands of choreographers who can create, and companies that can preserve the style," Nash says. "We need to reconstruct the masterworks of outstanding choreographers and present them." The work of ADF's Black Traditions program and the works of troupes such as Dayton Contemporary Dance Company are maintaining the heritage, he says.

However, Nash doesn't spend his time looking backward. He sees new vernacular steps emerging and being incorporated into theater dance. "Break dancing and electric boogie are having an influence," he says. "Step dancing, which is derived from the gumboat dancing that comes from Africa, is popular on black campuses. "Creativity is always based upon things that are basically familiar to you."

In other words, theater dance always has absorbed vernacular dance, and it will continue to do so. New steps are being invented, and new generations of choreographers will see them, absorb them, and move them onto the stage.

The problem Nash has encountered during his lecture tours is not the need to educate Americans about jazz or about the black dance tradition in general "but about dance, regardless of ethnicity."

People who choreograph or perform or teach dance, or merely write about it, often believe that the American public is well informed about the art form. It is not, Nash found. Traveling around the country has made him uncomfortably aware that, in many communities, people know almost nothing about dance.

The mission of Dunham, of Cole, of Primus, of all the pioneers--to bring dance to the entire American public--is nowhere near completion. Creativity continues, Joe Nash says, but the audience must be cultivated, educated, and excited. There's plenty of work to be done.