From Bharata Natyam to Bop: Jack Cole's “Modern” Jazz Dance

Abstract

It's what we used to see in the dance halls in the twenties and thirties, that is what real jazz dance is. This was a group of kids who did all those dances that were in then: the Camel Walk, the Charleston, the Lindy Hop…all stemming from African dance and all filled with authentic feeling. And the root of all these elaborations was the Lindy. Whatever is danced in the name of jazz dancing must come from the Lindy, necessarily theatricalized and broadened for the stage, of course.—Jack Cole, “It's Gone Silly,” 19631947 was the year Jack Cole created Sing, Sing, Sing to the recording made famous by “King of Swing” Benny Goodman and his Big Band. “[We] kicked, spun, slammed and slid on our knees for seven minutes in true Jack Cole style,” said Rod Alexander about the dance performed by the Jack Cole Dancers when it premiered in New York at the Latin Quarter (Loney 1984, 85). “Everyone came off the floor, gasped, and threw up. It was a ball-breaker, a number that asked the impossible,” remembered Buzz Miller (Miller 1992). Described by critics as “a dance in the style of Harlem” (Martin 1947) and “a primitive dance of primitive ecstasy” (Terry 1947b), Sing, Sing, Sing was a stylized Lindy Hop, or jitterbug, that popular swing-era social dance that flung and flipped partners into “breakaway” solos and daring “air” steps. More than a step, the jitterbug was a style, a state of mind: a violent, even frenzied athleticism made it hazardous, exciting, sexual, cathartic; the jitterbugger became synonymous with the “hepcat,” a swing addict. Sing, Sing, Sing, however, was not a pat reproduction of the jitterbug. Cole had captured and distilled its energetic spirit. He codified its movement, disciplined its form, tamed and readied it for the stage.