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A Love Letter to Anyone Who Thinks Jazz Is Dead
Last Saturday night, I caught a show at a small venue in Brooklyn. Some choreographer named Maya Taylor had put together a piece with a live symphony orchestra — not the watered-down pops version, the real deal. I went in skeptical. I left in tears.
That's the thing about jazz dance right now. Every few months, someone reminds you it's not dead. It's just been hanging out in the wrong places.
Maya Taylor
Taylor doesn't choreograph. She excavates. Her work starts somewhere deep in the torso — a ripple that travels through the spine and arrives in the fingers three beats later. She'll give you traditional jazz isolations, those sharp shoulder rolls and hip pops that define the vocabulary, and then she'll let the movement dissolve into something almost contemporary, almost broken. The contrast is what gets you.
Her piece with the orchestra wasn't a gala performance. It was a conversation between a 20-piece ensemble and eight dancers who moved like they had something to prove. One section had the dancers holding these impossibly slow balances — thirty seconds on one leg, eyes closed, while the strings built toward something underneath them. Then, exactly when you thought they'd fall, the music dropped into a Herbie Hancock groove and everything snapped into sharp, percussive attack.
WhatTaylor understands: emotion lives in the transition. The moment you stop holding your position and decide to go somewhere else. That's where she finds her audiences.
Elijah Johnson
Johnson came up in Philadelphia. That's the first thing people mention about him — the city, the steps, the particular kind of hunger that comes from learning to dance on concrete in rooms where nobody's watching.
His choreography hits different. There's nothing polished about it. The movements are angular, close to the ground, full of those freezes and ticks that come from street dance but twisted into something that belongs on a proscenium stage. He'll build a phrase around a single, sharp contraction — chest pulled in, chin tucked, a held breath made visible.
The thing about Johnson's work is the narrative. He'll put a solo on stage and let it run four minutes without stopping. A story of someone fighting to get from one side of the room to the other. The struggle is real, not metaphor. You can see it in the muscles of the back. You can see it in the way a dancer decides to fall and catches themselves three inches from the floor, holds there, then explodes back up.
He makes jazz dangerous again. That's his contribution.
Sophia Martinez
Martinez tells you her ideas first. She'll start a piece with a title on a投影 screen — something like "What My Grandmother's Hands Knew" — and then she builds the choreography around that premise like she's writing a novel.
She's the literary one. Her pieces have chapters, arcs, moments where you realize thirty seconds in that you're looking at a scene from something that happened before you were born. Her "Echoes of the Past" wasn't a history lesson. It was a collage of movement memories — some jazz, some modern, some things that belonged to choreographer's parents — woven together so you felt the weight of time without ever getting hit over the head with it.
She works in details. A specific turn-out. A particular way of falling that her choreographer picked up from a YouTube video of the Nicholas Brothers filmed in 1942. These small inheritances, passed down through bodies.
For Martinez, jazz dance is a conversation with the dead. She's not trying to invent something new. She's trying not to let things disappear.
Liam O'Connor
O'Connor is the wild one. Or at least, that's what people say about him. He puts dancers in places you don't expect — in the audience, behind you, under the stage. His pieces have no clear beginning. You walk in and the movement is already happening.
His latest project, "Fluid Boundaries," took place in a converted warehouse in Queens. No stage. Dancers moved on the same floor as the audience. At one point, a performer walked right up to a guy in the front row and held eye contact for a full 45 seconds without blinking. The audience didn't know what to do. Neither did the dancer. That's the point.
O'Connor's work is about presence. The moment right now, this specific place, these specific bodies in a room together. He'll build a complicated phrase and then have the dancer stop halfway through it and stand there confused. The choreography acknowledges itself — points at its own absurdity — and keeps going anyway.
He's the one telling you that jazz dance doesn't have rules. It never did.
Ava Thompson
Thompson is 26. She's too young to be this good.
Her work is theatrical in the old sense — big emotions, clear story, moments that make audiences gasp out loud. She'll do a turn sequence that ends in a fall so dramatic you'd swear someone died, but it's a joke. She's that kind of choreographer. The dramatic pause, the carefully timed joke, the moment that makes you realize you've been had.
Her collaboration with a visual artist last month combined live painting with live dancing. The painter created a backdrop in real time while the dancers moved, so the stage was always changing behind them. By the end, the canvas was covered in the evidence of the movement — colors and splatters and marks that recorded where the bodies had been.
Thompson wants you to feel something. Not think about it, not analyze it. She wants to hit that moment where a jump lands exactly on the downbeat and you feel it in your chest.
The Thing That Ties Them All Together
Here's what Maya Taylor said in an interview once, and I think about it all the time: "The danger with jazz is thinking you're preserving it. You're not. You're freeze-dried it. You're making it safe."
These five choreographers aren't keeping jazz dance in a box. They're opening it up, letting it get messy, and daring you to watch. That's the entire point.
