Beyond the Basics: How to Find Your Unique Style in Jazz Dance
You've mastered the basics of jazz dance—the isolations, the syncopated rhythms, the classic steps. You can execute a clean pirouette, hit a sharp contraction, and glide through a jazz square with precision. But now you find yourself wondering: how do I move beyond technical proficiency to develop a style that's uniquely my own?
Finding your unique voice in jazz dance is a journey of self-discovery that goes far beyond the studio walls. It's about connecting with the rich history of this art form while simultaneously bringing your personal experiences, emotions, and physicality to the movement.
Understand the Roots to Grow New Branches
Before you can innovate, you must understand what came before. Jazz dance is inextricably linked to African rhythms, vernacular jazz, tap, and the social dances of different eras. The great stylists—from Katherine Dunham to Bob Fosse to Luigi—all drew from deep wells of cultural and historical knowledge.
Action Step: Choose one influential jazz choreographer each month. Study their work, understand their signature movements, and try incorporating elements of their style into your practice. Then ask yourself: what would I change? How would my body naturally modify this movement?
Embrace Your Physical Uniqueness
Your body is not identical to anyone else's. Your proportions, flexibility, strength, and natural movement tendencies all contribute to how jazz technique manifests through you. Rather than fighting against your physical attributes, learn to work with them.
Are you particularly long-limbed? Perhaps your style will emphasize fluid, sweeping movements. More compact? Maybe your strength is in quick, sharp isolations. Your unique physique isn't a limitation—it's your artistic signature waiting to be developed.
Develop Your Musical Interpretation
Jazz is fundamentally a conversation with music. How you interpret rhythm and melody becomes a huge part of your stylistic signature. Do you play with the space between beats? Do you emphasize the melody or the underlying rhythm? Do you anticipate or follow the music?
Action Step: Take the same combination and perform it to three different jazz recordings—perhaps a classic big band arrangement, a bebop piece, and a modern jazz fusion track. Notice how the music changes your quality of movement, your timing, your emotional expression.
Cross-Train and Cross-Pollinate
Your unique style will emerge at the intersection of all your influences. Many groundbreaking jazz dancers have drawn from other forms:
- Ballet adds line, extension, and grace
- Modern contributes weight, floor work, and emotional depth
- Hip-hop brings rhythm, attitude, and cultural relevance
- World dances offer new ways of understanding rhythm and expression
Don't just stick to jazz classes. The more diverse your movement vocabulary, the more resources you'll have to draw from when developing your personal style.
Choreograph as Laboratory
There's no better way to discover your movement preferences than by creating your own work. Choreography forces you to make choices—about dynamics, spacing, musicality, and emotion. These choices reveal your aesthetic preferences.
Start small: create a 30-second study focusing on one element that interests you, perhaps a particular quality of movement or rhythmic pattern. Don't judge it as "good" or "bad"—instead, observe what patterns emerge across multiple pieces.
Perform, Reflect, Refine
Your style will never fully develop in the studio alone. It needs the catalyst of performance—the energy of an audience, the pressure of the moment, the spontaneity that comes from living in the movement rather than thinking about it.
After performing, take time to reflect. What moments felt most authentic? When did you feel you were putting on someone else's movement personality? What surprised you about your performance?
Embrace Imperfection as Character
In our technique-obsessed dance world, we sometimes forget that the slight imperfections—the unique way your body executes a turn, the particular angle of your wrist, the way you recover from being off-balance—often contain the seeds of your style.
Instead of erasing all your quirks, examine them. Some may need correction, but others might be the very thing that makes your dancing compelling and memorable.
The Journey Never Ends
Finding your unique style in jazz dance isn't a destination but an ongoing process of discovery. As you grow and change as a person, your dancing will naturally evolve. The jazz greats understood this—they never stopped experimenting, never stopped learning, never stopped listening to how their body wanted to move.
Your unique style isn't out there waiting to be found. It's within you, waiting to be uncovered, nurtured, and set free through the joyous, ever-evolving language of jazz.
