On a Thursday evening at the St. Mary's Jazz Dance Conservatory, fifteen students line up across a sprung-maple floor, their reflections catching in floor-to-ceiling mirrors. The playlist shifts from Count Basie to Beyoncé in a single class period, and that deliberate range—Lindy Hop fundamentals one moment, commercial jazz the next—captures something essential about what's happening in St. Mary's City right now. After decades of operating on the margins of the region's dance economy, jazz dance is experiencing a measurable resurgence here, driven by two expanding academies, a handful of working choreographers who chose to stay local, and a city arts grant program that has pumped roughly $180,000 into dance infrastructure since 2021.
From the Savoy Ballroom to the Studio
To understand why this matters, you have to look back. Jazz dance emerged from African American social dance traditions of the early twentieth century—the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Lindy Hop—evolving through the theatrical innovations of Katherine Dunham, the codified technique of Jack Cole, and the cinematic geometry of Bob Fosse. It is a form built on syncopation, individual expression, and cultural exchange.
For years, St. Mary's City had little sustained institutional presence for this lineage. Ballet and contemporary dominated the studio landscape. But a small group of instructors, many with New York and Los Angeles training, began resettling here in the late 2010s, drawn by lower costs and an underserved market. What started as guest workshops turned into permanent programs. Now, in 2024, the city supports two full-scale academies with year-round jazz curricula and regular student showcases.
The St. Mary's Jazz Dance Conservatory: Technique First
The Conservatory, located in a renovated warehouse district near the waterfront, occupies what was once a textile mill. The conversion is specific and functional: seven studios with professional-grade Marley flooring, a physical-therapy partnership with a local sports-medicine clinic, and a 150-seat black-box theater used for monthly student showings.
The faculty includes choreographer Alicia Voss, whose Broadway assisting credits include Chicago and Ain't Misbehavin', and Marcus Delgado, a former member of the Jazz Tap Ensemble who teaches vernacular jazz and rhythm tap. The curriculum is structured in levels and requires all intermediate and advanced students to complete a semester-long course in jazz history before advancing to performance ensembles.
"We treat the classroom as an archive and a laboratory," Voss says. "You can't execute a Fosse tilt with any authority if you don't know where the vocabulary came from."
The Conservatory's approach leans traditional. Repertoire classes draw from mid-century musical theater and concert jazz. Contemporary influences enter primarily through elective tracks in commercial jazz and video performance. Annual tuition for the pre-professional track runs approximately $4,200, with need-based scholarships covering roughly thirty percent of enrolled students.
The Rhythmic Arts Center: Cross-Training and Fusion
Three miles east, the Rhythmic Arts Center operates out of a smaller but comparably equipped facility with four studios and a focus on interdisciplinary training. Where the Conservatory builds walls between historical periods and styles, Rhythmic Arts deliberately breaks them down.
Founder and director Priya Malhotra, who trained in bharatanatyam before studying jazz and modern dance at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, designed the core curriculum around what she calls "collision courses"—semester-long intensives that pair jazz with another form. Recent combinations include jazz and house dance, jazz and West African, and jazz and Bollywood. The center draws students from across Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware, with a smaller but growing out-of-state enrollment from Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
"We're less interested in purity than in conversation," Malhotra says. "Jazz has always been a hybrid form. We're trying to make that visible in the training."
Rhythmic Arts offers more flexible scheduling, with drop-in classes and shorter-term workshops alongside its certificate program. A ten-class card costs $220; the full-year certificate program runs about $3,600.
Beyond the Studio Walls
Both academies have begun exporting their presence into public space. Since 2022, the Conservatory has partnered with the St. Mary's City Arts Alliance on Jazz in the Plaza, a monthly open-air performance series in the downtown pedestrian corridor that draws crowds of 200 to 400 depending on the weather. Rhythmic Arts runs a free weekly community class in a church basement on the east side, targeted at adults with no prior dance experience.
These outreach efforts have created overlap between the institutions' student bodies. It is common to find dancers taking historical technique at the Conservatory and fusion electives at Rhythmic Arts. The result is less a rivalry than an ecosystem—one that instructors and students say was hard to imagine a decade ago.
What Comes Next
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