At 8 p.m. on a Thursday, the third floor of the Cordova Building smells like rosin and sweat. Through the door of Studio B, a piano track bleeds out—1958 Broadway accelerated to 140 bpm—while twelve dancers rehearse a piece that will premiere at the Macy City Dance Festival in six weeks. One of them, Jaylen Morris, is practicing a sequence that didn't exist two years ago: a tilted pirouette that collapses into a footwork pattern borrowed from Chicago house music, finished with a Fosse-style wrist flick.
This is what jazz dance looks like in Macy City right now. Not a single style, but a collision of them—held together by a small, fiercely competitive community trying to define what "jazz" even means in 2024.
The Fusion Question: Is It Still Jazz?
The most visible shift in Macy City's studios is also the most contested. Choreographers are increasingly treating jazz technique as a chassis rather than a destination, loading it with hip-hop, contemporary, and street-dance vocabularies that would have been alien to the form even a decade ago.
Amara Okonkwo, whose Urban Swing debuted at the Macy City Dance Festival in March, has become the face of this approach—willingly or not. Her piece alternates between the fluid suspension of jazz dance and the sharp, grounded attacks of street styles. "I'm not trying to preserve some pure idea of jazz," she said during a rehearsal break at the Fulton Street Arts Collective. "I'm interested in jazz footwork with hip-hop's center of gravity."
Not everyone in her orbit agrees. Marcus Yee, who teaches classic Fosse technique at the Downtown Dance Conservatory, watched a clip of Urban Swing and was unimpressed. "It's competent movement," he said. "But if you strip the costuming and the marketing, what's left that requires jazz training? The answer matters, because enrollment in traditional jazz classes here is down 30 percent since 2019."
Okonkwo disputes the premise. "Fosse was stealing from burlesque and vaudeville. Jack Cole was pulling from Indian classical dance. The panic about purity always comes from people who just missed the last revolution."
Tech on the Body, and the Backlash
Two floors above Okonkwo's rehearsal, Studio 14 has installed a rig that would not look out of place in an electronic-music venue. Dancers there wear MiMU motion-sensitive gloves—originally developed for musicians—whose data feeds into Disguise media servers, allowing performers to manipulate digital projections in real time with their arm movements. The studio's signature piece, Contact Trace, ends with a soloist "painting" a 20-foot video wall through choreographed gesture.
Choreographer Delia Reyes developed the work over eight months with a $15,000 city arts grant. "The glove isn't a gimmick," she insisted. "It adds a layer of compositional choice. The dancer is simultaneously performing movement and designing the visual environment for that movement."
Still, the technology has drawn skepticism from critics and peers alike. Local reviewer Tomas Hendricks called Contact Trace "an impressive light show in search of a dance piece" in the Macy City Arts Weekly. And at a post-show panel in February, veteran tap dancer Rosa Cantu was characteristically blunt: "If the power goes out, what do you have? I want to see the body, not the interface."
The economics are also unresolved. MiMU gloves retail for roughly $1,200 per pair, and the Disguise server requires a trained operator. For now, tech-enhanced jazz in Macy City remains confined to a handful of well-funded studios and festival commissions.
The Retro Pivot: Nostalgia as Strategy
While some studios push forward, others have found commercial success moving backward. The "Vintage Verve" class at the Marlowe Theatre School—a twice-weekly session emphasizing Thirties and Forties jazz technique—has a waitlist that stretches into June. Instructor Pauline Voss credits streaming-era aesthetics: "Shows like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and the Some Like It Hot revival made this movement vocabulary legible to young dancers again. They come in wanting to look like they stepped out of a Technicolor musical."
The revival is not purely nostalgic. Voss's students typically arrive in sweatpants, learn a traditional combination, and then are assigned to re-choreograph its ending using only contemporary music. "The tension between the historical shape and the current sound is where the interesting work happens," she said.
This retro turn may also reflect economic pressure. Festival programmers and commercial clients, Voss noted, "like jazz when it reads as jazz—when an audience member can say, 'I know what I'm looking at.' A Fosse line
