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Back in the 1930s, a group of Black teenagers in Harlem were doing something that would eventually fill Broadway theaters and Hollywood musicals—they just didn't know it yet.
They called it the Lindy Hop. No studios, no agents, no choreographers. Just a bunch of kids in dance halls on 133rd Street, throwing each other around like human cannonballs, improvising to the music of Duke Ellington and Chick Webb. The moves came from African dance traditions, from tap, from the chaos of street parties. It was raw, it was dangerous, it was acrobatic in ways that could genuinely injure you. That's kind of the point.
Then Hollywood showed up.
The Heist
White filmmakers started noticing. They wanted that energy—that impossible, swinging, joyful energy—but they needed dancers who looked like their audience. So they found white performers, taught them simplified versions, and put them in movies like Stormy Weather and Hellzapoppin'. The original Black creators? They got background shots when they were lucky. Most of the time, the innovations they pioneered were just... called something else.
Gene Kelly could dance, genuinely. Fred Astaire too. But the footwork, the rhythm, the angularity that made it feel alive—that came from dancers like Frankie Manning and Norma Miller, from the Savoy Ballroom, from a community that never got credited in the opening titles.
Meanwhile, tap was doing its own thing. Bill "Bojangles" Robinson was making up words to the tap, creating a language with his feet. Then Broadway got involved, and tap became a production number. The rawness got smoothed out. The edges got filed down. That's what Broadway does—it takes something messy and alive and makes it look professional.
The Comeback
By the 1980s, jazz dance had become almost unrecognizable. It was all turned-out feet and jazz squares and competitions. Clean. Safe. A little dead.
Then hip-hop arrived and lit a match.
Kids in LA and New York started blending—taking the old isolations, adding pop-and-lock, pulling in breakdancing floorwork, mixing funk and James Brown and whatever was playing at the club. They called it street jazz, or street-style jazz, or just "jazz" when you couldn't tell where the genre ended and something else began. The moves were sharper, the floor work was lower, the attitude was different. It wasn't about being pretty. It was about being hit by the music.
This is where someone like Brian Puskar comes in—a dancer who grew up studying traditional jazz technique, then started incorporating hip-hop vocabulary. Or the choreography in music videos by Janet Jackson and Madonna, where you couldn't quite tell if you were watching jazz or something new entirely. That's the point. You're not supposed to tell.
Contemporary jazz then pushed even further—thinking less about hitting marks and more about Release (that Graham technique, that abandon), more about the emotional arc of a piece. Dancers like Mia Michaels and Joey Garrowte made routines that felt like storms. You couldn't do those in a competition—they were too raw, too personal, too committed to a single interpretation.
The Mess It's In Now
Here's the honest part: jazz dance doesn't really know what it is anymore. Is it Broadway? Is it hip-hop adjacent? Is it a technical category in dance competitions where the judges don't agree on what they're watching?
The answer is probably all of the above.
Which is exactly how it should be.
Every generation takes jazz dance and makes it something else. That's the entire history—Lindy Hoppers took African dance and ragtime and made the Charleston. Hollywood took Lindy Hop and made it theatrical. Hip-hop took the theatrical version and made it dangerous again. Now TikTok kids are making it into fifteen-second challenges. The purists will tell you it's lost its way. The dancers will tell you it's exactly where it's supposed to be.
The moves might change. The music might change. But the one thing that's always stayed the same: someone, somewhere, is taking jazz dance and making it their own—and someone else is mad about it.
That's not a bug. That's the feature.
