On a Tuesday evening in Burlington's South End, fifteen dancers filter into a drafty converted warehouse for an advanced jazz class. The playlist moves from Duke Ellington to Janelle Monáe. The choreography shifts from Jack Cole isolations to contemporary fusion. By the end of the hour, the floor is slick with sweat, and a 17-year-old pre-professional is trading improv phrases with a dancer in her fifties who drove 40 miles from the Northeast Kingdom.
This is what jazz dance looks like in Vermont in 2024: older than the hype suggests, more geographically scattered than the press releases admit, and currently riding a wave of institutional investment that may determine whether the state's dancers stay here or leave for Boston and New York.
The Education Layer: Building Technique in a Rural State
The Vermont Jazz Dance Academy opened in 2021 with three studios and a straightforward premise—fill the gap between recreational studio classes and pre-professional training. That gap was real. Before VJDA, dancers seeking serious jazz instruction often commuted to Montpelier or crossed into New Hampshire.
The academy's faculty includes working dancers with regional theater and commercial credits, among them Maya Torres, formerly a dancer with Rennie Harris Puremovement, and Jonah Keller, whose choreography credits include tours for mid-level pop acts. Torres teaches an adult advanced class in Jack Cole technique—the Hollywood-era style that fused Broadway jazz with ethnic dance forms—while Keller runs a Saturday youth program that blends tap fundamentals with jazz line and rhythm.
VJDA's curriculum is deliberately eclectic: Luigi technique for alignment, vernacular jazz for historical grounding, and contemporary fusion for current audition rooms. The academy now serves roughly 130 students per semester, a number that co-founder Sarah Delucia says exceeded their five-year projection in half that time.
"We're not trying to replicate a New York conservatory," Delucia says. "We're trying to build something that makes sense for dancers who want to stay in this region."
That aspiration faces a familiar Vermont problem. The state produced 1,200 live performances across all disciplines in 2023, according to the Vermont Arts Council, but paid dance work remains scarce. VJDA's response is to train versatile dancers—jazz technique as a foundation, not a destination.
The Presentation Problem: One Festival's Bet on Cross-Genre Programming
The Burlington Dance Festival, now in its tenth year, has become the state's most visible dance platform. Last year's attendance reached 4,200 across four days, up from 2,800 in 2019. For 2024, festival director Lena Okonkwo programmed a tribute to Alvin Ailey—a choice that raised eyebrows among jazz purists, given Ailey's primary identification with modern dance.
Okonkwo defends the decision by pointing to specific repertoire. The festival will stage excerpted performances of "Night Creature" (1974), Ailey's collaboration with Duke Ellington, and "For 'Bird'—With Love" (1984), his tribute to Charlie Parker. Both works lean heavily on jazz idioms—blues structures, swing phrasing, and the relaxed weight of social dance.
"Ailey understood jazz as a through-line, not a category," Okonkwo says. "If we're serious about jazz dance, we have to show where it intersects with modern, with ballet, with the concert stage."
The festival's broader lineup includes workshops in Broadway jazz, street jazz, and Afro-jazz fusion, plus a panel on the economics of rural touring for dance companies. That mix reflects a tension running through Vermont's scene: is "jazz dance" a specific historical form, or a flexible umbrella?
Artist Development and the Retention Question
While academies and festivals build infrastructure, The Green Mountain Dance Collective (GMDC) works at the individual artist level. The collective currently has 22 member artists, ranging from choreographers to lighting designers, and functions as a shared administrative and production resource.
In 2024, GMDC is launching its Emerging Artist Mentorship Program, which will pair five early-career jazz dance artists with established professionals for a nine-month cycle. Each mentee receives $2,500 in project support, rehearsal space, and a produced showing at GMDC's fall showcase.
"The hardest part isn't making the work," says GMDC director Paul Vachon. "It's finding the money and the audience when you're not in a major city."
That challenge sits at the center of Vermont's jazz dance moment. Institutions are multiplying. Training is deepening. But the state still loses most of its serious dance graduates to larger markets. The **Vermont Dance Alliance
