Gus Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago
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Gus Giordano’s 1966 Gang Hep comes down squarely on the side of show dancing. But what daughter Nan Giordano’s reconstruction for this concert makes clear is that the battle’s over–and choreography has won. Even in jazz dance, audiences have come to expect not just individual moves but movement meaningfully arranged. That movement can include maneuvers adapted from vernacular traditions like burlesque and minstrelsy–it can even be about those traditions, as the company shows brilliantly in Hi Jinks later in the program. But Gang Hep is so immersed in the tradition of show dancing it feels like an interesting historical excursion, illustrating the obsolete segregation of that approach from “serious” dance.
Gang Hep features the full company as “heps who do steps” to 1950s jazz, the archetypal hipster music. But the piece seems to be about the steps rather than the dancers, or about the steps in isolation from one another, and so its eye-high kicks, pelvic thrusts, and spread-fingered jazz hands look as dated as burlesque itself. Like a stripper who tries to interest the audience by bumping and grinding harder, the dancers exaggerate their moves–which only spotlights the lack of a choreographic plan. The dance was intended to pay tribute to Jerome Robbins, and some of its ensemble sections have a buoyancy that recalls West Side Story. But Giordano is no Robbins; his work dates as Robbins’s does not. Gang Hep is pleasant enough but forgettable.
Perhaps jazz dancing post-World War II had to be done in a self-deprecating way. Perhaps it seemed presumptuous to claim that dance whose heritage was the minstrel show and the bawdy house could be a serious means of communication. But at some point during the Giordano company’s 40-year history, society has given jazz dance the power of every other art form. Like the art form, the company has outgrown the need to pretend it’s only fooling. It should resist the urge to make fun of itself and just dance.
