Jump Rhythm Jazz Project

Josephine Louis Theater at Northwestern University, Chicago

About the Show

Jump Rhythm Jazz Project (JRJP), an Emmy-nominated Chicago-based national and international touring company of emotion-charged dancers that celebrates the rhythmic core of all jazz performance in high-energy bursts of swinging body rhythms, will present three concerts at Northwestern University in December.

Jump Rhythm Jazz Project is a company-in-residence at Northwestern University during the Dance Program’s 2007-08 season. Founder, principal choreographer and ensemble performing member Billy Siegenfeld, the 2006 recipient of Chicago’s prestigious Ruth Page Award and a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern’s Dance Program, is the group’s artistic director.

Siegenfeld’s new folk-dance ritual, "god of dirt," received critical acclaim following its world-premiere during JRJP’s spring 2007 season in Chicago. The dance’s hand-grasping and heavy-booted movements, accompanied by guttural, rhythmic vocalizations, mark out a ritual site for the affirmation of earth and the community that depends on it. The piece is performed to Goran Bregovic’s exuberant Gypsy folk songs.

"I Hear Music" is a laugh-filled rhythmic romp powered by a series of non-sequitur bursts of singing, scatting and tapping. Company members engage with both each other and the audience in onstage antics. Part of the piece’s charm includes unpredictable snatches of song the performers quote from the American Songbook, including "I Hear Music," composed by Burton Lane, with lyrics by Frank Loesser, for the 1940 film "Dancing On a Dime;" "Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,"
written by George and Ira Gershwin for the 1937 film "Shall We Dance;" and the Rodgers and Hammerstein theme song from the 1943 hit Broadway musical "Oklahoma."

Billy Siegenfeld and JRJP Associate Artistic Director Jeannie Hill will perform "You Make Me Feel So Young," a homage to the rhythmically choreographed romantic duets of the classic Hollywood movie musicals.

"Too Close For Comfort" (excerpted from "Released in Their Own Custody") was inspired by Bertrand Russell’s quotation, "Anyone in prison believes that outside his walls is a free world." This dance of hard-edged syncopations features six performers hurtling through space non-stop to the music’s driving, swinging rhythms.

The ensemble also will perform "The News From Poems." This work reflects on the impossibility of innocence during times of war and features choreography and vocal arrangements by Siegenfeld. The title of the work draws on lines in the William Carlos Williams’ poem "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower." The piece traces the journey of a boy- man through childhood innocence, his discovery of violence, and, at journey’s end, stunned disbelief at his own — and humanity’s capacity — for doing ill as well as kindness. It is set to a score of songs by Cole Porter, OutKast and Rodgers and Hart built around Christian Cherry’s recurring original composition, "Coda 12."