Community Jazz Dance Festival - Performances
Evert B. Person Theatre
May 1, 2025,
7:30 pm
May 2, 2025,
7:30 pm
May 3, 2025,
7:30 pm
May 4, 2025,
2:00 pm
Tickets and Information
GA $20 Youth and Students $12 SSU Free
SSU COMMUNITY: YOU GET 2 FREE TICKETS FOR ALL EVENTS
HOW?
- Open the link "GET TICKETS"
- Open the menu (☰), go to My Account, and login to your SSU account
- Click on Sonoma State University at the top to return to events
- Select your event one more time, and choose Student or Faculty/Staff tickets
- VOILA! NO CHARGE for mobile wallet or email tickets
Join us for the SSU Community Jazz Dance Festival Live Performances, a vibrant celebration of jazz dance rooted in history, culture, and community. Witness works performed by SSU students, SSU Sapphires, and SRJC Dance Program, and the CDEA (Saturday performance ONLY) as they honor the rich legacy of the African Diaspora in American dance.
These live performances are the culmination of a week of embodied movement practice, research intensives, and artistic exploration inspired by the award-winning film Uprooted: The Journey of Jazz Dance. Through rhythm, motion, and storytelling, these performances reflect the beauty, complexity, and cultural significance of jazz dance from its West African roots to its modern-day expressions.
How do we make sure we are learning an accurate history of the dance styles we are studying, practicing, and teaching?
The SSU Community Jazz Dance Festival will explore historically-rooted jazz dance practices and will present a week of embodied movement practice, a film screening, scholarly research intensives and performance opportunities exploring the many facets of Jazz Dance on the continuum. The SSU Community Jazz Dance Festival will feature dances performed by community dancers and SSU students aimed primarily at building community engagement and honoring the African Diaspora in American Dance.
Significance
While community engagement and artistic accomplishment are primary goals for this project, we believe that this festival is most significant to the field for the way it will work with the award winning film Uprooted: The Journey of Jazz Dance and the non profit professional institution, California Dance Education Organization to reclaim the true history of jazz dance, paying homage to its lineage, celebrating its many re-interpretations, honoring its roots in Africa and the African Diaspora, and making visible many of the Black originators and influencers of jazz dance that have often been left out of the canon. This festival through movement practice, research and performance will connect and help re-discover the roots and branches of jazz dance, celebrate its history, lineage and future and interrogate and reveal who has been made visible and invisible in the study of this form. This dance festival will study the West African origins of Jazz, the Africanist aesthetics that embody the practice, the trajectory of Jazz Dance in the 20th century and the shared social and kinetic elements of the form.
Major Learning Outcomes of the SSU Community Jazz Dance Festival
- Gain a deeper understanding of the origins and history of jazz dance and music
- Understand the Africanist principles/commonalities present in jazz dance
- Understand, embody, and perform the traits and kinetic elements of jazz dance
- Create an embodied scholarship performance for public viewing