Billy Siegenfeld

BILLY SIEGENFELD is the founder, artistic director, principal choreographer, and ensemble performing member of Jump Rhythm Jazz Project, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2010.

In 2007 he received an Emmy Award in the category of “Outstanding Achievement for Individual Excellence On Camera/Performer” for his work in the multiple-Emmy-Award-winning documentary Jump Rhythm Jazz Project:  Getting There, produced by HMS Media and aired on PBS.

He is the 2006 recipient of Chicago’s most prestigious dance honor, the Ruth Page Award, which cited him for “his vibrant dance artistry, development of a unique dance vocabulary, and the exciting choreography created in that dance technique.”

In 2005 he received the Jazz Dance World Congress Award for making “major contributions to the art of jazz dance.”  Also in 2005 the United States Fulbright Commission made him a Fulbright Senior Scholar, an honor that took him to Finland where he introduced the theory and practice of Jump Rhythm TechniqueTM to the Arts Academy of Turku University of Applied Sciences, where he now teaches the technique annually at Turku’s Arts Academy with other members of the company.

In 2000 the magazine Dance Teacher placed Siegenfeld on its Twentieth Century Timeline of Choreographers and Innovators for “develop[ing] the Jump Rhythm Jazz Technique and found[ing] Jump Rhythm Jazz Project,” and in 1998 the magazine Dancer credited him with “inventing the first genuine jazz technique in forty years.” Choreographic honors include the National Performance Network Creation Award in 2003, which led to the productions of Sorrows of Unison Dancing and The News From Poems; the 1997 Ruth Page Dance Achievement Award for Outstanding Choreography, citing the pieces Romance in Swingtime and No Way Out, and the 1994 Jazz Dance World Congress Gold Leo Award for Outstanding Choreography, citing Getting There.

Siegenfeld is also a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University where he teaches Jump Rhythm Technique; Jump Rhythm Tap; Movement Awareness; Choreographing Music; and American Rhythm Dancing and the African American Performance Aesthetic, a video-discussion course which surveys and analyzes filmed excerpts of Africanist-influenced, jazz-rhythm-based choreography and dancing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

His most recent article, “Standing Down Straight: Jump Rhythm Technique’s Rhythm-Driven, Community-Directed Approach to Dance Education,” appears in the December 2009 issue of Journal of Dance Education.  For further information: www.jrjp.org.