Black jazz-informed dance: The performance of rhetoric and resistance in Los Angeles-based Jazzantiqua Dance and Music Ensemble

This dissertation project deeply investigates the cultural practices and meaning making that are performed by the predominantly Black, Los Angeles-based, concert jazz dance company, JazzAntiqua Dance and Music Ensemble. In conversation with the fields of dance studies, rhetorical arts, and Black radical thought, this research pursues the question of how rhetoric is embodied through movement vocabularies that emerge from marginalized populations. Specifically, this project examines how artistic director Pat Taylor, through enacting a jazz philosophy and a jazz-centric approach to her artistry, develops a set of jazz-informed, signature steps and creates choreographic works that embody rhetorical resistance. Utilizing critical performance ethnographic methodologies and employing methods that incorporate the philosophical tenets of jazz this study collected data through qualitative interviews, participant observation, and choreographic analysis. The research argues that through an embodied practice and performance of resistance in community, rehearsals, and onstage, JazzAntiqua Dance and Music Ensemble engages in a world making practice that denounces hegemonic norms and white supremacy and promotes a more fully realized present and future where freedom is situated at the fore.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Dance

Grantor

Texas Woman's University

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Smyth, Laura Ann

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Wells, Charmian

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Akinleye, Adesola
• Fehler, Brian

• Dance
• Jazz
• Rhetoric
• Ethnography
• African diasporic
• Los Angeles

Language dc:language.iso

English

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/11274/17100

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:twu-ir.tdl.org:11274/17100