If you don’t credit Christiane Hennecke for her amazing performances with world renowned dance group Jazzcotech , you’ve got to respect the fat that she managed to teach me to dance! I spoke to her about the group she runs for young people (which I was a part of) and here’s what she said.  |
“The JazzCotech Juniors are a Jazz Dance group for young people which started life as a group of people who came to different Youth centres in the Borough of Redbridge (Caterham Youth Club and The Downshall Centre) on different days of the week. Young people would come to the centres in the early evening and be able to choose a number of activities, dance being one of them.”
“When I was asked to supply 3 Dance pieces for a performance at an annual Youth Dance Festival in Ilford, the organizers asked me to provide ‘something unusual which differs from the normal Hip Hop and Street Dance which is widely offered to young people’. With myself coming from a Jazz Dance background, I thus set up special, combined rehearsals as an experiment to see if the young people would enjoy dancing to Jazz, as one big group and have proper ‘rehearsals’ in a more formal way, leading to a show. The young people really enjoyed this and, needless to say, brought the house down, as they were so different from all the other Groups. Born were the JazzCotech Juniors.”
“At the beginning of 2005, I started teaching at ‘the hat factory’, a popular Arts and Performance Centre in Luton on a weekly basis and brought together Dancers from both my Essex and Luton groups to further develop JazzCotech Juniors. The Group is now made up of 10 young Dancers from both Boroughs and have got an impressive array of performances under their belt.”
“ Amongst others, they have performed twice at The Royal Festival Hall at London’s South Bank, The Kenneth Moore and Queens Theatres in Essex; they took The Jazz Café in Camden by storm in March 2006 and performed a 25 minute set at the Luton Carnival in May 2006. The JazzCotech Juniors bring together a group of young people aged 11 to 18 years with a mixture of genders and ethnic backgrounds. Not only has it brought together a group of youngsters from varying social backgrounds who would have never otherwise mixed, it has also introduced these young people to the concept of dancing to Jazz without having to enrol in a ‘proper’ Dance school, which is unaffordable to most of their parents.”
“The sense of achievement for the group has been immense - the Dancers are fiercely passionate about the group and have formed new friendships with peers they would have never otherwise given a second glance in the street. They are actively ‘recruiting’ new Dancers amongst their friends and I am confident that the group will increase steadily over the next couple of years.”
So watch out for the Jazzcotech Juniors coming your way because, as the presenter of the show we did at the Royal Festival Hall labeled us, they are ‘the future of Jazz Dance in Britain’. |
