BOP Jazz Theatre’s Jazz Arts ReWIRED Convention Performance

The BOP Jazz Theatre curated Jazz Arts ReWIRED conference concluded with a performance showcasing the wide breadth of what jazz dance can be in 2025…

BOP Jazz Theatre Company in ‘Daughters of Eve’. © Foteini Christofilopoulou.

BOP Jazz Theatre Company
Jazz Arts ReWIRED Performance
with works by Ovonlen-Jones Duet, Brit School Dancers, MM Jazz Dance, Lukas Hunt Creations, Footnotes Dancers, JME Dance Company, FFI Dance Company, Griots Dance Collective, Noel Rodriguez and BOP Jazz Theatre Company
★★★★✰
London, The Place
20 September 2025
www.bop.org.uk
theplace.org.uk

If you follow the mainstream dance critics and commentators, you won’t find much writing about jazz dance. Most coverage focuses on ballet, contemporary, South Asian, flamenco and, increasingly, hip-hop dance. It’s not an exhaustive list, but jazz dance shows, by and large, rarely feature in the seasons presented by the main (London) dance theatres. The scene almost feels underground; yet, as this show makes clear, it is a vibrant, living and evolving tradition that deserves a larger slice of the dance limelight.

Flying the flag for jazz dance since the 1990s has been BOP Jazz Theatre Company (where BOP stands for Body of People), led by the indomitable Dollie Henry and Paul Jenkins. The company is not just concerned with doing its own thing; rather, they advocate for the form and support the widest possible jazz dance ecology. This is where the Jazz Arts ReWIRED two-day convention comes in. Two years on from the first one, The Place has just hosted the second, alongside its entertaining final performance. I can’t speak for the convention, but if it’s anything like the performance, it will have been an enlightening, uplifting and joyful affair.

The Jazz Arts ReWIRED performance consisted of ten works split equally around a single interval, featuring commissioned short works from five established companies and five emerging jazz choreographers. It provided a broad showcase of what the ever-developing jazz form can be these days — well beyond the ‘jazz hands’ stereotypes you may have been thinking of. It’s a form that can tackle many subjects — happy and sad, reflective and abstract etc — but above all, it has audience entertainment at its core. This is refreshing, particularly after you’ve seen a few too many contemporary shows that leave you feeling perplexed and bamboozled, unsure of what the creatives intended. Although I didn’t connect warmly with every piece, each was concerned with fascinating and enthralling the audience, and I say a huge bravo for that. Bravo also for the printed programme distributed for free on the night, complete with sensible details about each work performed. In a digital ‘download the factsheet’ world, it was a real reminder of what we have lost in many theatres.

Joel Ovonlen-Jones and Lana Williams opened the night with their intriguing Bye / Dark Eyes, with the Bye section based around a jazz interpretation of tennis — his original love and calling for many years. Inventive as it was, things heated up when the fast-moving, steely-legged Williams arrived, particularly in their Lindy Hop section, which always brings a smile to faces. Great flips culminated with him (not a small chap) flipping around her (diminutive) base — the audience went wild. In fact, the piece should have ended there rather than continue with them quietly parting. Duh.

Another pairing was MM Jazz Dance’s Martina Gumbs and Katrina Moore, depicting the mentor (Gumbs) and mentee (Moore) experience in the studio - Pathway to Resilience. It only really hit its stride when they donned glitzy showbiz costumes and performed the actual show. I loved the good-time hoofing, sans narrative and narration. The very polished and experienced Bafana Matea and Charise Renouf (known as Griots Dance Collective) presented Revolution in Motion, celebrating their journey into professional jazz dance. Moody downlighting and slow, super-controlled power lifts/displays gave an almost circus feel at first, but there were elements of contemporary movement as well, making it the most slickly professional presentation of the night.

For full-on exuberance, you needed the BRIT School Dancers in City Rhythms by Nicola Mac. While nominally about a day (and night) in the life of a city, it came across as a bundle of dance energy, with six students each having a whale of a time and looking impossibly happy. I appreciated that it was not too preoccupied with a serious plot. Another youthful company, The Footnotes Dancers, performed Jazz Is, choreographed by Masumi Endo. For Endo and nine others this started with a lot of narration about what jazz and movement is and was rather annoyingly stop start and tedious. However, I liked its conclusion, “Jazz is all about the soul,” as it morphed into a more dance-focused display of group work and featured some particularly impressive fast-paced legs. More dance, less analysis, please.

FFI Dance Company is a group of five, all credited with the creation of Spirit, a moodily thoughtful work about growing old. There’s a modern feel here, with much haze and downlighting, elements of hip-hop and an engaging Sampha soundtrack. Like some other pieces, it was at its best in group work rather than the solos I could not fully comprehend. It seemed to reach a natural, uplifting and satisfying conclusion rather ahead of the actual, less-happy end. But that’s life and getting old, perhaps! Noel Rodriguez performed the only solo of the night, which also featured him narrating the voiceover. Bango is a heartfelt piece about his own journey of self-discovery. There were lots of props, particularly hats, in a piece that could be funny and maudlin, though it felt well too brief for all the elements that were crammed in. Less could definitely be more, but it was nice to see jazz dance used so endearingly.

The most visually striking and urbane piece of the night was Lukas Hunt’s Inner Demons — a work about self-love and acceptance. What made it striking were the honed muscles of his three topless Adonis’s — Conn Williams, Tobias Richards and Gustave Die. There was no problem with self-love here, you’d think! But my goodness, the three could move terrifically well, both in unison and in solos, with Gustave Die possessing that extra bit of feline stage magnetism. They danced to Fela Kuti, which imparted a 60s feel, and I was reminded of the Balanchine quote, “Dance is music made visible.” Lukas Hunt is one to watch.

Two pieces focused on portraying powerful women. Jasmine M. Eccles (JME Dance Company) dedicated Pleasure Peaks to Eartha Kitt. For three female dancers, it drew inspiration from Kitt’s full-on life and seduced us all with alluring looks and powerful unison movement. It was a polished work, well executed. Closing out the night was BOP in Dollie Henry’s Daughters of Eve, which seemed to be set in a Pacific island Garden of Eden paradise. For seven dancers there was no Adam about to spoil things, and, probably as a result, the narrator kept saying, “Everything in the garden was gorgeous.” It was the most designed piece of the evening, featuring West End level costuming and recurring elegant circular patterns in the movement. Here, jazz dance was less to the fore in a sophisticated piece about mood and the forcefulness of driven womanhood. It felt fitting that, in a night celebrating the diversity of jazz dance, the last piece used it sparingly to deliver its message and prove the point that the jazz is a many-splendoured art.