There is nothing more American than jazz. As Carlos R.A. Jones observed, “It was impossible for Jazz dance and its technique to escape discrediting. It was born in the middle of Jim Crow America and has never escaped that white-supremacist clutch. As white people realized jazz dance’s massive appeal to society, the pursuit of white economic prosperity fueled one of the most aggressive assaults on Black culture: appropriation.” Created by Black Americans in the 1920s, jazz music and jazz dance are rooted in improvisation, making their histories nonlinear. This lecture explores the origin stories of jazz dance, examines Rooted and Unrooted Jazz, and begins to unpack how the form was appropriated by the white community.
Annika Sheaff earned her master’s in dance from University of the Arts and Bennington College, studying under Donna Faye Burchfield and Thomas F. DeFrantz. She received a bachelor’s in dance from The Juilliard School, where she trained with Ohad Naharin, Paul Taylor, Ronald K. Brown and others, and earned Juilliard’s InterArts Award for community outreach.
Sheaff toured with Pilobolus Dance Theater, performing over 550 shows on four continents and collaborating with the founders, Inbal Pinto, Avshalom Pollak, puppeteer Basil Twist, graphic artist Art Spiegelman and the band OKGO. She appeared on America’s Got Talent, Extra!, Sesame Street, and the cover of Dance Magazine. She was in the original cast of "James and the Giant Peach" and toured with Aszure Barton and Artists.
From 2012–2017, she was a member of GroundWorks Dance Theater, creating over 15 new works with collaborators including David Shimotakahara, Rosie Herrera and Johannes Wieland. Her choreography has been presented nationally and in South Africa. Sheaff received a 2016 Creative Workforce Fellowship to produce seven dance films and taught as Associate Professor of Dance at Baldwin Wallace University before joining the faculty at Texas Christian University.
