Real Jazz Dance Lives on the Westside! JillyJazz at Electric Lodge in Venice

As I wrote some months ago for the Studio City Patch (http://http//studiocity.patch.com/groups/victoria-ordins-blog/p/bp--hama-dance-center-one-of-the-last-bastions-of-lyrac936876f6 ), Hama Dance Center is a great studio on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Moorpark, where you can take Hama's class (virtually unchanged since 1989) or study with other lyrical or musical theater jazz teachers whose numbers have steadily declined since the advent of hip hop. 

I love HDC but due to School Row--Archer School for Girls, two Brentwood School campuses, St. Martin of Tours and University Synagogue--it is simply not possible to travel East on Sunset from Anita Drive to the 405 after 2:30PM. My hypothesis that kids (and all that goes with them in the form of nannies, schools, tutors, Little League and AYSO) are to blame for nightmarish LA traffic has been confirmed repeatedly by the blissfully easy drives whenever kids aren't in school. 

When I trotted this out on Facebook (in slightly edgier terms), a friend dubbed me #childrenscrooge. I won't eschew the title and in their more frank and unguarded moments, neither will many single Angelenos whose commute has grown treacherously unpredictable and miserable in the last decade!

If you find yourself in the unfortunate position of having to head over the hill after school lets out, you have to snake down to San Vicente via 26th Street and inch up Barrington. Alternately, you can brave Wilshire at Federal to Sepulveda.

Any way you look at it, unless the mercurial traffic gods are feeling charitable, you're looking at 80-90 minutes if you leave the Palisades or Santa Monica after 4:30PM.

The good news: Studio City has quite a good food scene of which I was unaware until I started classes at HDC last year. And if you don't work a traditional job, you can make the Long March to the Valley at 3PM (avoiding Sunset of course) and park with your laptop (or iPad) at Sammy's Woodfired Grill, the Daily Grill, or my new food crush, Umami Burger.

The Valley has made great culinary strides since the 1980s and 1990s, when foodies had to go to Hollywood or the Westside if tired of the handful of fine dining restaurants up to Westside standards. I had no idea how many cafes and wine bars that stretch of Ventura Blvd now boasts. I even passed a whiskey bar, though probably Makers Mark or Knob Creek before 90 minutes of class in blistering Valley heat is not the best idea. 

On the weekend of June 22nd-23rd, I took four out of the six classes at the Hama Dance Center Open House. One woman in Hama's class had been back in NYC and taken a private with Francis Roach, the co-artistic director at Luigi Jazz Centre at 68th between Central Park West and Columbus in Manhattan's Upper West Side, so I posted on the Facebook page. 

Moments later, I received a private message from the vivacious, passionate and talented Jill Strauss, a Luigi dancer and teacher born and raised in NYC. You can read more about Jill Strauss, who also teaches advanced jazz in the Crossroads dance department, at her website: .jillyjazz.com/ .

Since my high school years at Westlake School for Girls in the 1980s, the astronomical rents on the Westside have essentially driven jazz out of the Westside and into the Valley and Hollywood. I studied with first with Tracey Durbin, Hama's assistant in the 1980s, and then Hama himself, at Santa Monica Dance Center on Lincoln and later Katnap on Venice Blvd near the high school. 

I quit dancing a year before I left for New Haven and did not dance again for nearly 22 years, when I started living in the city three months a year. I suppose I did not do a thorough online search, but when I spoke to dancers, I was told that lyrical jazz (whether pure Luigi style, or Hama's Luigi-based technique) had relocated to Studio City, Van Nuys or Hollywood (which is an even worse trek from the Palisades or Santa Monica). Hama had been in Glendale as well but this is obviously not an option for a WLA girl. 

After a few days of instant messages in which we learned we know many of the same people, including Davida Wills-Hurwin, who ran production camps and taught dance at Crossroads Elementary before becoming the drama guru of LA's version of the School of the Performing Arts (now LaGuardia High), I took Jill's Tuesday night class. 

Words cannot describe my joy at discovering such an extraordinary teacher (and New Yorker!) trained by Luigi, whose studio is an easy 20 minutes from the Palisades even at rush hour. The free parking in the large lot just off parking-unfriendly Abbott Kinney--with five parking spaces for electric vehicles, likely more than exist in all of Northwest Ohio as my Ohio Facebook friend put it--was additional cause for celebration.

(Note: I would never drive an electric vehicle unless a relative I didn't know existed died and left me a Tesla, but they're useless for road trips so it would be a backup car for town, not my sole vehicle. Still, I had to laugh that that a trendy area of LA with scarce parking would devote five and I take it free spaces to Prius owners and their ilk!) 

Jill's warmup will be familiar to anyone who has studied Luigi style or taken Hama's class. The sound system at the beautiful Electric Lodge is as good as at any studio I've been, including the stunning Alvin Ailey Extension on 55th Street. I was dripping with sweat halfway through the warmup during some balance and leg work which Jill added to the class. Her music, which changes every class, is a mix of old and new R and B, jazz and some indie rock and pop. 

Jill's across-the-floor is a traditional mix of turns and kicks and not difficult for any advanced beginner to pick up after a class or two. The two combinations I have done in the last two weeks were beautiful, though not straight beginner level, with long, flowing lines punctuated by strong, sharp poses interspersed throughout. I adored the dance to Mary J Blige's "Empty Prayers" and have been playing the song over and over since class last week.

I felt absolutely at home in Jill's class, which combines Luigi's and Hama's trademarks (layouts and frequent use epaulement, in which the shoulders are set in oppositional relation to the lower body) with her own musical theater jazz style.  

Jilly Jazz also offers classes for kids. Jill's mission is to provide LA kids with the type of dance education she was blessed to receive in New York City. Plenty of good to great ballet studios cater to children and teens, including the Westside School of Ballet (where I attended Davida Wills-Hurwin's 1984 production camp and where my 73-year-old mother has been taking ballet since 1999). Great jazz is much harder to find. 

In a world where hip hop has supplanted jazz, particularly outside Manhattan, it's a gift to find anyone teaching this kind of class. But to find such a class on the Westside, close to all the great bars, cafes, restaurants and shops on Abbott Kinney is almost too good to be true.