MOJAZZ DANCE – WHERE WOMEN “OF A CERTAIN AGE” KEEP THEIR LOVE OF DANCE ALIVE!
By Clem Richardson
Audrey Madison, in blue, leads a MoJazz rehearsal.
Brooklyn, New York - It’s Friday night, and a group of self-described “women of a certain age” have gathered at Dancewave, a rehearsal space on Brooklyn’s Fourth Ave.
Audrey Madison clicks a boom box on the floor along one wall, and a jazzy Earth, Wind and Fire tune rocks the walls.
First, the MoJazz Dance Company members hug.
Then they dance, and dance some more, working bodies to and in the music. Madison, MoJazz’s founder, artistic director and choreographer, shouts encouragement as she matches them step for step.
“That’s right, that’s right,” Madison calls to the room. “Come on, get going! Come on! It’s been awhile! Hit it!”
The women laugh, shout encouragement, and squeal with delight as they hit the mark on difficult moves. Brows are sweaty but the 10-kilowatt smiles in the room never fade.
They are not here because the music makes the years melt away. These women, most lifelong hoofers, meet each week to embrace another chance to blend body and beat, music and magic.
They come from as far as Newark, NJ, Ossining, NY and Greenwich, CT for another chance to dance.
For these women – ages from late 40’s to early 70’s - MoJazz lets them practice a discipline that has been a part of their lives since they were children. Some were trained by Madison. Yet the MoJazz Dance Company springs from a legacy older than the group’s 1995 founding.
Each shuffle, sashay, wave, whip and dip echoes long hours of classes with some of the top dance instructors of their day - Alvin Ailey, Charles Moore, George Faison, Ruby Blake, Pepsi Bethel, Carmen DeLavallade and husband Geoffrey Holder – and their students.
The Ailey-founded Clark Center for the Performing Arts (1959 – 1989), where many of the above choreographers taught and trained, was a mecca for aspiring dancers of the day.
Several MoJazz members did exceptionally well in dance. Choreographer Hope Clarke, 1993 Tony and Drama Desk award nominee for her work in Jelly’s Last Jam, is not a member but regularly dances with them on Friday nights. Clark, with Carmen de Lavallade and Sheila Rohan, founded the 5 Plus Ensemble, where Madison is Board member and dancer. Marie Rosenberg, Rita Littrean and Madison are Charles Moore alums.
MoJazz Founder, Artistic Director Audrey Madison
Before the Covid 19 pandemic Holder, Littrean, Moore, Rosenberg, Michelle Ashley, Angela Eargle-Bell, Cynthia Cummings, Sheila Kennedy, Bernadette Lewis, Angela Lomax, Jackie David-Manigaulte, Karen McClain-Marvin, Frances Vidal and Terry Walden met most Friday nights to twirl and shuffle for hours under Madison’s attentive direction.
“I can’t describe the impact this group has had on me personally, spiritually and emotionally,” said Kennedy. “I am very grateful for this group.”
“I am doing this because it feels so right to me” Madison said. “It feels right when the audience sees women of a certain age enjoying themselves, committing themselves and sharing.
“It’s a lot of fun,” she said. “I am very thankful and blessed to share the joy of dance with our dancers and our audience.”
And they owe it all to Madison’s once flat feet.
The Brooklyn native and still resident was six years old when doctors told her parents that dance lessons might benefit their flat-footed child. (Cummings and Holder had the same flat foot diagnosis and prescribed remedy as children.)
One dance lesson and Madison was hooked.
“I loved it!” she said. “I can’t tell you why. I know how much I loved it because my father, who bowled on Friday night, had to get up early Saturday to take me to class. There was always that look on his face that I don’t like you right now! But he took me!”
This was the early ‘60s, and just finding a ballet class in working class Brooklyn was more than a notion. But George and Lauretta Hubbard, a New York Transit Authority motorman and stay at home mom later an insurance company clerical worker, enrolled their only daughter in Saturday morning classes at the Williamsburg Settlement, in the borough’s industrial Williamsburg neighborhood, a short drive from their Cooper Park housing project home.
(Madison’s younger brother, James, was born with cerebral palsy. Seeing him as ‘differently able’ led Madison to become a special education teacher.
Lauretta Hubbard died in 2013, Jimmy in 2015, and father George in 2016. Madison says dance helped her through those sad times. Brother George Michael is a bowling alley mechanic.
Madison continued her ballet classes through her years in the New York Public schools (PS 110, PS 132, Junior High School 50, and Grover Cleveland High School) and through Hunter College, where she majored in mathematics and eventually earned a Master’s degree in Special Education.
MoJazz Dancers in Bobby Madison designed group hoodies.
In 1979 she started teaching students with learning disabilities in the public schools. “I had to develop myself into the educator those children needed and deserved,” she said. “The principal told me to keep them in the classroom. It was horrible. As a new teacher I knew I did not know what they were supposed to know or supposed to do, so I worked hard to figure it out.”
Thinking of her brother, Madison developed a curriculum for special needs students that identified the knowledge, skills and understanding her students needed.
She took the same immersive approach to dance, attending Clark Center classes and workshops as often as she could, sometimes several times a week.
Though her skills led her early ballet teachers to encourage Madison to audition for the performing arts high school, she decided not to consider it as a professional career.
“They didn’t make enough money,” she said. “I didn’t see a pathway to make it work.”
But every Saturday night, with her parents bowling and her brothers watching television in another room, Madison moved the living room furniture and choreographed dances to her hearts content.
“I played Roberta Flack’s “Trying Times” so much my brother George asked if I could please try something else,” Madison said. “It was the ride and emotion coming through in the music that moved me.
“It was not so much about being technically knowledgeable about what I was doing. It was about expressing myself.”
By 18 Madison was sharing her choreography, teaching Cooper Park kids and putting on a show in the rec center.
In 1975, her freshman year at Hunter, Madison met Charles Moore, who danced with Catherine Dunham, Alvin Ailey and Geoffrey Holder. She joined his group, Charles Moore’s Dances and Drums of Africa, and “my dance world exploded, in a beautiful way.”
That year she also met Robert Madison II, who would come to watch her practice – something he has continued to do over the course of their marriage. “Bobby and our son (Robert Madison III,) are my biggest supporters,” Madison said. “They still wait in the bedrooms when I move the living room furniture to practice.”
A MoJazz performance.
Introduced to the Clark Center, Madison trained with Moore and his wife, Ella Thompson Moore. She met and/or took ballet, African, tap, jazz, any classes offered by Ailey, Faison, DeLavallade, Pepsi Bethel and others.
Moore and his wife, Ella Thompson Moore, trained Madison in the Dunham method at Brooklyn’s Hanson Place Church, and at Clark Center, where she also studied tap, jazz, and modern dance, taking classes with Harris, Bethel, Fred Benjamin and Majorie Perces.
“This is where I became a dancer, where I was exposed to a smorgasbord of amazing dance, knowledge and techniques,” she said. “I was on fire, sometimes taking three classes a day, plus rehearsal, plus going to school and working in the Hunter College library.”
Through Moore, Madison danced in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s first Dance Africa program, now an annual event, and at Riverside Church, and in a PBS special, Dance Black America.
“For us, it was an amazing, inspiring time together,” Madison said.
But Clark Center was also where, seeing the starving artists around her and hearing stories of making soup with ketch-up, Madison decided professional dancing was not for her.
“Teaching was calling me as strongly as dance was,” she said. “Plus I was not going to starve, so I chose.”
Dance continued to be an integral part of Madison’s life as she taught learning disabled elementary school students (18 years) and was an inclusion middle school teacher (four teaching math, four as an administrative supervisor.) After her 2013 retirement the NYC Department of Education rehired Madison in 2015 as a Quality Review consultant, evaluating special needs programs.
She also kept running into women, many of them Clark Center alums – whose love of dance spanned decades but who had gone on to other professional careers.
In 1995 she founded MoJazz. Childhood friends Cummings and McClain-Marvin were founding members.
Madison choreographs all of the group’s numbers, inspired by a song or event. Today that takes into account the troupe’s changing physicality.
“We can’t jump down on the floor like we used to,” Madison laughed. “You jump down now and you say MEDIC!”
MoJazz members relish their membership.
“When I’m dancing, I’m in a trance,” said Davis-Manigaulte. “The themes we deal with, we feel personally. When Audrey tells us what we’re expressing through dance, I want people to see it, and I want to be one of the people conveying that message.”
“This is my chance to do something for me,” said Vidal. “This is the one day a week I get to do me. I get here, exhale and do me. For two hours, I am free.”
“Audrey always impresses us with the intent of what we’re doing,” notes McClain-Marvin. “She explains not just to raise our arms, but why we raise the arms. To have someone explain the intention of what you doing, and how you can express it, that really makes a difference.”
“There is purpose behind the movements, and if you don’t convey that purpose, you’re just doing stuff,” Madison said.
MoJazz performs several times a year at various events. They taped a Christmas number in 2019 that aired on Manhattan Cable Network.
They can be contacted on their Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/MoJazz-Dance-1440606392853532/.