LaTasha Barnes and members of “The Jazz Continuum” at the Joyce Theater/Photo: Steven Pisano

In the audio series portion of “The 1619 Project,” New York Times cultural critic Wesley Morris says that when he hears American pop music—jazz, R&B, soul, funk, disco, even yacht rock—he hears Blackness. Likewise (and inseparably) is American social Black dance, emerging and evolving alongside these genres: bodies unstoppably moved by syncopation and harmony, shot through with ripples of delight only a perfectly landed improvisation can provide.

But improvisation lives in the new. And as Black artists push forms and culture forward, older styles can get left behind. Take, for example Lindy Hop, a dance born in 1930s Harlem with the advent of jazz. After World War II, jazz music spun out into wilder bebop rhythms and the dance all but disappeared. That is, until a late-twentieth-century revival, fueled by European and predominantly white American dancers who sought out the “old timers” they saw in movies like “Hellzapoppin’”( famously featuring Frankie Manning) to convey how they kicked, stomped and took flight to the blare of a trumpet and slap of a bass.

One need not go back a hundred years for other examples. In our 2016 interview for Player of the Moment, members of The Era footwork crew—themselves in their early twenties at the time—talked about the importance of welcoming in the next generation of dancers and DJs to keep footwork, made on Chicago’s South Side pavements in the 1990s, alive. “As a kid, you have to keep busy and pick up the next thing: what’s the best shoe out right now? They have to have it,” Jemal “P-Top” De La Cruz told me. Jamal “Litebulb” Oliver added, “We’re trying to build the culture and make it a citywide thing, an international thing.”

An international thing it became. Chicago footworkers travel from Moscow to Lima to Tokyo breaking down how to step like lightning to 165 beats per minute. American music and dance—Black music and dance—has shaped and continues to shape global culture. But too often the origins and originators of an art form, integral to its spirit, slip through fingers as it passes from hand to hand.

No wonder then that LaTasha Barnes refers to herself as a carrier of traditions. The root word here is “care,” and Barnes deeply cares for Black American dance and music across decades, honoring those who came before, celebrating her contemporaries, while remaining committed to the invention and spontaneity that is the beating heart of these movements. Barnes, whose life trajectory includes the upper ranks of the U.S. military, medalling in fitness competitions, a graduate degree from NYU and a couple of Bessie Awards, found her way to older jazz and social styles through a longstanding love of hip-hop. Barnes has become a rare polyglot, as fluent in house as she is in Lindy Hop and a master at erasing the lines between them as she dances.

LaTasha Barnes, the rare polyglot fluent in jazz and hip-hop, in “The Jazz Continuum”/Photo: Steven Pisano

Barnes’ ongoing project to close the gap between contemporary Black dances and their predecessors is “The Jazz Continuum,” first presented in New York’s Guggenheim Museum rotunda in 2021 as part of the Works & Process series. That space, Barnes said, “leaned even more into the spiritual implications I carry in this work. The grandness of that rotunda made this notion of bringing in ancestral spirit into the space even more powerful.”

The rotunda inspired a light fixture for the set which resembles an atom—a reference to the quantum physics of the title and a joining of past, present and future in forms that continue to expand outward in endless galaxies of movement.

“The Jazz Continuum” comes to the Dance Center of Columbia College in March. The visit includes a residency period to connect with Chicago artists. Barnes says she hopes time will allow for visits to the Warehouse, the former factory that became a nexus for Chicago’s house scene, a style close to Barnes’ heart. “I’m beautifully overwhelmed to come because Chicago is the birthplace of one of the traditions I’m most honored to carry,” she says.

Creative exchange in the local scenes will inform the Chicago iteration—or, as Barnes refers to the event, offering—at the Dance Center March 7-9. “[The Jazz Continuum] is more about gathering resources and people I always wanted to have meet each other, teach each other, inspire each other,” she says. “Connecting each other’s whys and then having the space to scaffold it into a collective offering.”

Le’Andre Douglas, Duane Lee Holland Jr. and Ray F. Davis in “The Jazz Continuum”/Photo: Steven Pisano

Expect to see local artists in the offerings, too. Barnes told me she is hoping to confirm footworker King Charles, tap dancer Star Dixon, and tap dancer-slash-footworker Donnetta “LilBit” Jackson, as well as to-be-named guests from the Chicago steppin’ scene. They’ll join a fifteen-person ensemble of dancers, musicians and DJs, including musical director and Illinois native Christopher McBride.

While all of this will take place on a theater stage, Barnes makes it clear “The Jazz Continuum” is best not thought of as a conventional show. These dances live in the clubs, the ballrooms, the basements, the backyard parties, and breathe communal air. Proscenium stage settings with their timed lighting and silent, seated, darkness-shrouded audiences present a challenge to invoking the power of social dance—a challenge Barnes happily takes on.

“There are moments of performance, but that’s not what it’s about. I recognize now that a large part of my mission is to gain an understanding of performance standards with my master’s degree so I could very clearly upend them. I know the standards for what is supposed to happen onstage and they are not things that invite that deep improvisational spirit. Things that don’t invite that, we thwart.”

Melanie George delivering the welcome charge at the Joyce Theater/Photo: Steven Pisano

One upfront thwarting is a “welcome charge” from dramaturg Melanie George, who will introduce the ensemble and set the tone. “If you feel you want to get up and move you should do that,” Barnes says. “And hopefully the person next to you will catch up.”

George is also a jazz dancer (and dance scholar), and Barnes says the musicians in the ensemble now see themselves as dancers too, which influences how they play. “My biggest pet peeve is when they [promoters, media] separate the music from the dancers as though we’re not a unified entity. It’s a powerful marriage of all the things. We don’t refer to ourselves as a dance company. It’s about Black music and dance experience. I want the full, unapologetic Black experience to be fully received and celebrated.”

“LaTasha Barnes’ The Jazz Continuum” at the Dance Center of Columbia College, 1301 South Michigan. Thursday-Saturday, March 7-9 at 7:30pm. $30. Tickets at eventbrite.com.