Jazz Dance Technique Skill List

Struggling with what to teach in your jazz dance classes? This list of jazz dance technique skills can help! Featuring skills to be taught at four levels: beginning, intermediate, advanced intermediate, and advanced, this list of jazz dance technique skills will make it easier to create your jazz dance lesson plans, evaluation and level-up assessments, and even a jazz dance curriculum for your studio or program! 

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This resource from the trusted Holistic Dance Teacher Collection includes a list of technique-based skills that can be taught in jazz dance classes, in addition to general overall dance technique concepts that are applicable to any dance form. The list is divided into four skill levels; beginning, intermediate, advanced intermediate, and advanced. You can further divide the lists into smaller sections if your dance studio or program offers more than four levels of lyrical dance technique, or combine them if you offer less than four levels. You can use this guide to help you devise jazz dance lesson plans or build a jazz dance curriculum for your studio or program.

Jazz dance traces its roots to West Africa. Dances such as the ring shout, cakewalk, and pattin’ juba were practiced by African people who were enslaved in the United States. In the 20th century, these dances evolved alongside jazz music, eventually becoming popularized in integrated dancehalls like The Savoy Ballroom. Jazz dancing then moved to professionalized setting like movies and musicals, with choreographers like Jack Cole and Fred Astaire blending jazz dance movements and the jazz aesthetic with ballet and modern dance technique. For the purpose of this jazz dance technique skill list, the term jazz dance is generally used to describe this blend of authentic jazz with ballet and modern dance technique. 

Please note that this skill list is not a list of all jazz dance skills that could possibly be taught in a jazz dance program, but is is extensive!. Because jazz dance is such a broad term that encompasses a wide rage of movement styles, you may that you have more to add to the list, or that some of the skills don’t fit your approach. It is not a complete syllabus or curriculum, but a tool that you can use to design your own. The jazz dance technique skill list does not include descriptions or videos of the skills, advice on how to teach the skills, or drills and progressions related to the skill.