2nd year - Matt Mattox
Matt Mattox
1921-2013
Matt Mattox (1921-2013) was a dancer, choreographer and teacher who helped shape contemporary jazz dance in the United States and Europe. He had an extensive career dancing in films and on Broadway in the 1940s and 1950s and was a product of the finest concert and commercial dance training of the time. Mattox significantly impacted Hollywood dance films, Broadway musicals, European concert dance companies and training of generations of dancers. Though he was not as well-known as some of the celebrated Hollywood dancers of his era such as Bob Fosse or Jack Cole, he was by all accounts every bit their peer. “He was one of the greatest male dancers that ever was on a performing stage,” Jacques d’Amboise, the distinguished dancer and choreographer remarked.
In The Beginning
Harold Henry Mattox, known as Matt, was born August 18, 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The family moved to San Bernardino in the 1931, as his parents worked in sales and moved with the work. He once said he learned to dance a “waltz clog” at age 5 from a black male porter (a worker that assisted passengers at train and bus stations) and other steps from a female vaudevillian performer. He would go on to win local tap contests. Starting at age 16 he would spend more than a decade studying ballet. Between the two he loved ballet more.
Except for the two years he served as a fighter pilot with the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II, Mattox said he'd "been dancing ever since”. A brief attendance at San Bernardino College, he would continue his dance training in Los Angeles. His ballet teacher, Nico Charisse was
married to Cyd Charisse who would become a remarkable star. She encouraged him to audition for Eugene Loring, and Robert Alton, both prominent film choreographers. Within 24 hours of the audition, Matt was on the set of Yolanda and the Thief (1944), choreographed by Eugene Loring and he continued working in the industry for years.
Hollywood’s Golden Age
As a dancer, he was quickly becoming the most sought after talent of the top choreographers in Hollywood. Mr. Mattox was celebrated for his “ballpoint ease, pinpoint precision, and catlike agility,” as Dance magazine wrote in 2007. Thanks to his early recognition from choreographer Jack Cole, Robert Alton and teacher Eugene Loring, he soon entered the elite band of first-choice dancers for film and Broadway. He became one of the sought-after partners to Hollywood’s leading actresses as well. He was requested by everyone from Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon (1953) to Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blonds and Guys and Dolls (1955) with Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando. In fact you can see Mattox “punch” Brando in the staged bar fight in the scene at the El Café Cubano in Havana, Cuba.
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
Even though the cast included a New York City Ballet star (Jacques d’Amboise), it was the bearded Matt Mattox whose acrobatics in the barn dance are often rated as the highlight of one of the best dance musicals ever filmed. The classically trained Mattox memorably vaults over a sawhorse and pirouettes on a plank. He also led the singing and some eye-catching axe-wielding in the Pontipee brothers’ forlorn lament “Lonesome
Polecat”. "Everyone on the movie set agreed that he was the best dancer of all," commented Jacques d'Amboise. Jacques was no novice to excellent dancing as he was a leading figure in American ballet when he danced alongside Mattox as one of the film's rowdy brothers. "He's up there on Mt. Everest with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly”.
The tall and dashing Mattox "had enormous strength, versatility, precision and technique," Kidd once said, and was "always the first person" the choreographer wanted for the movies he made at MGM. On the set of Seven Brides Mattox pushed for perfection, doing scenes over and over even though Kidd saw little wrong with them. A star performer fated never to be a named character in Hollywood musicals, Mattox had a strikingly wiry, athletic frame and had a remarkably fast way of moving.
Broadway Also Beckoned
Mattox also was working on Broadway when he wasn’t working in the movies. He made his Broadway debut in 1946 in Are You with It? Early in his career Jack Cole recognized his talent and cast him in the Broadway production Magdalena (1948). Jack Cole would figure prominently in Maddox’s career as a mentor and push him into choreography. In addition to Magdalena (1948), he danced under Jack Cole in Alive and Kicking (1955) and Ziegfeld Follies (1956). He also appeared on Broadway in Carnival in Flanders (1953). He originated the Jester role with the Carol Burnett version of Once upon a Mattress (1959). And in the 1957 revival of Brigadoon, in which he played Harry Beaton. He would appear in regional productions of musicals all over the world with roles in shows such as Louisiana Purchase (1947), The Song of Norway (1952) and Brigadoon (1954).
Television jobs started to come his way. He appeared and choreographed often on television dance shows, such as the concert series The Bell Telephone Hour (which exposed everything from classical ballet to edgy jazz) for which he won the Emmy. In 1965 Mattox featured as himself in Hoagie Carmichael’s Musical Tour of Tin Pan Alley. He would appear in numerous shows over the span of time he worked in television.
Teacher, Choreographer and Innovator
Beginning in the mid-1950s, Mattox began teaching the Jack Cole movement vocabulary in New York. His classes were packed. He was a strong teacher with high expectations. He eventually opened his own dance school and began to standardize his exercises and techniques to what would become the Mattox technique. By 1966 he closed his studio to have more time to choreograph and travel as a guest freelance teacher. Jack Cole, Luigi and Matt Mattox are generally accepted to be the prime
innovators of what is now called jazz dance that was taught during that time. Matt Mattox was unique in that he helped conceive a genre that was subtler, more rhythmically complex, and far more eclectic, as well suited to the concert hall as to the theatrical stage.
Combining his own extensive training in ballet with tap dance, modern dance, and world dance, he created a new, fluidly integrated art form he liked to call ‘‘free-style dance”. Mattox took the fluid, animalistic style of Jack Cole and merged it with his own vast background in ballet technique to create a technique for jazz dance that is clean, powerful, and extremely challenging. He codified movements that he learned from Cole, and his work evolved to emphasize an understanding of isolating the body with a keen sense of coordination.
His jazz class was structured similarly to a ballet class. He calls his warm up exercises "the barre". Mattox would specifically design the exercises, or “the barre” to relate to the combinations given at the end of his class. “I’ve never classified myself as a jazz teacher, I prefer to talk about ‘free-style dancing,’ which means I have a choice of movement for any piece of music,” said Mattox in a 1993 interview. He used the word “freestyle” to describe his jazz style because it allows one to make both creative movement and stylistic choices. He said of his style in an article Magazine Focus On Dance in April 1969; “the word free is used because one is left to choose any kind of move he wishes to makes, whether it is a tilt of the head, a flick of the wrist…The word “style” is used because one is left to choose whatever style of movement he wants: East Indian, flamenco, early nineteenth-hundred contemporary, modern…or a mixture of all of these. All in all, free style is the best term to be used in reference to this kind of movement. Therefore, it seems logical that one is left to one’s own imagination in creating movement that can be, and is, called jazz”.
He created a dance company in 1961 to present the Mattox “free-style dance” called Jazzart. He premiered his dance ensemble first in New York prior to taking it to London then on to Paris. He would eventually choreograph over 30 ballets in his lifetime with his innovative style and technique.
In1970, Matt moved to London and started teaching his “free-style”. Within five years, his dance classes were renowned and his name began to be mentioned as a significant teacher of jazz dance movement. Mattox was a strong advocate for the style of jazz, yet he bristled at the term “jazz” as others saw it. In an article he wrote for the Magazine Focus on Dance in April 1969, he defined that jazz should have “highs and lows, darks and lights, quick drops to the floor and recoveries just as quick. There must be reverses, and above all, there must be a sense of flow, a sense of moving from one thing to another”.
Europe did not have the blazing innovation of a Jack Cole or Gus Giordano as America did. But Mattox clearly credited his form from Jack Cole and his exposure to other dance pioneers. He was the only leader to offer an alternative to the established style taught. Students flocked to his classes. In 1980 Matt moved to France where he opened his own school “Mattox Dance School”. He was a demanding teacher. He expected that his students “live what you are doing as a dancer. Don’t be a moving statue. Look as if you’re having a ball…then for god’s sake be alive and beautiful”. He would often yell “don’t just be a vegetable”.
Mattox lamented after holding an audition for a Broadway musical that the dancers were not “hungry”. They were technically strong but didn’t have the drive that he had seen in other generations. They would get to a certain ability that would get them the job and stop. But their minds, their imaginations, their ambition wouldn’t develop. He continued to challenge his dancers to work for true artistry and not settle for pleasant mediocrity. He would remain in France, teaching, choreographing and inspiring dancers until the end of his life.
His personal life would have its ups and downs. He would marry several times and divorce brought its own kind of bitterness. He would find happiness later in life with his last wife dancer Martine Limeul. They would marry in 1981. At his death it was reported that he had seven (7) children and numerous grandchildren. A granddaughter Skye Mattox is currently dancing on Broadway, continuing the family business.
His Legacy
He would accumulate accolades but being out of the Hollywood limelight he was not as recognized as his peers. In 1964 he was voted “Choreographer of the Year” by the Dance Masters of America. He earned an Emmy in 1966 for the “Bell Telephone Hour”. He also won the “Edinburgh Festival Choreographer” award in 1974 and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the French Dance Federation in 1987. In 1994 the French government appointed him a “Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres”.
Living overseas since 1970 had caused Mattox's fame "to recede somewhat in America," commented Bob Boross, a dance professor at Radford University in Virginia wrote his graduate thesis on Mattox. But in Europe, “he is widely known as a big catalyst for its jazz dance scene." Yet Mattox yearned to concentrate on teaching and choreography — "to be and artist”.
Sources:
• Giordano, Gus; Anthology of American Jazz dance, Orion Publishing House, 1975 pp 84- 85, 100-101
• Mrozowski, Cheryl, Jazz Dance; A History of the Roots and Branches; edited by Lindsay Guarino and Wendy Oliver 2014, Bob Boross, The “Freestyle” jazz dance of Matt Mattox pp 119-124
• Fox, Margalit, , Matt Mattox, jazz pioneer dies at 91, Feb 24, 2013; New York Times
• Ralabate, Tom, Jazz dancing past and present, Dance studio Life, December 3, 2008
• Straus, Rachel, “Luigi, Gus Giordano, Matt Mattox: Jazz Maters; Dance Magazine July 6, 2007
• Billman, Larry; Film Choreographers and Dance Directors, Arts Meme, February 21, 2103
• The Telegraph, U.K., obituaries, Matt Mattox, March 28, 2013
• http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/23/local/la-me-matt-mattox
Answer
the below 2 Questions in 400 words:
1.
What are three qualities that make Matt Mattox choreography unique?
2.
How do you think these qualities are reflected in your KDA/Tinie Tempah Routine?
The blog of 400 words to answer the two questions mentioned earlier is due by Friday 6th March at 8.30am.
Please send your
published blog link to the email address here.
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