Showdance

Danny Buraczeski calls his company “Jazzdance,” the verbal conflation evidently intended to distinguish it from the generic “jazz dance,” a catchall used to refer loosely to show dancing. As anyone who has seen A Chorus Line knows, Broadway gypsies today are expected to know ballet and tap as well as traditional jazz. Buraczeski, himself a former show dancer, has transposed this hybrid form from its commercial context to the concert-dance stage and used it to choreograph composed jazz music for himself and his eight-member troupe.

On the evidence of his last New York program (January 19-24 at the Joyce Theatre), Buraczeski takes a balletic approach to jazz, eschewing tap and indulging only rarely in shoulder and pelvic isolations. His bulky physique is also a limiting factor of his movement vocabulary. Many of his dancers, too, have less than ideal bodies, and the...