Choreographer: Robert Battle
Music: Damian Bassman, Ella Fitzgerald, Wycliffe Gordon, Mahalia Jackson, and Steve Reich
Costume: Santo Loquasto
Lighting: Burke Wilmore
Date First Performed: November 11, 2025
In his first work as a Resident Choreographer of the Taylor Company, Robert Battle created a highly personal and loving tribute to jazz music and his mother Dessie Williams, who he says “filled [his] childhood with music and rhythm, teaching [him] that movement can carry us through life’s joys and challenges.” The dance title comes from Albanian poet Ermira Mitre Kokomani’s poem Under the Rhythm of Jazz. Fused with the scatting of Ella Fitzgerald and the spirituals of Mahalia Jackson, Under the Rhythm is “a fun, arousingly syncopated jazz fest. It also explains Battle’s love of Jazz, the American art form that evolved from the sounds and rhythms of slave songs and spirituals… Syncopated footwork, tight unison, explosive movement, and falls and drops with great abandon, all signatures of Battle, were a strategic mix of competition and camaraderie to both wow and beguile the audience.” – Walter Rutledge, Out and About Magazine
Patrick Gamble & Company, photo by Ron Thiele
