Jazz Dance Classes UK | 67 Cities

Jazz Classes in Your City

Every class is taught by a working professional. Choose your city for the local class page: venue, day, time and how to book your first session.

Your First Jazz Class

Warm-up and isolations

Every class opens with a full-body warm-up and isolations — head, shoulders, ribs and hips learning to move independently. It feels like patting your head while rubbing your stomach. It clicks sooner than you'd think.

Technique across the floor

Jazz walks, chassés, kicks and turns, travelling corner to corner. This is where the style lives: clean lines, sharp accents and the confidence to take up space.

The combination

The final stretch is choreography — a routine that grows week on week until it's a proper performance piece. Jazz hands optional, but they do tend to happen.

What Is Jazz Dance?

Jazz dance grew up with jazz music, in the African American social dances of the 1920s and 30s — the Charleston, the Lindy Hop, the whole swing era. When those moves reached Broadway and Hollywood, choreographers like Jack Cole shaped them into a stage technique: sharp isolations, deep knee slides, sudden changes of speed and direction. That technique — polished by Bob Fosse and his generation — is what a jazz class teaches today.

In class that means a thorough warm-up, technique work — kicks, turns, jazz walks — and choreography that sits right inside the music. Jazz rewards precision and attack more than flexibility or a ballet past, and it underpins nearly everything you see on stage and screen: musical theatre, pop videos, arena tours, panto. Learn jazz and every other style you ever try gets easier.

In Britain, jazz is the working dancer's bread and butter. It powers the West End — Chicago and Cabaret are jazz through and through — and it is the core style behind stage schools, pantomime seasons and every touring musical in the country. Our classes teach those same foundations, at a pace built for adults starting from zero.

Sharp, stylish and shamelessly theatrical — jazz is the style musicals are made of.

Broadway Jazz

The classic show style — big kicks, bigger finishes, choreography built to reach the back row. The heart of every musical you've ever hummed.

Fosse Style

Turned-in knees, rolled shoulders, bowler hats and jazz hands — Bob Fosse's slinky, minimal signature, still copied everywhere from Chicago to pop videos.

Jazz Funk

Jazz technique with street attitude — sharp, punchy and danced to current pop and R&B. The style behind most backing-dancer choreography.

Lyrical Jazz

Softer and more flowing, danced to ballads with the storytelling turned up. Where jazz borrows from contemporary.

Commercial Jazz

The music-video blend — jazz lines with hip-hop weight, built for cameras. The closest cousin to our commercial classes.

Vernacular Jazz

The originals — Charleston, swing-era steps and authentic jazz-age moves, danced to the music that started it all.

Jazz Facts Worth Repeating

Its 'father' studied Indian classical dance

Jack Cole built theatrical jazz by fusing Bharatanatyam's precise isolations with the Lindy Hop he watched at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom — one technique, two continents.

Fosse's record still stands

Bob Fosse won eight Tony Awards for choreography — more than anyone in Broadway history — with a style built on turned-in knees, rolled shoulders and jazz hands.

Chicago just keeps running

The 1996 revival of Chicago, danced in Fosse's style, is the longest-running American musical in Broadway history. Jazz technique keeps the lights on.

The Charleston was jazz dance's first hit

The 1923 Broadway show Runnin' Wild sent the Charleston around the world — a jazz-age craze a century before dance moves went viral.

Jazz Questions, Answered

Do I need ballet or previous dance training?

No. Ballet helps with everything, but jazz has its own technique and we teach it from the ground up. Plenty of our adult beginners have never set foot in a studio before — that's exactly who the beginner level is for.

I'm not very flexible — can I still do jazz?

Yes. High kicks are built over months of warm-ups, not demanded in week one. Jazz rewards sharpness and musicality first; flexibility arrives quietly while you're busy enjoying yourself.

What should I wear?

Leggings or joggers, a top you can move in, and jazz shoes or clean trainers with a flexible sole. No leotard required — this isn't that kind of class unless you want it to be.

Is jazz dance done to jazz music?

Sometimes — but the name describes the movement, not the playlist. In class you'll dance to anything from big-band swing to chart pop. Broadway and Beyoncé share more DNA than you'd think.

Quick Enquiry

Tell us what you need and we will reply within one working day — no phone tag required.

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Your City Has a Jazz Class

Somewhere near you this week, a warm-up is starting and a combination is waiting to be learnt. Join in.

67 cities

Find Your Class

Local venues, times and prices — everything is on your city's jazz page.

Choose Your City Sister style

Tap Dance Classes

Jazz's rhythm-obsessed sibling — plenty of dancers train both.

See Tap Classes

Questions? Call 07759 656300 or email info@dancecentreuk.co.uk

Jazz Dance Classes

Jazz Classes in Your City

Aberdeen

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Bolton

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