The Columbia City Jazz Dance Company (CCJC) was formed in 1990 by artistic director Dale Lam and was named one of the "Top 50 Dance Companies in the USA" by Dance Spirit magazine for the 2002/2003 season. The Company has an active community outreach program and performs over 20 performances each year in Columbia and smaller cities in South Carolina, often performing for audiences that may have never seen a dance performance of any kind.
In addition to public performances in South Carolina communities and schools, CCJC completed a five week tour of China during July 2006, 30 shows in Singapore during the winter of 2000, danced for the European Cultural Month festivities in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, the 1999 Tanzsommer Festival in Innsbruck, Austria, and has performed during the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C. for a number of years.
CCJC holds an established "Master Instructor Series" each year by bringing in a number of internationally known guest artists to teach master classes, which are open to any dancer from any studio that wishes to attend. Past instructors have included Nick Lazzarini, Danny Tidwell, Travis Wall, Ivan Koumaev, Mia Michaels, Mandy Moore, Ray Leeper, Desiree Robbins, Doug Caldwell, Liz Imperio, Jason Parsons, A.C. Ciulla, Dee Caspary, and others.
Entry into CCJC is by audition, which is held at the end of each season in May, and again at the beginning of the season in late July or August.
The Columbia City Jazz Dance Company is supported in part through a Tier III Grant made possible by contributors to the United Arts Fund of the Cultural Council of Richland and Lexington Counties, the City of Columbia, and the South Carolina Arts Commission, which receives funding from the National Endowment of the Arts.
Famous quotes containing the words columbia, city, jazz, dance and/or company:
“Although there is no universal agreement as to a definition of life, its biological manifestations are generally considered to be organization, metabolism, growth, irritability, adaptation, and reproduction.”
—The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition, the first sentence of the article on “life” (based on wording in the First Edition, 1935)
“The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents.... It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.... It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“People come to see beauty, and I dance to give it to them.”
—Judith Jamison (b. 1944)
“All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self.... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself—a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required.... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)