Standing Down Straight® & Swing Dance Workshops with Guest Artist Billy Siegenfeld

Standing Down Straight® with Billy Siegenfeld | 10-11:30 a.m.

Standing Down Straight® (SDS) is a voice-and-movement training method developed by Billy Siegenfeld, founder of the theatre company Jump Rhythm®. This approach emphasizes gravity-directed relaxation, allowing individuals to do performative or everyday tasks with reduced strain and heightened efficiency—to find power in relaxation to prevent strain and injury.

Swing Dance Workshop with Billy Siegenfeld | 12-1:30 p.m.

This workshop explores swing dance through the lens of Standing Down Straight®—finding power in relaxation and letting gravity do the work. Instead of applying muscular force, we’ll practice: releasing unnecessary tension, organizing around the skeleton, and allowing movement to happen with less effort and more ease.

Dancers and non-dancers alike are welcome in this workshop to learn simple swing rhythms and partner movement while applying gravity-directed alignment, shared momentum, and efficient use of energy. Through partner and group exercises, we’ll discover how Standing Down Straight® makes swing dancing feel more sustainable, connected, and joyful.

BIOGRAPHY: Billy Siegenfeld is a former jazz and rock drummer and present-day vocal-rhythmic actor-dancer-singer. He’s also the founder, artistic director, choreographer, and musical arranger of the theatre company Jump Rhythm® (www.jumprhythm.org); an Emmy®-Award-winning recipient for both his performances in and vocal-rhythmic choreography for the documentary Jump Rhythm Jazz Project: Getting There; an author of essays, plays, and an upcoming book titled How To Make Gravity Our New Best Friend; and a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence in the Department of Theatre at Northwestern University.

The courses he teaches at Northwestern and in national and international residencies are guided by 2 holistic-educational-creative concepts:

• STANDING DOWN STRAIGHT®, or SDS, is an anatomically fact-based, injury-preventive, “less is more” approach to both stage performance and daily living. By basing all movements and vocalizations on gravity-directed relaxation, SDS guides people to do any task with less physical strain, more emotional gain, and a body-mind connectedness to the earth, oneself, and the people we live, work, and/or play with.
• JUMP RHYTHM® is a vocally accompanied jazz-, funk-, and hip-hop-rhythm-driven approach to singing and dancing. Inspired by the African-originated approach to body-voice rhythm-making called ngoma (“drumming and rhythmic song-dancing”), Jump Rhythm uses gravity-directed relaxation to turn body and voice into a single emotion-driven percussion instrument.

Among the courses he teaches using these two concepts are:

• STANDING DOWN STRAIGHT® FOR ACTORS: Moving and Vocalizing from the Natural Body Using Gravity-Directed Relaxation as Source of “Less Is More” Stage Performance.
• PARTNERED SWING DANCING: Using Gravity-Directed Relaxation as Source of Hands-Joined, Rhythmically Swinging Party Dancing.
• JUMP RHYTHM® TECHNIQUE: Fusing Body and Voice into a Jazz-Syncopating Instrument of Emotion-Driven Body-Percussion.

His creative work focuses on building theatre out of primal human behaviors: giving expression to the energies we feel inside the body rather than the shapes we make on the outside it. This process turns fusions of rhythm-driven motion, song, and speech into stories that laugh, cry, and rant about our species’ most dominant condition: wanting to get more than enough instead of accepting that enough is enough – especially when we replace human-made ideas like standing up straight and no pain no gain with nature-friendly ideas like gravity-directed relaxation, less is more, and the Golden Rule.

Springing from this idea is his 2019 play with music and dance, What Do You Want To Be When You Give Up? It premiered that year at the Mark O’Donnell Theater in New York City. Expanding on the idea, his most recent work is titled FORTITUDE or and GENTLENESS: A play about a rehearsal for a play about how two people, who have known each other for years as actors, finally begin to know each other as people. In 2023, Fortitude or and Gentleness premiered at the O’Donnell Theater in New York. In the summer of 2024, a revised version of it premiered in Tampere Finland, Paris France, and Portland Oregon. Beginning in 2025, it tours in the states and Europe.

• Some of his previously published essays, plus one unpublished manuscript: “Performing Energy: American Rhythm Dancing and ‘The Great Articulation of the Inarticulate’ ” (2014).
• “The Art of Misbehaving: Youth, American Rhythm Dancing, and the Need to Not Be Good” (2012).
• “Standing Down Straight: Jump Rhythm’s Communally Engaged-In, Rhythm-Driven Approach to Performing Arts Education” (2009).
• “Opening the Door: Teaching to the Person Inside the Student” (2002).
• “If Jazz Dance, Then Jazz Music” (1992).
• “Democracy’s Energy: How the African American creation called swinging the beat beats back despair; says no pedestal works better than the ground we stand on; and teaches that democracy works best when we practice it on ourselves.” (Manuscript available; inquire at billysiegenfeld@gmail.com.)

His upcoming book is titled: HOW TO MAKE GRAVITY, earth’s always-available, cost-free, non-polluting source of get-up-and-go, OUR NEW BEST FRIEND by STANDING DOWN (NOT UP!) STRAIGHT®.

Billy received a bachelor’s degree in literature from Brown University and a master’s degree (subject: writing about jazz music and the singing and dancing performed to it) from New York University’s Gallatin Division. When living in New York City, he danced in Don Redlich’s company; taught theatre-movement at Hunter College; performed as an actor-dancer-singer in both off-off-Broadway shows and the Broadway production of Singin’ in the Rain; and studied Meisner-based acting with Tim Philips and natural-voice singing with Joan Kobin.

After becoming injured from years of dance training that pushes the body beyond its natural limits, he studied a rehabilitative approach to human movement called “ideokinesis.” It emphasizes working within the body’s natural range of motion by using gravity-directed relaxation to help the body operate in an energy-efficient, injury-preventive way. It is based on the ideas of posture and motion innovated by Mabel Ellsworth Todd. In her iconic anatomy text The Thinking Body, she addresses the difference between what the nature-made, evolution-designed human body wants to do versus what the over-grasping, hypertension-driven human mind thinks it should do. Todd’s point of view directly spurred the development of the holistic-educational-creative concept that he named “Standing Down Straight®.”