VOP: the word he made up, and the dance empire he built on it

It was raining Frank Hatchett this past weekend. I'd never heard the name before that day. Here's what I didn't know yet.

Hatchett invented an entire style of jazz dance and named it after a sound, not a word. VOP. He'd shout it mid combination to snap a student out of technically correct and into actually alive. One two three, VOP, ball change, VOP. From what I can find, it's not an acronym. It doesn't stand for anything. It's just the noise he made when a movement needed more truth in it.

He built that style out of being shut out. Back when he was auditioning, Black dancers simply weren't getting hired. So he stopped waiting for a stage and started teaching instead, blending the African and modern technique he learned from Katherine Dunham's own protégé with Broadway jazz and real street attitude.

That style eventually trained Madonna, Janet Jackson, Brooke Shields, Naomi Campbell, at a studio in New York that grew out of his classes and still exists today as the Broadway Dance Center.

These records though, these weren't made for any of that fame. Statler Records pressed them specifically to be sold in bulk to dance schools, part of a whole hidden genre collectors call dance instruction records, so instructors anywhere could teach identical choreography without Hatchett in the room. They were never meant to be listened to as music, never meant to leave a studio floor, let alone end up in a stranger's collection decades later.

What I know for certain is a man got told no at every audition, and instead of quitting, invented a whole vocabulary for teaching presence itself. That's still on these records, somewhere in the grooves, whether it was ever meant to be found there or not.