Frank Hatchett

Frank Hatchett III was born December 7, 1935, in Danville, Virginia, and grew up in East Hartford, Connecticut, and Springfield, Massachusetts. A high-school dare led him into dance and choreography, and he became East Hartford High School's first male cheerleader. Among his formative teachers were Marge Fielding-Hayles, June Taylor, Alvin Ailey, Henry LeTang, and Syvilla Fort—a lineage that would shape his later movement vocabulary.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Hatchett built a ten-year performing career in New York, Las Vegas, and Miami nightclubs and on television. He worked as a jazz performer in theater, film, television, and concerts alongside entertainers including Sammy Davis Jr., Eartha Kitt, Harry Belafonte, and Jackie Gleason. That professional experience informed what became his principal public role: master teacher and pedagogue.

In 1967, Hatchett founded the Hatchett School of Dance on Eastern Avenue in Springfield. The school expanded from roughly one hundred students to more than five hundred per dance year, offering ballet, tap, modern, African dance, modeling, and percussion alongside youth development that monitored schoolwork and provided scholarships. It was in Springfield that Hatchett developed VOP, a teaching framework and performance attack that combined Dunham-based principles with contemporary social and street movement. The sound "VOP" itself became a cue in class—a demand for committed energy and rhythmic conviction at the moment of execution.

In the early 1980s, Hatchett co-owned the Hines-Hatchett Performing Arts Center at 1733 Broadway in New York. He closed his Springfield school after its 1984 recital to concentrate on his New York work. That same year, working with Richard Ellner's vision, he helped create Broadway Dance Center. At BDC, Hatchett became a defining presence: after the studio's 1998 move to West 57th Street, he was teaching fifteen jazz classes a week and attracting dancers from around the world. His teaching synthesized strength, funk, individual interpretation, and the responsibility to communicate a performance to an audience.

Hatchett toured as a master teacher, appeared at the Jazz Dance World Congress, and co-authored *Frank Hatchett's Jazz Dance* with Nancy Myers Gitlin in 2000. He received a special teacher honor at the 2002 TDF/Astaire Awards and, in 2013, *Dance Teacher* magazine's Lifetime Achievement Award. Hatchett died on December 23, 2013, at age seventy-eight. Broadway Dance Center continues to identify protégés carrying his teaching legacy, while surviving class footage preserves the attack, groove, and direct performance communication that his method demands.