History of Tap dance

Women in Tap

The conceptualization of tap dance as an Afro-Irish fusion, fuelled by the competitive interplay of the challenge in a battle for virtuosity and authority, puts into focus issues of race and ethnicity; and inevitably takes on the painful history of race, racism, and race relations in America. In addition, there are issues of class, in which tap was considered a popular entertainment and placed in the category of "low-art," and therefore not worthy of being presented on the concert stage. Moreover, the strange absence of women in early accounts of jigging competitions forces a consideration of gender in the evolution of tap dance which, for most of the twentieth century, was considered "a man's game." That has become a kind of mythologized truth, given the plethora of tap histories that have blindsided women. By inference or direct statement, women were told they were "weak"; they lacked the physical strength needed to perform the rhythm-driven piston steps, multiple-wing steps, and flash and acrobatic steps that symbolized the (male) tap virtuoso's finish to a routine. Women were "nurturers," not competitors," and therefore did not engage in the tap challenge. A woman's role was not as a soloist but as a member of the chorus line.

Racial and ethnic lines were distinctly drawn in New York at the turn of the twentieth century, but not so strictly drawn, geographically and culturally, between Irish and African Americans living in some neighbour hoods. Of the 60,666 blacks in the city in 1900, the majority was concentrated in Manhattan, with most squeezed into two neighbour hoods—the so-called Tenderloin district, which generally covered the West Twenties, and San Juan Hill which spanned from Sixtieth to Sixty-fourth Streets, from Tenth to Eleventh Avenues. New York also had a population of 275,000 Irish-born residents (not counting their American-born offspring which, together with Irish immigrants, accounted for 26% of the population) living in Brooklyn, which in 1900 was considered the largest Irish settlement in the world.

1920s and 1930s: Broadway Jazz

In the teens of the twentieth century, Americans went "dance mad" with the foxtrot, a syncopated ragtime dance that bounced couples along the floor with hops, kicks, and capers. Dozens of black- based "animal" dances, such as the Turkey Trot, Monkey Glide, Chicken Scratch, Bunny Hug, and Bull Frog Hop, were danced to ragtime rhythms. While dance bands in downtown New York Clubs were "jazzing up" (adding speed and syncopation) such dances as the Grizzly Bear and Kangaroo Dip for their white clientele, uptown Harlem audiences were rocking to Dark town Follies. J. Leubrie Hill's all-black musical revue of 1913 expressed an inexorable rhythm by its dancers who "stepped about, and clapped their hands, and grew mad with their bodies' ' (Van Vechten 1974). The show introduced the "Texas Tommy," prototype of the Lindy Hop, as well as new styles of tap dancing. One was Eddie Rector's smooth style of "stage dancing, in which every move made a beautiful picture. Another was the acrobatic and high-flying style of Toots Davis, whose "Over the Top" and "Through the Trenches'' were named for wartime combat manoeuvres. The dance finale, "At the Ball," was a spiralling, stomping circle dance whose rhythms, wrote Carl Van Vechten, "dominated me so completely that for days afterwards, I subconsciously adapted whatever I was doing to its demands." Florenz Ziegfeld bought the entire show for his Follies of 1914, thus helping to transplant black vernacular dance and jazz rhythms onto the Broadway stage.

By the Jazz Age twenties, both black and white dancers had discovered the rhythmic power of jazz. In this decade in which jazz music became a popular nighttime entertainment, jazz tap dance—which was distinguished by its intricate rhythmic motifs, polyrhythm, multiple meters, and elements of—emerged as the most rhythmically complex form of jazz dancing. Setting itself apart from all earlier forms of tap dance, jazz tap dance matched its speed to that of jazz music, and often doubled it. Here was an extremely rapid yet subtle form of drum dancing that demanded the dancer's centre to be lifted, the weight balanced between the balls and heels of both feet. While the dancer's alignment was upright and vertical, there was a marked angularity in the line of the body that allowed for the swift downward drive of weight.

It is generally believed that Shuffle Along (1921), the all-black musical with music by Eubie Blake and lyrics by Noble Sissle, introduced the most exciting form of jazz tap dancing ever seen on the Broadway stage. Blake's musical score provided a foot-stomping orgy of giddy rhythms that spanned traditional and early jazz styles. While the jazz dancing in Shuffle Along was never specifically referred to as "tap dance," the styles of percussive stepping certainly belonging to jazz tap dance were often described and singled out as the most exciting aspects of the dancing. In "Jim town's Fisticuffs," the boxing match performed by Flournoy Miller and Aubry Lyles, as two would-be mayors, saw these rivals swinging and knocking each other down, jumping over each other's backs, and finishing each round with buck-and-wing and time steps. The title song, "Shuffle Along," a song-and-dance number featuring the Jim town Pedestrians, had the Traffic Cop played by Charlie Davis performing a high-speed buck-and-wing dance that staggered the audience. Elsewhere in the musical, Tommy Woods did a slow-motion acrobatic dance that began with time-step variations that included flips landing on the beat of the music; and Ulysses "Slow Kid" Thompson, a well-known tap dancer, performed an eccentric soft shoe with rubber-legging legomania. The most obvious reference to tap dance in Shuffle Along is the "shuffle" of the title, a rapid and rhythmic brushing step that is the most basic step in tap dancing. The step also refers to the minstrel stereotype of the old and shuffling plantation slave who, accused of being lazy and venal, drags and scrapes his feet along the ground. While the book in Shuffle Along purveyed the old caricature of the black- shuffling Fool, the musical part of the show embodied a new image of the black dancer as a rhythmically propulsive source of energy. Tap dance was thus resurrected from its nineteenth-century minstrel origins to a modern twentieth-century art form. After Shuffle Along, musical comedy on Broadway in the twenties took on a new rhythmic life as chorus girls began learning to dance to new rhythms.

While Broadway chorus lines in the twenties performed simple steps in square rhythms and complicated formations by such choreographers as Ned Way-burn, the most elite of white Broadway stars worked with the African-American choreographer Clarence "Buddy" Bradley. Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Bradley moved to New York in the twenties, where he learned to tap dance at the Hoofer's Club and performed as a chorus dancer at Connie's Inn. After re- choreographing the Greenwich Village Follies in 1928, he worked at the Billy Pierce Dance Studio off-Broadway, where he created dance routines for such white Broadway stars as Gilda Grey, Jack Donahue, Ruby Keeler, Adele Astaire, Ann Pennington. On Broadway in the twenties musical comedy dancing, with simple walking steps, were reserved for ingenues, and considered the lowest common denominator in show dancing. Uptown, African-American tap dancers were inventing intricate steps with complex rhythms. Bradley's formula for creating dance routines for white dancers was to simplify rhythms in the feet, while sculpting the body with shapes from black vernacular dances. Even though he simplified rhythms, he never sacrificed the syncopated accents of jazz, and he used the accents of jazz improvisations to shape new rhythmic patterns in the body (Hill 1992).

1990s: Contemporary Afro-Irish Traditions

The decade of the nineties saw the resurgence of percussive forms of dance forms that were an outgrowth of the tap dance's Afro-Irish cultural and musical traditions.

Stepping is a percussive dance form in which African-American youngsters in military lines run through routines in rapid- fire movements, slapping their hands on their hips, stomach and legs, crossing and re-crossing their arms to the hip-hop beat and gospel music. Often they chant praises to the Lord as they step, imbuing their performance with an air of spirituality. Stepping dated back to the early twentieth century, when black veterans of World War I who enrolled in colleges wanted to express their blackness through a communal art form of their own. Inspired by their military training, they brought to their dances a highly rigorous, drill-like component and combined it with elements from other black vernacular dances. Today's step dance or drill teams add hip-hop movements to their combinations. African-American stepping, like jazz tap, relies on improvisation, call and response, complex meters, propulsive rhythms, and percussive attack, stepping quickly took off in black fraternities, becoming an integral part of initiation, with students holding fierce contests to demonstrate their originality. Spike Lee's 1988 film School Daze brought Stepping to a wider audience.

Though Stepping would certainly not be confused with the style of step dancing performed by the Trinity Dance Company, which sprang from a school that won step-dancing competitions in Dublin, it shares elements of clean rhythmic precision, speed, and the keen sense of competition. Though the company stages its challenges in an air of competition dancing it movement is considered progressive Irish dance, and liberties, such as the semaphoring of arms movements and dazzling knee-to-toe action—have been taken with the original form of Irish step dance.

Trinity Dance Company is not the only company to revive, transform and concertize the traditional Irish step dance forms. The most creative departure from tradition was achieved by dancer/choreographer Sean Curran. A postmodern dancer and choreographer with a background in step dancing, he was also a principal dancer with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane company. Curran's dance works, such as Curran Event (2000) have co-opted related rhythmic forms, such as body percussion, to create patterns intricate enough to keep the eye alert and the pulse throbbing.

In the 1990s, two musicals were sterling representations of the evolution of the Afro and Irish music and dance traditions—Rive river dance on Broadway and Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk. With River dance, which moved to Broadway in 1996, traditional Irish dancing was virtually transformed overnight, liberated, and seen around the world. Since the sixties, Ireland had enjoyed a renaissance of Irish traditional music brought to the world by the Chieftains U2, Van Morrison, Enya, and Sinead O'Connor. With River dance, dozens of talented Irish dancers but also dancers from Britain and America who were dazzling world champions and principal dancers who had been perfecting their craft from going to Irish dancing classes from virtual infancy, entering competitions and brought home medals and cups. The main Irish dance numbers in River dance were choreographed by Michael Flatley (who went on to create Lord of the Dance), who unabashedly mixed traditional Irish step dance and the sensuous flow of flamenco rhythms. Still, the pure essentials of Irish dancing—the frankness of the frontal presentation, calm neutrality of the torso, arms, and pelvis, footwork as keen as a flickering flame, the blithe verticality of the body—glorified a centuries old Irish dance tradition.

Also in 1996, Savion Glover had the opportunity to mine the riches of jazz tap and ground its history in the heart of African American identity when he choreographed and starred in Bring 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk. Subtitled "A Tap/Rap Discourse on the Staying Power of the Beat," the show conceived and directed by George C. Wolfe, with lyrics by Reg E. Gaines, opened at the Public Theatre in New York and subsequently moved to Broadway to win Tony Award for best Choreography in a Musical. Noise/Funk, wrote New York Times critic Ben Brantley, was "not just the collective history of a race but the diverse and specific forms of expression that one tradition embraces." Critics commented that Glover's feet in the show spoke hip-hop, and that he was first young tapper in his generation to yet again reawaken the art form. The show brought the history of rhythm in America up-to-date, and in the process, making tap dance cool again.

In the 1990s, tap dance has continued to thrive and evolve as a unique American percussive expression. When tap dance artists were asked what was new in the technology, technique, translation, or theatre of tap in the nineties, their responses ranged from amplification, concretization, layered rhythms, verbal embellishment, instrumentation, exotic rhythms, political raps, modernist shapes, newly explored space. Incorporating new technologies for amplifying sounds and embellishing rhythms, new generations of tap artists in the nineties are not only continuing tap's heritage but also forging new styles for the future.

The Millennium

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, tap dance was regarded as a national treasure, a veritable American vernacular dance form. It was celebrated annually on National Tap Dance Day—May 25, on Bill "Bojangles" Robinson's birthday (1878-1949)—in big cities and small towns in every state. Tap festivals, from three days to two weeks in length, were held every month of the year, in more than twenty-five U.S. cities. There were also hundreds of tap classes, workshops, and festivals on all six inhabited continents. In Cuba in 2001, for example, Max Pollak established that country's first tap festival and performed with an all-star ensemble, made up of Cuba's finest jazz musicians led by Chucho Valdes.

Tap dancers as performance artists were also acknowledged in all forms of the media. Savion Glover received a lengthy review by Joan Acocella in The New Yorker for his show, Improvography, at New York's Joyce Theatre (16 December 2000), with a full-page photograph taken by fashion and fine arts photographer Richard Avedon. Glover also appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine (May 2004), as did Jared Grimes (June 2007) and Michelle Dorrance (May 2008). Melinda Sullivan made the cover of Dance Spirit (May/June of 2003), as did Ayodele Casel (May/June 2006) and Jason Samuels Smith (May/June 2008); and Gregory Hines with Michela Marino Lerman made the cover of Dance Teacher (February 2002).

In advertising, the entire Edwards family—Omar, his wife Dormeshia, and their two children—became the poster-family for Capezio tap shoes; Jumane Taylor wore Brenda Bufalino's Tap Shoe for Leo's Dancewear; and Jason Samuels Smith became the corporate spokesperson for Bloch dancewear, engaged in a team effort to develop a new tap shoe offering quality and affordable options for professional tap dancers.

Tap had its popular home base in the in-print and online publication of Dance Spirit, with feature articles on tap dancers, performances, and festivals, written by Melba Huber, whose writings comprise a mini-history of tap dance. Nadine George Graves's The Whitman Sisters: Royalty of Negro Vaudeville (2000), Savion Glover and Bruce Weber's Savion! My Life in Tap (2000), Constance Valis Hill's Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers (2000), Mark Knowles' Tap Roots (2002), Brenda Bufalino Tapping the Source: Tap Dance Stories, Theories, and Practice (2004), and Jane Goldberg's Shoot Me While I'm Happy (2008) broke with the genre of star-centered biography to contextualize their subjects within the bio-historiography. Thomas DeFrantz's article, "Being Savion Glover: Translocation, Black Masculinity, and Hip Hop Tap Dance," first published in Discourses in Dance (2002), heralded tap's worthiness of critical cultural and theoretical discourses on race and gender. So too did the tap dancer and performer Ann Kilkelly, having written earlier ground breaking articles in the feminist theory journal Women & Performance ("Brenda Bufalino's Too Small Blues," vol. 3, no. 2, 1987/88, pp. 67-77; "Ghost Notes, Rhythms, and Lamentations," vol. 7, no.1, 1994, pp. 65-81). Kilkelly continued to theorize on the feminist implications of tap performance through lenses of race, gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and autobiography.

Veteran master hoofers hit the academic jackpot on February 22, 2002, when Oklahoma City University awarded nine Honorary Doctorate of Performing Arts in American Dance degrees to world-famous African-American "Doctors of Dance": Charles "Cholly" Atkins, Bunny Briggs, James "Buster" Brown, Jeni LeGon, Henry LeTang, Fayard Nicholas, Leonard Reed, Jimmy Slyde, and Prince Spencer. Marion Coles received an honorary degree (honoris causa) from Queens College (CUNY) in 2002; and Harold Cromer from New Jersey's Bloomfield College in 2008.New tap studios were opened, such as Dormeshia Sumbry and Omar Edwards' Harlem Tap Studio, in the legendary Sugar Hill section of Harlem, as a serious home for tap. New tap companies were founded, such as the all-woman Barbara Duffy & Company (2000); Jason Samuels Smith's Anybody Can Get It (A.C.G.I.); and Ayodele Casel and Sarah Savelli's Tandem Act Productions (T.A.P., 2006), aimed at promoting female tap choreography.

Elka Samuels, big sister to Jason Samuels Smith and herself a tap dancer, founded Divine Rhythm Productions in 1999 to produce, represent, and exclusively manage tap dancers. In 2006, Savion Glover, on the occasion of his 25th year in dance theatre, founded Savion Glover Productions, a self-producing and managing company that was inaugurated at a formal reception and dinner at New Jersey's Performing Arts Center on National Tap Dance Day (May 25); there, Glover honored fifteen "responsibilities" of tap dance—historians, producers, and practitioners—"for giving tirelessly to the spirit and legacy of tap dance." They included Marshall Davis, Jr., Hannah Leah Dunn, Jane Goldberg, Megan Haungs, Al Heywood, Melba Huber, Delilah Jackson, Peter Ktenas, Sali-Ann Kriegsman, Deborah Mitchell, Cobi Narita, Frank Owens, Carl Schlesinger, Hank Smith, and Sally Sommer.

On television, Marvin, the Tap-Dancing Horse (PBS-TV) brought down the house in his big Broadway-style production number; Savion Glover and company performed on Dancing With the Stars (2007, CBS-TV); and for the short-lived Secret Talents of the Stars (2008, ABC-TV) Jason Samuels Smith choreographed a production number for rhythm-and-blues singer Mya Harrison (whose secret desire was to be a tap dancer), using fifteen hot young tap dancers. At Radio City Music Hall, the precision tap dancing of the Rockettes continued in show-stopping numbers—five shows a day, seven days a week. On Broadway, the chorus kids in choreographer Randy Skinner's Broadway revival of 42nd Street (2001), the tap-dancing flappers in Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002), and the show-stopping soft-shoe dancers in Jerry Mitchell's Hairspray (2002), certified, as did the City Center Encores! production of No, No, Nanette (2008), that "tap is the language of love."

On film, the romantic hero in the Warner Brothers Academy Award-winning animated musical Happy Feet (2006), was an unstoppably cheerful penguin named Mumble, who could not sing but could dance, tap dance—and that he did brilliantly. Slapping his webbed feet on the icy Antarctic terrain, his body upright and flippers hanging rigidly out at his side (almost passing for an Irish step dancer), his feet made dazzling ornamental flourishes, Mumble the penguin was an exact spin-off of Savion Glover—because Glover was Mumble—by computer, he provided Mumble's dancing moves. The film's director, lead screenwriter, and producer, George Miller, explained how the entire film hinged on persuading Glover to don a motion-capture body suit to become the tapping feet of "our tap-dancing-fool-hero."

Tap International

Fusion, the union or blending together of unlikely elements to form a whole, might be the term that best describes the musical and cultural mix in tap dance that resulted from an explosion of global cultural consciousness in the first decade of the new century. Max Pollak combined taps with Afro-Cuban rhythms and body percussion for his company, Rhumba Tap; Tamango blended of tap and Afro-Brazilian rhythms for his company, Urban Tap; and Roxanne "Butterfly" Semadini melded tap with flamenco and rhythms from North Africa, not far from her ancestral roots, in her tap work, Dejallah Groove. While these fusion works derive from a relatively simple equation, more intricate multi-stranded weavings have made the term fusion in the millennium relatively obsolete.