What the Eye Hears, page 55
The choreography for the second act, like everything else about the second act, was weaker. Sending up the Nicholas Brothers, the young hoofers couldn’t match the period style, much less hyperbolize it. (The loving imitation that Glover had offered to Harold and Fayard when the Kennedy Center honored the brothers in 1991 had been closer to the mark.) The big-armed wings Glover used to symbolize the Kid’s betrayal of ’da Beat were, for the show’s polemical purposes, too close to those that riddled the later “hitting” of the cast in contemporary garb. But Glover’s evocation of the Harlem Blackout was powerful—a line of dancers, ready to riot, ratcheting up tension with fake-out accents against the low ostinato of a heel relentlessly dropping and patience running out. And in the 1980s vignette, he managed to sneak in the style of Gregory Hines, otherwise excluded by his crossover status. While the text treated gaiety as hypocrisy and only anger as real, Glover’s pleasure in his dancing could not be repressed.
Noise/Funk could not account for the mentors Glover honored. It could not account for Glover. The distortions required to tell the history of tap without the Irish and white dancers and women were bound to disfigure it. But even the metaphor was faulty. Tap isn’t som’thin’ from nuthin’; it is something from something, what Africans brought and what Europeans brought and how cultures in conflict changed one another. It isn’t just what was stolen, but what was shared.
When Robert Brustein, in his New Republic argument against the show’s “victimology,” asserted that “tap dancing was one of the very few expressions of American culture that knew no racial divisions” and that “the early black entertainers were generally free of racial resentment,” he made it easy for Wolfe to respond with indisputable facts about double standards. Brustein would’ve done better to quote Buster Brown, who was given moral authority in Noise/Funk’s own scheme. Brown wasn’t free of racial resentment—how could he have been?—but he could say similar things without sounding like someone yearning for the days before blacks got uppity. “Tap dancing and show business as a whole,” Brown once said, “has done a lot towards getting rid of this black or white thing. The dancers enjoy one another. They don’t see color. They hear tap.”
FUNK U
At the Public Theater and when it transferred to Broadway, Noise/Funk was showered with honors. Reviewers lauded it for the best dancing in years and for energy that could revitalize the American musical and make it young again. (As it happened, Noise/Funk was overshadowed by Rent, the rock-and-AIDS version of La Bohème with the ads that read, “Tap dancing sucks.”) Some critics objected to the glib satire, but everyone praised Glover. Even New York’s dyspeptic John Simon, who thought that Noise/Funk had too much tap in it, conceded that Glover took the form to new heights.
It was important that Glover tapped to hip-hop. As he pointed out, one reason tap had grown marginal was that dancers were tapping to one kind of music and partying to another. Gregory Hines had done some of the catching up, but only with Glover was tap once again strongly connected with the music of the young. At the same time, the young star was never comfortable with the labels “rap tap” or “hip-hop tap.” As far as he was concerned, what he did was hoofing, the art of the men whose tradition he took responsibility for carrying forward. Glover often struggled to explain that “bringing in the noise” was about excellence, not volume, and that “hitting” was about clarity and expressive phrasing, not about how hard you struck the floor. “People think I dance angry,” he told The New Yorker, “but I’m reachin’ for a different tone.” Meanwhile, the promotional materials for Noise/Funk peddled statistics of damage, such as how many tap shoes and drumsticks the cast burned through. Evidence of destruction was thought to appeal to the young.
Glover already did that. More and more young people responded to the invitation to come as they were, yet the impulse to copy him was so potent that even peculiar mannerisms, such as his habit of gripping a pant leg as a bronco rider grips a saddle, were reproduced. Use of the body grew more functional. A floor-directed gaze, an ever-deepening slouch, and involuntary twitches of the forearm indicated that the dancer was reserving all of his or her attention for improvisation. Would-be hoofers favored the model of shoe that Glover did, the Capezio K360, bulked up the way he liked it. (The spread of other habits could be smelled, a reek of cannabis wafting out of the Noise/Funk dressing rooms and sometimes into the theater.)
The cast of Noise/Funk had been drawn from Glover’s longtime associates—Jimmy Tate and Dulé Hill from The Tap Dance Kid, Baakari Wilder and Vincent Bingham from Real Tap Skills. The understudies came from the same circle, connected to Glover’s tap family or biologically related to him. As the run of Noise/Funk extended, though, and preparations for a national tour began, it became necessary to widen the pool. Glover left the show in July 1997, feuding with the producers, and didn’t return until the final performances in January 1999. He didn’t go on tour. In his absence, it became even more imperative to find young black men who could tap, or to teach them. The show established a training program, run by a well-versed alum of Black and Blue and Jelly’s Last Jam, Ted Levy, that drilled young men in tap and tap history (the kind espoused by the show). Officially, it was named the New York Shakespeare Festival Tap Insitute, but everyone called it Funk University.
“It was like being reborn,” Derick Grant told me about the Funk U experience. “Being a young black man, because of the generation gap, there was not much communication with our elders. Noise/Funk breast-fed us that.” Jason Samuels Smith, the mixed-race child of New York jazz dance teachers, described Funk U as a substitute for college: “It taught me about my own history. Made me want to despise my education. It taught me about not forgetting where it came from, who to give homage. If you don’t pay homage, you’re disgracing.”
However disrespectful they may have appeared, the young hoofers shared with Glover a reverence for their elders and a reverence for tradition. Their sense of history, however, could be blinkered. “I love Savion,” Harold Nicholas told The Washington Post, “but he’s got to learn to think for himself.” Fayard, who always bristled at the flash label, suggested that if George Wolfe had been white, the NAACP might have picketed the show. Among several letters of protest in the International Tap Association newsletter, Jerry Ames, whose name was so often left out in lists of the Original Hoofers, praised Glover but found his limiting definitions “gratuitous,” insisting that tap was “no one’s exclusive domain.” Josh Hilberman, a white dancer who had studied with the old masters and befriended them and performed on the same stages, wrote to The New Republic about “misplaced black nationalism” in Noise/Funk. “It is lonely and cold as a white dancer in the ’90s just as it was lonely and cold for a black dancer in the ’30s.”
Jane Goldberg sent the ITA newsletter a rambling journal entry. She was thrilled by the artistry of Noise/Funk, but she found the show’s tap history simplistic—as simplistic as the counterargument she conveyed from the choreographer of The Tap Dance Kid: “Only a nitwit would think that African Americans invented tap,” said Danny Daniels. “They didn’t even own shoes when they got here.” The ugliness made Goldberg wax nostalgic: “In the seventies, we were so innocent. Thinking we could change the world with tap integration.” When newly informed strangers now asked her if she knew that tap had started when drums were taken away from slaves, she sighed. But she already had a response to the questions of ownership. It had been in her act for a decade. You wanna know who started tap? she would ask. It was the Jews, her ancestors, waiting for Moses in the sands of Sinai, stepping on unleavened bread.
Even before Noise/Funk, Brenda Bufalino had been raising concerns about tap going backward. The idealization of the street corner drove her nuts. Don’t let the dance dry out in a studio, she said, but tap sounds so much better on a nice floor. She looked wryly upon the surge of testosterone, upon men returning to the form once they smelled money. She worried that sophistication and subtlety would be stomped out. “If we revert to flash, and only the street corner, we’re in trouble,” she told me in 2001, “because the audience will tire of it again. It’ll be yet again another trend.”
BARE CHESTS AND BOOTS
As Noise/Funk was in development, another tap show was running on the concept of a small cast of men, a relish for making noise, and an aesthetic described by its creator-star as raw. This show also made a point of repudiating Broadway and Hollywood style. “Real Tap” was its preliminary title, but it was under the name of Tap Dogs that the production found global success and longevity far surpassing that of Noise/Funk.
Dein Perry, the creator of this tap juggernaut, hailed from Newcastle, Australia, a coal-mining and steelmaking town. American dancers had been visiting the area since minstrel days, and it was well within Hollywood’s reach, yet during Perry’s childhood in the late sixties and seventies, tap was largely a memory, preserved in old films. Perry’s teacher, a paymaster at a local tube factory, gave classes in his garage. He taught a masculine style, discouraged his boys from taking ballet, and trained all his students hard for competitions. Perry was a champ, but he quit to drive trucks for his truck-driving father until seeing Gregory Hines on TV changed his mind. He moved to Sydney, where he spent years as a chorus dancer in Australian productions of American musicals, 42nd Street and the like. With funds from the Australia Council for the Arts, he made a video for television in which he and his mates danced in Blundstone boots. To paraphrase Gene Kelly, how does a truck driver from Newcastle tap? Maybe like this.
In Tap Dogs, the show that stemmed from the video, the men dressed in ripped jeans and flannel shirts, or in jeans cut off at mid-thigh and no shirt at all. In work boots tipped with steel, they hammered a set that resembled a construction site. In volume, the show resembled a rock concert, and so it was received. One number resurrected the effect of showing dancing only from the shins down; the macho twist was to have a dancer appear to urinate. Another routine spewed welder’s sparks in mock ejaculations. The men tapped together on electronic footpads, and electronics allowed Perry to tap with himself. The only conversational moment came between an older dancer and the youngest, their traded phrases growing longer until the kid was soloing. Most solos were slots for tricks. Most rhythmic phrases went rattle, rattle, bang! Yet top-dog posturing was overwhelmed by male bonding. Perry said that the show was about “being yourself,” and indeed the lads seemed at ease, even if being themselves meant conforming to recognizable types.
Underneath the bluster, the show was conservative, derivative, loaded with ideas lifted from Hollywood musicals. Perry’s younger brother reported on how he and Dein had studied videos of Gregory Hines frame by frame. When Tap Dogs toured the United States, Hines, that advocate for tap volume, praised Perry for building tap up. The American must have been surprised at what he had inspired. Much of the critical response, especially in Britain, split along class lines, with reviewers sneering at the antipodean barbarians or applauding a return to tap’s proletarian origins. In the United States, much criticism that compared Tap Dogs to Noise/Funk played up the similarities of volume and virility rather than the differences of race, lineage, and artistry. The stated ambition of Tap Dogs was commercial—employment for Perry and his mates. It worked. By 1997, there were four companies touring the globe simultaneously; by 2000, there were eight. In 1998, Perry created Steel City—Tap Dogs with a bigger budget and a gigantic set. At the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, in a segment choreographed by him, hundreds of dancers banged their feet on aluminum tap boards as an emblem of Australian culture.
Also in 2000 came Bootmen, a semiautobiographical feature film written and directed by Perry. It’s an astonishingly comprehensive collection of movie clichés. Among the borrowings from Tap is a conflict between a shallow choreographer and a rebel hero who gets in trouble for improvising. The hero’s brother, who knocks up the hero’s girlfriend before getting killed by a rival thief, leaves him the quasi-magical gift of tap shoes that hook up to amplifiers. The only extended dance number comes in the final two minutes, and it’s cruder than Tap Dogs. Nevertheless, the movie is remarkably successful in one sense. Though the boys have to defend themselves against slurs, the world created by the film is one in which it’s assumed that Australian steelworkers could love to tap. The preponderance of unoriginal ideas helps familiarize that counterintuitive notion. You could call that Dein Perry’s larger achievement.
* * *
Noise/Funk was a Broadway breakthrough. Tap Dogs was a prosperous franchise. The success of Riverdance was closer to world domination. Multiple touring troupes of the show brought it to tens of millions. Many millions more saw it on TV. It wasn’t a dance show. It was an industry.
Yet the initial spark was similar, the revitalization of a percussive dance tradition. In the case of Riverdance, the shock was greater because Irish dance was closer to fossilized. At least since the establishment of the Irish Dancing Commission in 1929, a nationalist undertaking under the body-fearing influence of the Catholic Church, Irish step dancing had been standardized, shackled by a set of rules as rigid as the arm position those rules mandated. In Ireland and in Irish America, step dancing became a discipline children were forced to study so that they might express the cultural heritage of their no-longer-dancing parents. Rather than a social pastime or an expressive art, Irish step dancing turned into an activity largely confined to beauty-pageant recitals and competitions, an in-group ritual left behind in adulthood and, for many, a source of shame or at least embarrassment.
Which is why the appearance of Irish dancers before millions of television viewers for the Eurovision Song Contest in 1994 came as such a surprise. “Riverdance” was an interval act, filling time while the judges tabulated scores. A fetching lass did a springy slip jig—so far, so ordinary, except for the brevity of her skirt. Then drums boomed, and a cocky fellow in a satin shirt bounded across the stage, floating on a froth of quick taps. There was something of a bullfighter in the set of his shoulders, a bullfighter who shimmied. The lass went so far as to caress him. Behind them, a line of black-clad dancers held their arms stiffly as they scissor-kicked in unison and beat out rhythms with the precision of the Rockettes. The performance was, relatively speaking, sexy. It wasn’t embarrassed. To many, it embodied Irish cultural pride in a time of economic resurgence, and the ecstatic response spurred the producers to expand the seven-minute act into a full-length production.
Michael Flatley and Jean Butler, the cocky fellow and his partner, were both second-generation Irish-Americans. Flatley, thirty-six in 1994, had grown up short, shy, and poor in a tough Chicago neighborhood. For him, dancing was fighting, and he ascended the web of Irish dance championships until, at age seventeen, he became the first American to win the World Championship in Ireland. Trophies didn’t pay the rent, though, so he followed his father into the plumbing business. The Chieftains, a revered traditional Irish band, brought him along to Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl, but after each triumph he returned to digging ditches. You couldn’t make a living as an Irish dancer. Not until Riverdance.
Flatley was fast. In 1989, he earned a place in the Guinness Book of Records, clocking in at a scarcely credible twenty-eight taps per second. He took a maverick pride in casting off “eight hundred years of Irish repression.” Yet his “loosening”—he raised his arms!—only showed how tight his style remained: physically tight, rhythmically narrow. It was his attitude that made the difference—not just his habit of appearing bare-chested in leather pants, but his projection of his own high self-regard and an energy that was, as he described it, “below the waist but above the knees.”
Riverdance benefited from his stage presence, but it also easily survived his departure following a contract dispute. The producers didn’t hide their opinion that Irish dance alone couldn’t sustain an audience’s attention for two hours. They were likely right about Irish dance as they conceived it: a formula of the same rhythms and climaxes surrounded by dry ice and a movie-trailer voice-over that made New Age garbage out of Celtic mythology. Bill Whelan’s score herded the dancers down the same few paths. But it might have been to give the dancing a fighting chance against the score, as well as to control a variable product, that the decision was made to dance to recorded taps.
Another way the producers hedged was to bring in other, somehow related dance traditions: flamenco, balleticized Russian folk dance. A tap segment was at least justified by a migration-to-America theme. At first, the producers hired three Europeans of African descent who offered up their idea of American tap: the easiest-to-fake stuff skimmed off of Astaire and Nicholas Brothers movies. Then the producers hired Tarik Winston, a young veteran of The Tap Dance Kid and Black and Blue who had worked with the Nicholas Brothers directly. The new concept was a blacks versus Irish street-corner challenge. Winston choreographed the number with Colin Dunne, the Birmingham-born champion who replaced Flatley. “It was my chance,” Winston told me. “I was thinking about Lon Chaney and Chuck Green and all the people who taught me, trying to get all of that into six to eight minutes.”
“Trading Taps” opened with him and his friend Danny Wooten casually trading phrases with each other and an insipid saxophonist. Before long, they were joined by Dunne and two of his ramrod-straight buddies. The competition wasn’t quite fair, since the Irish had reels to match their motions while the Americans had to swing against music that didn’t. Playfully, the Americans mocked the Irish style, and vice versa, though this wasn’t a fair comparison, either. (The Irish style was far easier to mock.) Winston spun across the stage on his toe-tips, Dunne answered by clapping his airborne feet together, Winston ran up a wall and flipped, and then he leapfrogged Wooten into splits. The number concluded with handshakes and hugs. They were all winners: the number never failed to prompt a standing ovation. None of this represented with much accuracy what must have been exchanged in the dives of Five Points, but the spirit of the exchange wasn’t all fairy-tale. Follow it with the race riot from Noise/Funk and you would have a picture truer to history than either show approached.
