What the Eye Hears, page 62
IMAGINING TAP
Although the success of Noise/Funk, Tap Dogs, and even Riverdance seemed to hold out the possibility of tap returning to the for-profit marketplace, after Noise/Funk Broadway reverted. When period-appropriate, revivals included tap. There were crafty, capable choreographers—Kathleen Marshall, Casey Nicholaw, Jerry Mitchell, Warren Carlyle, and the savviest, Susan Stroman—but their conception of tap was mainly restricted to evocations of Broadway’s faded glory.
Derick Grant came from a different tradition. Born the same year as Savion Glover, he grew up in his aunt’s Roxbury dancing studio and was one of the kids brought to Rome for the 1984 event at which Glover became the One. After that, though, Grant drifted into the adolescent pursuits of his Boston buddies. It wasn’t until the early nineties that the Jazz Tap Ensemble’s apprentice program pulled him back in. In footage from that time, he’s ebullient, a sunny heir to Jimmy Slyde. Glover hired him as the first understudy for Noise/Funk, and when Glover dropped out of the first national tour, Grant took over the lead. After the show closed, he told me, “it was like recovering from a meteor smash.” Tap was back on top, except that it wasn’t. Through the Jazz Tap Ensemble and teaching, Grant met and reconnected with tap dancers he wasn’t supposed to respect but did. Tired of waiting around for someone to hire him, he found a producer—a real estate agent whom his friend Aaron Tolson had met on a tour of Riverdance—to book Chicago’s Harris Theater for a four-week run of his own Imagine Tap! in 2006.
There were eight soloists and an eight-member ensemble, a fair sampling of the best hoofers Grant’s age and younger. Five were white; six were women. Imagine Tap! was a revue, a string of scenarios: the doll who comes to life (Ayodele Casel), kids goofing off in detention. In structure and in spirit, it harked back to Black and Blue. One number directly alluded to that show’s “Butter and Egg Man,” with three men in chefwear vying for the attention of a female singer. An homage to flash acts, this routine took all the acrobatics, the whole scale of dancing that Noise/Funk treated with scorn, and presented it without quotation marks, as part of a hoofer’s natural idiom. During the opening number, as dancers in tailcoats revolved in Busby Berkeley kaleidoscopes and pulled trenches, a bunch of guys in basketball jerseys slid in looking like the cast of Noise/Funk, there to sweep away the sellouts. But Grant had no such intention. Jerseys mingled with tails, and bringing in the funk did not preclude trenches, properly pulled. A number Grant called “the whole show in a nutshell” made use of Ray Hesselink, a dancer in the Tommy Tune line and the clearest possible representative of the tap Noise/Funk had rejected. While Tolson, a black dancer playing a homeboy humiliated in a basketball game, hammered out his frustration, Grant sent Hesselink in to save the day with a smile: Happy Tap and Angry Tap reconciled.
Though Imagine Tap! was weakened by some nice-guy muddle, its generosity was cheering. And though the show revealed and suffered from its creators’ theatrical inexperience, it also strongly suggested possibilities, drawing from a broader tradition to access a wider expressive range without sacrificing technical advancements and contemporary style. Where Broadway tradition gave the chorus line the simplest choreography, Grant could trust his ensemble with much of his smartest material. The cast, all children of the festivals, found acting more of a challenge. They weren’t Broadway babies dying to get into a show; they were hoofers searching for a commercially viable format. That search continues.
NEW TAP GENERATION(S)
Much of the impetus behind Imagine Tap! came from Grant’s awareness of all the underused, underrecognized talent around him. He himself is a compelling soloist, deeply versed in tradition, a big man of athletic delicacy who sets himself off-balance to force invention. But he also seems like a team player, and in Imagine Tap!, he ceded the next-to-closing spot to a dancer five years his junior. Once a sloppy fifteen-year-old substitute in Noise/Funk, Jason Samuels Smith had since driven himself with a punishing work ethic. As a video-game samurai in Imagine Tap!’s twist on the hoofer-as-gunslinger conceit, he riddled to shreds every prior usage of machine-gun metaphors. A hard-hitting attack is the most obvious sign of Glover in him, yet Smith makes more of a display of rhythm. He devises devious challenges for his feet: steps turned inside out, unnatural activity along odd edges. It was indicative of both his attitude and his abilities that he once honored Peg Leg Bates by locking one leg as if it were wooden and then adapting all his own crazy footwork to that condition: it was devotion expressed through difficulty. Looking to footage of past masters for style as well as sound, he reincorporated such connective tissue as the high-pressure slide. The suaveness that results, poised against the pounding exertion, contributes to a brutal charm that Smith acknowledges with a sly, goateed grin.
A fearsome soloist, Smith has also emerged as a tap missionary and a leader, roles indicated in the name of his first company, Anybody Can Get It. In 2003, he co-founded a now-thriving tap festival in Los Angeles. The following year, he starred in Tap Heat, a short film without dialogue or much intelligence. In it, Smith is a dreadlocked tap outlaw investigated by a policeman of tap orthodoxy: Arthur Duncan, grown white-haired since the cancellation of The Lawrence Welk Show. Their challenge dance ends in mutual acceptance and cross-fades into a big production number choreographed by Danny Daniels to the corniest possible arrangement of “I Got Rhythm.” Inclusiveness so anodyne may inspire longings for Noise/Funk’s narrow-minded fervor, but a similar routine for the Jerry Lewis Telethon won Smith the first Emmy for tap choreography since Astaire. Smith’s gifts found better use in India Jazz Suites, a concert and then a series of tours and a documentary, all with Pandit Chitresh Das, a senior master of the Indian percussive dance kathak; the mutual respect communicated through challenge dancing honored two traditions. As a dancer, Smith keeps maturing, his perverse innovations settling into naturalness as he pushes the envelope somewhere else. As a choreographer, he’s yet to show much imagination. But he’s attracted attention from television producers and nonprofit dance presenters. On the international tap festival circuit, Smith is king, the obvious model for dozens of Brazilians and Japanese.
Younger Americans nip at his heels. Take Joseph Wiggan. Born in 1986 as the youngest of seven children in South Central L.A., Wiggan got a first-class tap education at the school of Paul and Arlene Kennedy and then as an apprentice with the Jazz Tap Ensemble and in a kind of postgraduate study with Smith. One of the Three Chefs in Imagine Tap!, Wiggan handles Smith’s mind-boggling footwork with a gentler touch and more through-the-body finesse, his albatross arms swooping snow angels into the air while his feet whisper. His musicality and his courtesy summon the ghost of Chuck Green. Lately he has been touring with Cirque du Soleil.
Jared Grimes, another Imagine Tap! chef, was three in 1986, when his mother gave him his first tap lessons. At age twelve, he joined the North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble, a superior outfit that supplied him with solid training and a ticket into the tap festivals. Grimes is always setting off untested pyrotechnics, insane stuff that leaves tap experts happily bewildered. Also a hip-hop dancer, he’s accustomed to popping the beat through all parts of his body. He’s a musician who has tapped with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra—a coup, since today’s few big bands use hoofers about as frequently as symphony orchestras do—but he is far from reluctant to put on a show. His stated role model is Sammy Davis, Jr. So goes the new wave: dancers who find no contradiction between the hoofer tradition and all-round entertaining. The misalignment between Grimes’s tap mastery and his mediocre singing and comedy skills—unfortunately also typical of this new wave—underscores the rarity of a Sammy Davis or a Gregory Hines. Still, in 2013 and 2014, Grimes was on Broadway, stopping the show with tap in the next-to-closing spot of After Midnight, a Cotton Club–style revue. The format was a throwback; Grimes’s tapping was not.
Kendrick Jones II, born into the postindustrial decay of Flint, Michigan, in 1985, answered one of Hines’s end-of-show invitations at age fourteen and found an advocate in his idol. Jones slimmed as he grew and learned to handle his long stems more in the manner of Honi Coles. He has baby-faced good looks, and he can swing to bring the house down. In Stairway to Paradise, a short-run 2007 anthology of Broadway revues, his solo spot was “Doin’ the New Low Down,” a stair dance, and he managed to channel Bojangles while staying entirely himself, suggesting the style of 1928 through his own steps. That’s one mark of a living tradition.
Another is Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards. The bright little girl in Black and Blue, the young lady in drag outdancing the boys in Noise/Funk: she is now a grown woman, married, a mother of three. In the 2003 tour of Noise/Funk, she danced as a woman, providing audiences with the rare pleasure of watching Savion Glover meet his match. In Imagine Tap!, she played a woman in a business suit waiting for the subway, tapping out her discontent, and then, as the number blossomed into an MGM fantasy sequence with hints of “Too Darn Hot” in the score, turning red-hot momma to beat Ann Miller. This wasn’t satire. This was outclassing. Sumbry-Edwards has all the poise and posture, the regal or sassy positioning of arms and shoulders, to make a movie queen envious. But she also has technical chops, rhythmic acumen, and an in-the-bones access to the whole of the tap tradition that no Hollywood lady ever had, and probably no Harlem lady, either. When she is fully inspired, she is like Jimmy Slyde or Astaire—sound and motion in the same dance impulse. Her “Flight of the Bumblebee” is obviously a tour de force, but the greater marvel is how she burns into a ballad. Laser-precise with tap needlepoint or rapid-fire chisel blows, she delivers astonishments with an air of suffering no fools.
And she does it in high heels. Sumbry-Edwards has reclaimed the taboo footwear for women of her generation and younger, who are less likely to see pumps as handicaps than as instruments of feminine expression. In truth, it is only in Sumbry-Edwards’s high-heel dancing that I sense no restriction or loss. A class she offered in high-heel technique, provocatively called “Mastering Femininity in Tap,” prompted e-mail objections from Jane Goldberg, who lamented a step backward for feminism. But the young women see themselves as Third Wave. The heels are an option, as are flats; they’re part of an array of choices that encompass hard-hitting aggression, coquetry, and asexuality. There was something liberating about how, in Jason Samuels Smith’s 2009 show Charlie’s Angels, three women (Sumbry-Edwards, Michelle Dorrance, and Chloé Arnold) could pose in lingerie like Farrah Fawcett while tapping out note-for-note renditions of steeplechase solos on Charlie Parker recordings. Though it’s a strain to see the progress in Arnold’s Syncopated Ladies, endorsed by Beyoncé for the female empowerment of pushing their sexiness in bustiers, today’s female tap dancers unquestionably enjoy more stylistic range, more freedom, than their male counterparts. Everything that men do is open to women, while the reverse does not hold. (The fear of sissiness that pervaded Jazz Dance in the sixties is no longer overt, yet conceptions of masculinity continue to be narrower in tap than in other dance forms.) For this change, credit goes to the Supermoms of Tap, mothers whom the young women, quick to venerate deceased grandfathers, are prone to overlook.
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I could write much more about the post-Glover generations. There are many more striking dancers I could describe, more all the time. As in sports, each generation breaks the records of the preceding ones, because technique is progressive. Art is not, and when the youngsters imitate the old guard, they get the steps, but often not the style. Watching them in their own accelerated mode, I sometimes lose track of the groove. In admitting this, I am probably dating myself, though it is a complaint I hear echoed by the best tap dancers my age and older, such as Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards.
Few of the young have shown much promise as choreographers. The exception is Michelle Dorrance, a stringy, pale tomboy from North Carolina. The daughter of a ballerina and a soccer coach, she has the kind of tap skills that prompted Ted Levy, the head teacher of Funk University, to compare her favorably with an old black man. For much of the past decade, it was hard to find a tap company or project that didn’t include her, from Glover’s Ti Dii to Imagine Tap!. At once dorky and hip, she could pull off the sexy poses and the kick-ass footwork in Charlie’s Angels but also twist her gangling limbs into a knockabout comedy of splayed and quick-sinking knees. At its best, her choreography lays bare emotions hidden in the mechanics of tap technique, revealing how swiveling ankles expose tender parts. It takes tap’s darker emotions and makes them visible for people who can’t necessarily hear them in the shadings of percussion. Dorrance has shown some aptitude for larger-scale composition and has earned recognition in the world of contemporary dance. Her Blues Project, a collaboration with Sumbry-Edwards and Derick Grant, was an unforced celebration of confluent traditions and interracial friendship that also alluded to the pressures to divide. It raised hopes that tap dancers might free themselves from their past without forgetting it.
Some tap dancers have benefited from the recent explosion of interest in dance among producers of TV competitions. But for now, those producers’ ignorance of (or disregard for) how to present tap—to begin with, by hiring tap-cognizant sound engineers and providing appropriate flooring—has meant that tap loses more than other forms in the translation to TV. Though it gestated through competition, it can’t compete. Even the best hoofers—Glover, Samuels Smith, Sumbry-Edwards—haven’t registered. The trouble that lesser tap dancers have had competing in these shows is partly an outcome of the unequal way the competitions are structured, but their struggle is also a sign of how separate tap has become from other kinds of dance. It remains peripheral to contemporary popular culture, and its place in more specialized zones is far from secure.
HISTORY
When I got back into tap, I often practiced at a place called Fazil’s. Founded in 1935, in a different location under the name Michael’s, Fazil’s was a ramshackle, if-those-floors-could-talk kind of spot: the real-life site of the true hoofer’s studio in Gregory Hines’s Tap, the Copasetics’ home base in Great Feats of Feet, the place where Fred Astaire invites Judy Garland to rehearse in Easter Parade. In 2009, its building was demolished to make way for new construction. Hoofers saved pieces of the floor as if they were pieces of the Tree of Hope. For years afterward, there was an empty lot where the building used to be.
The Copasetics are all gone, as are all of Buster Brown’s peers. The women who brought them out of semiretirement haven’t really taken their place. For that and other reasons—above all, the hole left by Gregory Hines—tap these days can feel young. It can seem curiously immature, even though Savion Glover is over forty, even though the art form is at least as old as the U.S.A.
The young are serious students of that history, though what history mostly means to them is footage: the compilations of video clips from movies, TV variety shows, documentaries, and concerts that tappers of Glover’s generation and after grew up swapping and studying. This is their repertory. This is their usable past. Accordingly, the most significant historical development of the last decade or so has been the spread of the Internet. More and more, tap history lives on YouTube. For me, this development has been thrilling in the sudden appearance of a new dancer or an old clip I had searched for in vain, if also maddening when footage that had cost me much effort or money to acquire was instantly available to all. The last point is important: available to all, anywhere in the world. The practice of stealing steps, now wired and wireless, is less geographically determined than ever. Or, to put it another way, the models widely available for study are no longer restricted by mass-market distribution channels or by access to private collections. A kid can search out Baby Laurence even though Laurence made no movies—can study Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards even if she never strikes it big.
Of course, the technology introduces challenges of intellectual copyright and compensation, as well as new threats of a digital age in which copies swamp originals. YouTube comment boards—dominated by don’t-make-them-like-that-anymore grumbling, if not by fetishists who tag videos with phrases like “womans tap shoe metal makes me hard”—are no substitute for person-to-person transmission. As ever, exposure is only the beginning. But tap dancers abroad already report beneficial effects: better and more plentiful sources producing higher-quality reproductions and responses. Many of the students who flock to international tap festivals do so to learn from the heroes they’ve discovered online.
You, reader, can instantly access much of the footage I’ve described in this book. If you haven’t already, go ahead and search. But I also suggest that you go witness some tap in person. It still lives in jam sessions. Circa 2000, if you attended Buster Brown’s tap jam at Swing 46, you would find a pubescent prodigy named Michela Marino Lerman. From 2009 into the present, you could find her at the New York jazz club Smalls, hosting her own jam. “Who’s got their shoes on?” she asked, as Buster used to, and opened the floor to everyone while also trying to convince skeptical young musicians that it’s possible to play jazz at the highest level with one’s feet. Some of the old Swing 46 gang was there, many of them no better or worse, just older. Dancers too young to have attended Buster’s jam were developing their own styles. Half the participants still came from East Asia, but where a camcorder once might have started a fight, recording by smartphone was now commonplace. Video of the jam was broadcast, via Web feed, all over the world: the sound and image of dancers crowding for the Shim Sham in this basement club, not far from where Juba once jigged.
Like Swing 46, Smalls was a site of tradition. What transpired there was a continuation of what had transpired at La Cave, at the Purple Manor, on the pavement in front of Minton’s, in the alley behind the Apollo, on the street corners of Philadelphia and Chicago, and in the Hoofers’ Club. It was a continuation, probably, of what had taken place in Pete Williams’s Five Points saloon and on the shingles of Catharine Market.
