CHOREOGRAPHY AND THE COMPANY MODEL
If tap choreography meant the sequencing of steps, it went at least as far back as minstrelsy. Ned Wayburn and other Broadway dance directors had worked out spatial patterns for large groups of tappers, while the class acts had refined the precision of small ones. In films, Astaire had achieved a pinnacle of imagination and musicality. His dances had a shape and ideas that he developed as a composer or a poet does. Some expressed character or told a story. So, less enduringly, did Paul Draper’s work. But Astaire and Draper kept their dances brief and confined themselves to solos and duets. Some of the great black acts expanded into trios and quartets, but they rarely strayed beyond unison or call-and-response, and they nearly always defaulted to serial solos. Fundamentally, there was the solo, the challenge dance, or the chorus line. The possibilities of sustaining a choreographic structure involving more dancers and greater compositional sophistication remained largely unexplored.
Moreover, at the heights of tap artistry in the jazz tradition, there was a strong suspicion of choreography. “Having a choreographer tell me what to do would ruin everything,” Baby Laurence said. “I wouldn’t be able to improvise or interpret the music, and I couldn’t express myself.” The identification of the dancer with the dance was so tight that the idea that one could express oneself, or something larger than oneself, by interpreting another person’s creation—the way an actor approaches a role, or a musician regards a composition—was almost entirely foreign. It was foreign the way ballet was foreign, and for most of the hoofers, ballet represented an abdication of freedom. (The possible freedom in escaping the self was not considered.) All the best tap dancers of old had fashioned routines for themselves, but they tended to be individualists, with little interest in dancing routines made by somebody else or in making routines for somebody else to dance. The history of imitation and the allotment of credit had not encouraged many to think differently.
Modern dance had its own tradition of the individual voice. Martha Graham, to choose the greatest example, had created her own movement language in the thirties. Other modern choreographers were expected, in some measure, to do the same. Graham worked out her language on her own body, then taught it to others, and this was also part of the model: the establishment of a company of dancers, trained in the choreographer’s methods and style, who serve both as the material of her creations and the storehouse. Belonging to a company could function as an apprenticeship, both for dancers and for future choreographers. Graham emerged out of the company of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, and from her troupe branched off the great and very different dancemakers Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor, from whose companies branched off other companies, and so on. Choreographic styles could be combed for creative thefts and family relations. Although the choreographer was, until he or she retired from dancing, usually the star dancer, the company model marked a shift in emphasis from the performer to the choreographer and the work. A company built up a repertory that could be maintained or revived as dancers came and went, dances that might last beyond the death of the choreographer. In the eighties, it was this model that young tap dancers attempted to adopt. Choreography and companies, they believed, were necessary for tap’s survival.
Paul Draper had made the argument back in 1963, positing the need for institutions and “a framework in which student dancers may envisage themselves.” (A decade later, he told Jane Goldberg that he should have been the one to form a tap company, but that he was too selfish.) “Tap must be perceived as an art form,” Brenda Bufalino wrote in 1989, “one that can be choreographed, performed in ensemble, notated, and put in repertory like other dance forms. Otherwise, it is in danger of dying out again.” And: “If we do not have thriving companies, what is there for the young dancer to hope for? The aspiring tap dancer has only one hope at present: that is to be a star soloist. This single aspiration will eventually be a deterrent.” Bufalino admired how the founders of modern dance had started on the same stages as tap dancers, and had, through years of poverty and struggle, created an alternative system of venues and funding, cultivating audiences with a taste for their kind of art.
Jack Cole recalled that when he practiced tap at Denishawn, the home base of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, St. Denis called a meeting to announce that “the temple” had been “defiled.” In 1937, when tap still had the upper hand, Shawn had vilified it as an invention of the devil. After tap went into decline, though, it was treated more as a childish thing to be left behind. Many of the foremost choreographers of the latter half of the century studied tap in their youth. Before Merce Cunningham perplexed and enthralled audiences with his difficult dances and the auditorium-emptying soundscores his collaborators developed in complete independence, he was a teenaged tap dancer inspired by Astaire and the Nicholas Brothers. Though his extraordinary choreography severed sound from motion, you could find a residue of tap in the brisk footwork and vivifying rhythmic sense, but only if you were searching for it.
In the seventies, Twyla Tharp was the choreographer of the moment. Her Bix Pieces (1971), one of a series of her dances to early jazz, included a spoken lecture-demonstration that recalled, with humorous hatred, her childhood studies in tap. Yet Tharp states in her autobiography that she found inspiration for The Fugue (1970), a wild-seeming yet Bach-rigorous dance originally performed by three women in boots, when she saw Tap Happening with Arlene Croce. “Their taps,” she writes, “forced my attention to the integration of sound and movement.” Tharp’s style, with its loose-swung torso and fancy feet, found a way to rescue jazz dance from “jazz dance,” a way to recapture spontaneity, straight-faced humor, rhythmic subtlety, and cool without abandoning intelligence. And when, for Push Comes to Shove, her hit ballet of 1976, Tharp faced the task of imparting some of that style to Mikhail Baryshnikov, one of her methods was to have the Russian classicist watch old films of black tap dancers.
Tharp’s work offered useful precedents for choreographers interested in doing something with tap. Her “crossover” ballets—calling a truce between modern and ballet, infusing classical steps with vernacular style and vice versa—were a sign of blurring boundaries between high and low. The 1960s postmodern movement out of which Tharp emerged had questioned most dance virtues. “No to spectacle, no to virtuosity” began Yvonne Rainer’s 1965 manifesto of renunciation, and dances made by Rainer and her colleagues concentrated on everyday movements such as walking. The effect for tap was to prime dance audiences to pay attention to what might appear ordinary and to see function as form. At the same time, the ascetic experiments left many people hungry for skill and musicality, especially if these pleasures could be snuck in under the cover of unjustly disregarded black culture. It was into this world that young choreographers were attempting to transplant tap.
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Gail Conrad was in at the beginning of the company-making trend, though she never quite belonged to the tap festival family. She used tap to underline points of drama or character in postmodern theater. The child of a ballroom dance duo, she took tap and ballroom lessons from her mother, then classes at the Cunningham school as a young adult. She was drawn to avant-garde theater troupes such as Mabou Mines and Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, with whom she began to perform. This was around 1975, at the height of tap nostalgia, and when actors (the future Wooster Group) learned that Conrad could tap, they asked her for lessons. Teaching them, she taught herself. She also took private instruction from Cookie Cook, after being introduced to him by her neighbor Jane Goldberg. “Cookie fell into my life like a gift from the gods,” Conrad told me. “All the finesse in my technique was Cookie’s doing.” She starting tapping on street corners and the Staten Island Ferry, taking along an accordionist who played sambas or music from Fellini films. Eclecticism was her delight.
For Travelers: A Tap Dance/Epic, Conrad strung together Latin American songs into a collection of animated postcards, an hour-long production that was something new for tap in 1978. Because she chose performers more for their stage presence than for their technical prowess, the technical level of her company ranged from Conrad’s own miscellaneous competence down to beginner level. Yet the amateurishness jibed with a purposeful putting-on-a-show pretense. It was Conrad’s imagistic theatrical sense but mainly her ballroom-derived carriage and line that earned her the approbation of Arlene Croce in The New Yorker. For Croce, Conrad was the sole exception, the point of contrast in her article about the young white women and their “low-primate stuff.” Croce’s blessing could jump-start a career. In Conrad’s two-hour Wave (1981), an allegorical-satirical “tap-dance melodrama,” the living room of a suburban family was inundated by waves, two panels on wheels like cutouts from a Hokusai, but this disaster left domestic rituals virtually unaffected. To convey this persistence of routine, Conrad used routines of tap. She used silent-movie pantomime and a stomping-match argument à la Astaire and Rogers. A solo for the mother combined a clipped quality in the tapping with florid arms to suggest an elegant control freak, a fairly complex character. The music roamed from Kurt Weill and Tchaikovsky to salsa and Dave Brubeck jazz to grab for a variety of moods.
Conrad wanted to tell “choreographic stories that you could hear as well as see.” Among her tap contemporaries, she was probably the most inventive in making designs in space, and the most successful in conveying character. Rhythmically, her choreography was notably less intricate. Croce compared her favorably to Astaire: whole-body rather than just-the-feet. But to the ears of other critics now accustomed to judging tap in relation to Chuck Green, Conrad’s tapping seemed unsophisticated. (That’s how it sounds on video.) Tap for Conrad was a tool, a metaphor. Even Croce came to find too little dancing in Conrad’s narrative pieces, “too little of which depended on the features of tap,” and eventually concluded that what Conrad was trying to do with tap probably wasn’t possible. Conrad’s interests drew her away from the art of Cookie Cook. Unable to attract Broadway producers and tired of the administrative toil of her company, she disbanded it in 1985.
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The company founded by Linda Sohl-Donnell was more along the lines of the Jazz Tap Ensemble. In fact, she was the dancer who took the place of Camden Richman when Richman retired, eventually to become a sushi chef. At Ohio State in 1971, Sohl-Donnell learned that tap was a stepchild and that her dance-career aspirations might better be directed toward modern. She studied with Lynn Dally, and like Dally, she relocated to Southern California, where she soon formed a modern-dance troupe. In 1979, she had her epiphany at a UCLA concert featuring Honi Coles, the Nicholas Brothers, Sandman Sims, and Foster Johnson. “I became fascinated with what, to me, was a new art form,” she would recall. “I knew I had to do it.”
Sohl-Donnell read in the program bios that Johnson taught, and so it was Johnson, with his white Afro, whom she asked for lessons. After the first few classes, he told her to stop paying him, and over two years of intense if unsystematic instruction, he didn’t tell her what he had told the Los Angeles Times before that UCLA concert:
There has never been a white tap dancer that could reach the level of the best colored dancers. Never. And there have been some good white dancers. But they don’t have it. They don’t come up in the environment. They can steal steps or learn the steps or buy the routine, but you can’t buy rhythm. Rhythm is a part of you because you’ve grown up in an environment where electricity is just part of the way of life. You have to live it to get it.
When Johnson and Sohl-Donnell performed together, she executed what he had choreographed while he improvised around her. After he died in 1981, she kept his dances alive. Sohl-Donnell next took classes from Eddie Brown, whose idiosyncratic accenting made her feel like a beginner all over again. After her first session with Honi Coles, Coles asked, “Will that do it for you?” but once it was clear that she wanted more, he gave it. “The training wasn’t just learning steps,” she told me. “It was about history, about music.” The lessons in the rented studio weren’t necessarily more important than the lessons over drinks afterward. “Eventually Honi told me, ‘I don’t know why you want another lesson. You’ve got more steps than anybody I know. You just need to go in a room and figure out what you’re going to do with it.’”
She started choreographing tap pieces for her company, which she soon renamed Rhapsody in Taps, and she found tap constricting. “In modern, you can leap, jump, spin, roll,” she recalled. “In tap, every time the foot hits the floor it better fit into the pattern.” Her method was to choreograph first, then find a musician to compose or arrange; her music was always live. She was, of all the female tappers of her generation, the most successful in transplanting the articulate, lyrical upper body of a modern dancer onto high-level tap technique. Her sound was reminiscent of Coles’s, and with her abundance of steps she could ably avoid cliché. Some of her works were traditional, such as Drum Thunder (1991), a challenge dance on pedestals, and she collaborated with top-notch jazz musicians such as Louie Bellson, an Ellington-alum drummer who said he thought like a tap dancer when he played. But she also combined the techniques of her mentors with odd meters, koto, and berimbau. In Piru Bole (1988), a duet with a tabla player, she ingeniously matched the pitched drumming and rhythmic syllables of Indian music. In 1999, after traveling to Bali, she made Nusantara, a forty-five-minute piece with a gamelan orchestra.
Though capably constructed, these weren’t works of the highest originality, invention, or poetry. The cool presence of Eddie Brown, a guest artist until his death in 1992, pointed up the company’s lackluster proficiency. (Bob Carroll, the troupe’s improvising virtuoso, was in the tradition of his mentor, Louis DaPron: a schlumpy guy with great feet.) Rhapsody in Taps toured, but it was primarily a local troupe. With NEA and local grants, Sohl-Donnell managed to self-produce an annual performance in Los Angeles for three decades. In the mid-eighties, along with her first husband—who, like her second one, happened to be black—she went into debt producing events that brought together the tap masters of both coasts. These were some of the only shows where you could see Leonard Reed, Eddie Brown, and Louis DaPron on the same stage with Sandman Sims, Jimmy Slyde, and Leon Collins. While Rhapsody in Taps represented the present, Reed, as emcee, demonstrated how a septuagenarian could handle backward Over the Tops and nerve wings, swinging his Charleston legs violently. Sticking it to the young, he quipped, “This is me doing it tonight, them doing it tomorrow night.”
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Tap is music: that’s what all the young tap choreographers insisted. But not all in the way of Anita Feldman. Growing up outside Chicago, she had been exposed to the teaching of the black hoofer Jimmy Payne, but at the University of Illinois in the early seventies she switched over, by necessity, to modern dance. The dramatic, emotive style taught at the college didn’t appeal to her, yet the concept of choreography as an intellectual pursuit did. While seeking a master’s degree at Columbia University, she served as an assistant to Robert Dunn, whose classes, a decade earlier, had helped foster the creation of convention-questioning postmodern dance. (Dunn, too, had once been a professional tap dancer, as a child in Oklahoma.) At the same time, Feldman honed her tap skills by studying with Brenda Bufalino and Steve Condos. When, in the early eighties, Feldman began trying choreography, she commissioned a composer to write her a score. Though based on songs by Thelonious Monk, it was only tangentially related to jazz. The dancer played twelve beats against the percussionist’s seven, and tapped one rhythm with the right foot while tapping another with the left.
Feldman was interested in contemporary musical composition. In 1984, Steve Reich, whose compositions were ubiquitous and à la mode in postmodern dance, allowed her to treat his Clapping Music as a tap score. In Reich’s piece, one performer repeatedly claps a twelve-count rhythmic cell based on an African bell pattern, as another performer, starting in unison with the first, shifts the pattern by an eighth note until the two performers are again in synch. Feldman had a percussionist hold down the base pattern as she circled him, tapping and clapping the shifting part, her movements growing more elaborate as she repeated the phrase. Her adoption of such minimalist methods gained her entry into the “new music” world, with its festivals and venues. Her performances were art school exercises, but they could sound closer to African practice than anything done by the Hoofers.
What Feldman came to patent as the Tap Dance Instrument was actually a collection of instruments. There were four hexagonal platforms made of oak and fir, each about the size of a café table, each with its own distinct timbre. One was bisected by scalar slats like a marimba, and there were also two smaller, diamond-shaped modules of pinging brass. All the parts could be used independently, fitted together, or spread across the stage as stepping-stones, islands of resonance. The instrument was a variation on the shingle, the platform, the portable tap mat. It was a drum to dance upon, funded by an NEA grant. In Hexa (1988), Feldman and two other dancers shared the instrument and a looping phrase composed by Lois V. Vierk. The performers’ cyclical supplanting of one another gave the music-making a visual dimension, with the crowding adding a hint of interpersonal drama. Fed into the dance’s machine, a dancing-school staple like hop-shuffle-hop got converted into a minimalist rhythmic cell. In Landings (1989), a duet with the percussionist Gary Schall, Feldman resembled an intent hopscotch player as she ingeniously spread tap technique across the instrument’s surface. As Schall’s long-sticked mallets darted between her legs, the line between musician and dancer blurred further.
These carefully constructed compositions had a sportive air, and over years of performing them, Feldman and her dancers gradually relaxed. This gradual process was part of the point of repertory, and it wasn’t so far from the years of repetition that perfected the Berry Brothers’ act. Like a vaudevillian, Feldman became best known for her gimmick, the Instrument, yet dance critics were respectfully admiring of her craftsmanship. Feldman was successful in earning grants and commissions, and in the eighties and early nineties—but only until then—that was one way to be a working tap dancer.
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Though Heather Cornell grew up in Toronto, her path paralleled that of her American contemporaries: the tap classes as a kid, the drift into modern dance in college. When her teachers at York University told her to improvise, she felt she had no vocabulary to improvise with; improvising with jazz musicians in the music department made more sense, but her instructors disapproved, insisting that she ignore the music, set herself free from it. After Cornell moved to New York to study at the Cunningham studio, Peggy Spina, a Cunningham student who would run an all-female tap company of her own, directed her to the classes of Cookie Cook. “In ten seconds, I thought, Aha! This is what I was looking for. Music in Dance. Interchangeable.”
Cornell learned from the masters—“time in the studio was such a small part of it”—and would come to value how they didn’t break things down, how she had to figure it out for herself. She performed with the Jazz Tap Ensemble and Gail Conrad, picking up ideas. Her own company, Manhattan Tap, came together haphazardly, in 1985. Messing around with Shelley Oliver, Tony Scopino (the lead comic of Conrad’s troupe), and Jamie Cunneen, she had assembled a fifteen-minute a cappella piece. Reviews of it were good enough to garner them a manager, who swiftly booked them into a festival in New York. When the manager asked them if they had a show, they said yes and made one. Their most successful dances were clever updates of traditional numbers: Slipped Disc, a sand dance for four; Chair-O-Kee, a complicated and yet comical take on the Copasetics’ chair dance. Their programs interspersed improvisation and choreography, solos and group work. From the beginning, they performed with a live jazz trio, musicians with a New York edge who were more collaborators than accompanists. Starting out in modern-dance venues, the company also helped return tap to jazz clubs, as when they played the Village Gate for a series of Mondays in 1989 and 1990.
Dancing together, the chipper quartet could achieve a tight (if sometimes brightly vanilla) unison even while executing phrases as syncopated and intricate as those in a solo by Buster Brown or Cookie Cook. Some of the numbers were put together by those men, and Manhattan Tap invited them, along with Eddie Brown and Steve Condos, onstage as guest artists. This was one of many signals that Manhattan Tap saw itself as an extension of their tradition. “It was like magic being onstage with the old guys,” Cornell told me. “We would work so hard. Do everything we knew. And then Cookie would come onstage, flip his hat in the air, miss his head, and the audience was in love with him. We used to ask each other, How long does it take to learn simplicity?”
In 1991, Tony Scopino died at the age of thirty-three—not of drink or drugs but as a casualty of the AIDS epidemic. Cornell assumed the post of artistic director and led a cohort of younger dancers. Collaborating with the renowned jazz bassist Ray Brown, she nervously informed him that her company had fallen apart and that she was bringing in new members. Brown told her, “I do that all the time. Keeps things fresh.” (Brown taught her some Groundhog steps, which she put into “Gumbo Hump,” the tap-friendly composition he let her use.) Through the nineties, Manhattan Tap served as an apprenticeship program rather like one of the big bands in which Brown had spent his early career: an impressive list of dancers got exposed to Cornell’s process and the musicians and the guest masters, then moved on to solo careers or to form companies of their own.
Willowy and Waspy, Cornell grew into a soloist of fine-drawn musicality. Her stage persona was girlish at the wrists and in modestly shrugging shoulders, but there was an undergirding of steel. The tone of her concerts stayed informal, admitting no conflict between serious musicmaking and jokey interludes. The patent aim was conversation; that was the point of dancing with others. In a potentially noisy medium, Cornell was after quieter pleasures, such as good company, and her shows were the best at maintaining the spirit of the old guys. “The true intent of the work,” Cornell once explained, “is to get to the place where the music is playing you.” In the music of South America, Africa, and the Caribbean, tap was a new instrument, which gave Cornell and her dancers territory to explore that her mentors hadn’t. Considering herself a musician, she wanted to get on the music circuits, but she had trouble convincing music producers. Like George M. Cohan or Astaire, she didn’t like being considered just a tap dancer. The label got in her way.
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Brenda Bufalino had a vision of tap as music. She had laid the groundwork by training a cadre of dancers, and on July 4, 1986, at a centennial celebration of the Statue of Liberty, her American Tap Dance Orchestra debuted. In the early days, she sometimes stood on a platform and played conductor. She dressed her dancers in tuxedos, the uniform of symphony musicians. But along with these outward shows, Bufalino divided her group into smaller groups, like the trumpet and saxophone sections of a big band, which could work in call-and-response or relay or canon or could combine separate rhythmic phrases into one big rhythm. Of course, two sections of tap dancers can’t make use of the timbral and tonal contrast available between a section of trumpets and a section of saxophones, or even between two sections of drums. So the trick is to exploit the possibilities for differentiation—loud and soft, busy and spare, bass and treble—to design phrases that stay distinct yet mesh. For this, Bufalino had a rare gift.
She labeled what she did “counterpoint” or “fugue,” and though a music theorist might have found her use of those terms imprecise, they conveyed the idea of rhythmically independent lines acting in concert. At its best, this interlocking catalyzed a chemical reaction of rhythm that a soloist could never equal. Bufalino tended to introduce her rhythmic phrases one at a time, breaking the structure down before building it up. The additive process trained her audience’s ears and also gave the dances some drama; group unison arrived with the force of sudden clarity. Although the choreography had recognizable hallmarks—active hips, feet scuttling sideways—it seemed to incorporate most of tap history, drawing upon movement from associated vernaculars with a historian’s punctiliousness. It was the most complex choreography yet executed by a group of tap dancers.
The music was mainly jazz, frequently in the form of artfully woven medleys. The musical arrangements were hers: “To me,” she asserted, “that is the voice, how you arrange your material.” Solos, duets, and trios varied the format. Bufalino sought to increase visual interest with all manner of floor patterns and turning bodies, but these often looked perfunctory, and though she drilled for exactitude of timing, aural balance, and tone, she didn’t strive for corresponding visual precision. The concentration and proximity required to hold the rhythmic parts together restricted the spatial options. Bufalino’s 1987 treatment of “Haitian Fight Song” by Charles Mingus—a composer with whom she was temperamentally and compositionally aligned—generated high intensity, and in Touch, Turn, Return (1989), the interpenetrating rhythms and rows of dancers built up an elemental power. In Flying Turtles (1990), the dancers swirling around in counterpoint resembled flocks of birds snapping into formation. Curling their torsos in Afro-Cuban contractions and swooping their arms, they suggested winged creatures and also tap dancers doing wings. This was Bufalino’s choreography at its most visually convincing.
And yet the ungainliness remained, and it was compounded by the problem of affect. Serious works like Touch, Turn, Return seemed to demand something other than tap’s traditional amiability: an impersonality, expression through the steps rather than through the face. The dancers seldom found it, and they couldn’t look to Bufalino for help. Even by traditional standards, the ensemble suffered from a deficit of charm and a surfeit of effort. Their technically assured tapping often seemed hampered and diminished by personality, rather than enhanced. Their solos could be shapely, and a few members—especially the sparkplug dance captain, Barbara Duffy—could truly improvise. But Bufalino’s disciples would dance their hearts out, and then Honi Coles, too frail to dance anymore, would sit on a stool and sing and remind the audience what was missing. In her own solos, Bufalino still sang terribly, grinned tensely, and composed, on the spot, conglomerations of rhythms and tones gorgeous enough to stand with those Coles used to compose. The American Tap Dance Orchestra was obviously her child.
Bufalino’s most ambitious endeavor was American Landscape, an evening-length suite of songs by Hoagy Carmichael. First presented in 1990 and expanded over the years, it opened with the dancers stampeding in counterpoint while wearing stylized buffalo headdresses, and it ended with a Native American circle dance that brilliantly segued through several meters, as if through several eras, into “The Riverboat Shuffle.” In between came Flying Turtles and an overstuffed collection of trios, duets, and mostly solos, signature turns built around jump-rope tap or cartwheels. While the frame indicated an attempt to make nature poetry out of an urban art form, the contents were an all-tap variety show. Gertrude’s Nose, a Tap Dance Oratorio, which debuted in 1996, stuck more firmly in the pastoral, and its mode was bolder, relying on nothing but the sonorities of taps, chirpy vocalizing, and Bufalino’s own mediocre nature poems. Jennifer Dunning’s kind criticism in the Times that the program was “confusingly unsettled in tone” could have applied to any of Bufalino’s shows. A program note asserted that “the usual personality of a tap dancer is consumed by the character and the theme,” a worthy goal as yet unattained. The note proclaimed “the distance between the artist and the art itself eliminated,” but the artist was still getting in the way.
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As the tap companies were laboring to expand ideas of tap, critics applauded the effort, if not always the execution. The most common critical charge was that the ensemble work came at the sacrifice of individuality. Reviewers, pining for the masters they had quickly come to love, regularly complained about a blandness, a homogeneity, sometimes characterized as “genderless” or “desexualized,” sometimes as “feminized.” Almost always, they singled out solos, rewarding tricks and showboating. Bufalino complained that the critics were nostalgic, determined to hold the form in the past. She charged that since the critics didn’t have a vocabulary to discuss tap, they wrote only about personality and costumes. And reviewers did write a lot about personality and costumes: these things are hard to look past. (Especially her personality. And the costumes were often bad, as if unflattering attire were the only way to get people to listen.) But the mixed reviews accurately reflected the tough bind that tap companies were in. How to create a company style without losing the singular character of the masters? How to excise the corniness and low audience expectations still evident in the masters’ manner without discarding charm or, worse, faking it?
If that wasn’t tough enough, the company directors had other critics to please: the masters. Leonard Reed never tired of telling Linda Sohl-Donnell that people were not going to sit through a whole program of nothing but tap. “It’s like kissing a girl for an hour,” he once explained. “You can’t just stand there and make love. You’ve got to find some food to eat and you go back and love her again.” He held to that opinion, yet he came to the Rhapsody in Taps show every year. He also told Sohl-Donnell that if she was going to tap, she should just tap and not mix in other forms. And yet when she premiered her tap-and-tabla duet, Reed was the first in the audience to stand up and applaud. Sohl-Donnell remembered thinking, “I have permission.” Brenda Bufalino had made a career out of defying the advice of Honi Coles, yet she also craved his approval. Early in the history of the American Tap Dance Orchestra, Coles attended rehearsals. For days, Bufalino recalled, Coles sat and listened to the counterrhythms. And then he came to her and said he understood: “We couldn’t have done this because we didn’t think this way.”
Though program credits rarely indicated as much, the choreography that the elders provided for the companies was almost all collaborative. Eddie Brown, sober or not, would improvise beautiful phrases—because that was how he, or the little man in his head, thought—some of which Linda Sohl-Donnell, who had written the grant applications to fund this process, would teach to her company in set form. “Sometimes, I would impose some shaping,” she told me. “Once I turned profile on a repeat. He liked that.” As Brown had trouble remembering his own creations, Sohl-Donnell developed cues to spring his improvisations. In between solos, he sat on a stool; in between numbers, he napped in the wings. After Sohl-Donnell noticed that Brown, normally a one-spot dancer, was incorporating more traveling, she suggested that he might have been taking ideas from her. “Heh, heh,” he responded. “You may be right about that.”
When Brown choreographed for Manhattan Tap, Heather Cornell did the shaping, as she did for the Brown called Buster. The choreography with Buster’s name on it packaged some of his steps nicely, but it was the man who mattered. He had no compunction about sitting out a chorus and just standing in the middle of the stage as the dance continued around him. He was more at home improvising a solo or rehashing his jokes, and even then he stopped whenever he felt like it. The company directors would allot him or Steve Condos or Bunny Briggs fifteen minutes and they might take forty-five. “When you get old,” Buster would announce with disarming candor, “you can get away with anything.”
Conglomerations, a piece that Honi Coles was commissioned to choreograph at the Colorado Dance Festival in 1989 with the assistance of Brenda Bufalino, was, in her opinion, “not such a good dance,” though it had a lot of his ideas in it. None of the old masters, she thought, ever became choreographers. “They could make a little dance.”
When Rhapsody in Taps won an NEA grant, in 1990, to invite Gregory Hines to choreograph, the process involved Sohl-Donnell “following him around the studio as he improvised, trying to catch certain chunks of material and hang on to them.” Surprisingly, a decent dance emerged, though it would be hard to say that seeing Hines’s steps done in unison by five women of middling stage presence constituted an advance in the art. “Groove,” which Hines made for the Jazz Tap Ensemble in 1998, came out similarly: a collection of his steps and rhythmic proclivities set to smooth jazz.
When Jazz Tap Ensemble received an NEA grant to work with Jimmy Slyde, Lynn Dally and one of her dancers spent a few days in Boston with the master. He gave them some steps and some ideas about how to put them together, and then he left to play golf. From this material, Dally, her dancers, and her musical director, all back in Los Angeles, assembled a suite of solos, duets, and ensemble portions, all set to some of Slyde’s favorite standards. Periodically, the group sent videotapes of the work in progress to the choreographer, who replied with terse notes. The dance that resulted, amazingly, was a near-ideal balance between set choreography and opportunities for improvisation. Its simple spatial ideas rose gently out of musical transitions. A repository of the Slyde style, Interplay still allowed room for the styles of the dancers performing it; it raised theirs toward his. With talented improvisers, the piece could work wonders.
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The dancer who accompanied Lynn Dally on her sessions with Slyde was Derick Grant, a young black man from Boston. That was in 1995, five years after Dally had started up an apprentice program precisely to develop such young dancers. Throughout the eighties, however, skin in Grant’s tonal range was hard to find in the group photos of tap companies. And that was the kind of detail that a grant panel in the 1980s was likely to notice. Rhapsody in Taps was told it was not diverse enough, even though Eddie Brown was prominently featured and most of the musicians were black. Manhattan Tap and the American Tap Dance Orchestra heard similar complaints. “Lots of places wanted to book us for Black History Month,” Linda Sohl-Donnell recalled. “And they would ask me, can you put in some black students?” Jazz Tap Ensemble’s agent made comparable suggestions. Weren’t there any young black tap dancers interested in dancing for very little money and taking direction from a middle-aged white woman?
Weren’t there any young blacks interested in tap at all? Didn’t anyone want to grow up to be Gregory Hines? Tap’s movie star was still determined to use his fame to promote the art. PBS’s Great Performances: Dance in America series had started in 1976, as both cause and effect of the dance boom, but it had not yet devoted an episode to tap. Aired in March of 1989, the one Hines designed was, according to his narration, a picture of “tap dance now, what’s happening today.” Accordingly, he included tap companies (American Tap Dance Orchestra, Manhattan Tap), and this was the largest audience they would ever have. There were the masters—Bunny, Jimmy, Sandman, Buster—but there was also Fred Strickler tapping contemplatively to a chamber orchestra playing Samuel Barber. There was the Philadelphia hoofer LaVaughn Robinson with his protégée Germaine Ingram, a young black lawyer. There were other women—Camden Richman, Dianne Walker, and the Eleanor Powell emulator Jennifer Lane—cordoned off in their own section and introduced by Hines half-incredulously exclaiming “Women in tap!”
Sandman Sims played his ornery self. (It was the same role he would soon play on several episodes of The Cosby Show, the era’s most popular representation of black life.) A running joke in which he tried to loosen Hines’s taps dramatized a genuine argument about style. Hines challenged a video double of himself. He luxuriated in the tonal gradations of the stage wood. He spoke of the smiling he was forced to do as a child, sharing that it wasn’t until he was in his late thirties that he discovered a “naturalistic expression.” The women talked about the confict between wanting to hit the floor as their male mentors did or dance like ladies, a conversation immediately followed by Hines saying, “Tap dancers always like to challenge each other. It’s just part of the tradition.”
But the emotional through-line of the program connected Hines, the elders, and the only other person allowed to join them in challenge: a shy fifteen-year-old named Savion Glover. “I get very emotional when I see Savion with these men,” Hines explained. “It’s not so much that I see myself. It’s just that I see an experience I had with these men.” It was Glover, in a sweatshirt and a painter’s cap worn sideways, who was given the closing spot, Glover who was introduced with the phrase “the tradition lives on,” Glover who improvised a cappella, tossing together quoted steps from his elders exclaimed at a higher pitch and his own astonishingly fast rattling, Glover who tapped up and down the stage stairs, as Hines did, finishing with a backflip into a split, as Hines had not, Glover who stole the show. And not just the show.