A hoofer could envy how Steve Condos made his exit. It happened in France, at the Biennale de la Danse in Lyons. The theme for 1990 was “An American Story,” and the lineup for the tap concert included Jimmy Slyde, the Nicholas Brothers, the Jazz Tap Ensemble, and Savion Glover. Condos, a month away from his seventy-third birthday, danced generously through two sets. He was the life of the afterparty on Saturday night, playing piano for sing-alongs, and when a Sunday matinee was added, he gave as much as ever. He croaked his song “Ain’t Nothing but a Hoofer” and he tapped, totally absorbed and with surpassing beauty, to “You Must Believe in Spring,” a wistful French ballad about seasonal death and rebirth. Even on video, the performance comes across as extraordinary. Condos walked offstage dripping, out of breath, aglow, saying that he felt as if he could dance forever as he went into his changing area and closed the curtain. His friends heard a crash, the sound of a large man hitting the floor. Someone tried mouth-to-mouth. Emergency doctors arrived. The show went on, and at the end, all the dancers save one returned to the stage for the Shim Sham, half of them aware of what had happened, half not. Only after Shave and a Haircut did the announcement come: Steve Condos had died of heart failure.
“He died with his tap shoes on,” the newspapers said. Three months later, his colleagues honored him with a benefit concert for a scholarship fund in his name. The concert was a celebration, a tap wake hosted by the half-paralyzed Honi Coles. Condos appeared on video and in the steps of a protégé, thirteen years old and black, named Marshall Davis, Jr. That kid (no relation to Sammy) opened the proceedings, Jimmy Slyde closed them, and twenty other tappers took turns in between. More crammed the stage for the Shim Sham. It seemed to some a one-of-a-kind event, but events like it became all too regular in the nineties, a defining feature of the decade. The shape and tone held fast as half of the participants crossed over from doing the eulogizing to being eulogized. Ralph Brown died a month after Condos. The next year it was Cookie Cook. Then Eddie Brown. Then Honi Coles. Lon Chaney, 1995. Bubba Gaines and Chuck Green, 1997. Peg Leg Bates, 1998. Harold Nicholas, 2000.
Astaire had died in 1987, his place in the world’s cultural memory secure, but it was in reading the obituary that same year of the Hollywood tap choreographer Louis DaPron that one of DaPron’s students realized that her teacher’s stories had died with him. That student, Rusty Frank, set out to find and record other stories before it was too late. Thirty tap dancers made it into Tap!, the book of interviews she published in 1990. Compared to Jazz Dance (which was reissued in 1994, after a long period out of print, with a preface by Brenda Bufalino explaining how it had become the tap bible), Tap! was cursory. But the later book included much that the earlier one had missed, and in places, the newer contradicted the older, the same dancers telling the same stories differently a few decades on. At the bottom of each interview, Frank printed the date she had conducted it, and in a few cases—Willie Covan, Hermes Pan—this date was followed by another, mere months later, after which the subject was no longer available for interviews.
Nineteen ninety was also the year that the world lost Sammy Davis, Jr. He succumbed to throat cancer at the age of sixty-five. Davis was alive for his tribute, an event honoring his sixty years in showbiz that was filmed for television shortly before his death. There were, as might be expected, not many tappers in the procession of performing stars, but the only time the honoree rose up out of his ringside seat to perform himself was when a choked-up Gregory Hines shared his love by laying down iron. Here was a challenge that Davis could not lose. After a few teasing trades, Hines sank to his knees and kissed the shoes of his idol. Later, at the funeral, Hines spoke of having seen Davis one last time: on his deathbed the older man, unable to speak, mimed passing the younger man a basketball. The younger man mimed catching it.
This was symbolic, in the sense that it commemorated something that had already happened. Hines had caught the ball a long while back. In fact, he had started passing it to someone else, and enactments of that passing became a standard climax for tap events. Hines would do his thing and then at some point he would call up Savion Glover, who would trade with him until Hines mimed defeat. In case anyone missed the message, Hines used every public opportunity, every interview, to offer sports analogies of succession and talk up Savion as the future of tap. And if you wanted to see what he meant, from April 1992 through September 1993, you could find their ritual on a Broadway stage eight times a week.
JAMMING ON BROADWAY
Jelly’s Last Jam took nine years to reach that stage. The producers had difficulty finding a black writer interested in tackling the complicated character of the New Orleans composer-pianist Jelly Roll Morton, a compound of such outsized talent and braggadocio that his claim to have invented jazz can neither be credited nor entirely dismissed. The producers found their writer, and a director, in George C. Wolfe, who had gained attention for satirizing black stereotypes in his 1985 play The Colored Museum. By the time Wolfe’s take on Morton debuted in Los Angeles, Gregory Hines had dropped out. He was uneasy about embodying a figure who had become, in Wolfe’s treatment, a light-skinned black racist facing damnation for denying his roots. When Hines signed back on, Wolfe gained a bankable leading man and a performer with the charm to make an antihero palatable, a Gene Kelly for his black Pal Joey. Hines, however, also came with a problem: How was the rise and fall of a great piano player to be portrayed by a tap dancer?
The answer was to use tap as metaphor—not just for the piano playing, which Hines could simulate, but for Morton’s creative energies and frustrations and the African origins of jazz and the suppressed drum. Wolfe framed the story as a musical morality play in which Morton, recently deceased, is forced by a Death figure called the Chimney Man to face his past. In The Colored Museum, Wolfe had mocked the vapid reassurance of the dancing in all-black musicals, and in interviews he disparaged “cultural strip mining, where you don’t go down through the dirt to get the jewel, you just scoop down and put it on top.” In Jelly’s Last Jam, the dirt is color and caste. It’s the defensive snobbery that leads Wolfe’s Morton to say, “Ain’t no Coon stock in this Creole.” Wolfe’s script condemns Morton for this—for being a messenger who thought he was the message, and above all for his failure to honor those who came before. That was a judgment that Hines, honorer of elders, could get behind. He could also draw on family history: his mother’s father had refused to attend her wedding because the man she was marrying—the soon-to-be Dad of Hines, Hines, and Dad—was dark-skinned. Eubie! and Sophisticated Ladies, the productions that had launched Hines’s comeback, were exactly the kinds of revues that Wolfe was repudiating, but Hines’s adult career had been a search for ways “to be real,” to escape the forced smiles of his childhood. This show furthered that project. It even had a sex scene, as explicit and comically athletic as Hines could want.
Playing Young Jelly Roll was Savion Glover. In one early number, the older Jelly Roll taught the younger how to find his song in the sounds of the street. Amid vendors’ cries (“Roots! Roots!”) and the percussion of pots and pans, Hines led Glover into a challenge dance, their call-and-response at once dramatizing the growth of the artist and generating the excitement of a showstopping number. Neither in the improvisations nor in the unison sections, choreographed by Hines and Ted Levy, did the two Jellys confine themselves to period style. The choreography was loaded with Hines’s pet steps, which he also traded with the chorus in the irresistible instructional number “That’s How You Jazz.” The second act was more innovative. Alone, passed over by musical fashion, Hines sat on a chair, venting his discontent in irregular fits of tap. Then Young Jelly appeared in half-light, laying down a time step over which old Jelly could improvise his groove back. Wolfe didn’t shy away from minstrelsy: the first-act closer had Morton calling his darker best friend a nigger before selling himself as Doctor Jazz backed by a chorus in blackface. But tap represented something else in the show, something like what the Chimney Man called “the black soil from which this rhythm was born.” Roots.
Jelly’s Last Jam was hailed as a breakthrough. Reviewers who knew little about Morton dutifully expressed outrage at the racism; more knowledgeable critics saved their outrage for Wolfe’s polemical distortions. Wolfe had taken Morton’s tall tale of inventing jazz and treated it as a sin, but this exaggerated reaction to an exaggeration made for an engaging few hours of theater. Wolfe had an obsession about class within color, yet he knew how to turn his thoughts into fluid stagecraft, and he saw Hines’s gift as a tap dancer as a gift not to be wasted. The title role, for all of its reductive psychology, was the best part Hines ever had. This time he won the Tony.
As for the contest embedded in every performance, the one between the forty-six-year-old hoofer and the eighteen-year-old, “winning was never in question.” That’s how Hines described his chances for The New Yorker, though he remembered one occasion when he thought he saw an opening. Glover came in tired after a night of partying:
We get out on the stage, and we’re doing it, but I can see he’s not a hundred per cent. I do my first step and he does a step. I pull something out, and I riff on it, so that even the people onstage are going, “Ooh, ooh.” So now he blinks a couple of times, like a rhino that hadn’t seen me and now he’s spotted me. Now he reaches for something very interesting. But it’s still not, you know, there. I spin. I go up on both of my toes, and I just stay there, and I come down with a flourish. And now I can see his nostrils flaring and his eyebrows wrinkling. His lips come out pouting like they do, and he does an amazing step—he spins around, goes up on one toe, and then he hops on the toe to some kind of percussive thing that pissed me off. And when he did that a roar went up like it was a bullfight. The people onstage started laughing, because they knew I thought I had him.
THE REAL DEAL
Glover was happy enough outdoing Hines at each performance of Jelly’s Last Jam, but after the two shows each Wednesday, he would head over to the jam session run by Jimmy Slyde and dance until two in the morning. At a small club called La Cave would be Chuck Green and Buster Brown and the hefty encouragement of Lon Chaney. Slyde had inititated the sessions to give younger dancers opportunities to practice with a band in front of an audience. He didn’t think of himself as a teacher; he preferred the term “nudge.” He taught by example and did much of his nudging through tap koans that could sound like platitudes but would work in the minds of his pupils like slow-release pills or time bombs. Lessons about the dance resonated as lessons about life. “You’ve got to fall,” he’d say, “and you’ve got to learn how to get up, gracefully. Like you never fell.” Continually, Slyde invoked the names of past dancers and the recent dead. “What we’re doing,” he said, “has been done before.” Younger dancers began thinking of themselves as enrolled in the University of La Cave. Glover was the star student.
Yet Glover the improviser had also been dabbling in choreography. The nonprofit organizations Dancing in the Streets and Dance Umbrella commissioned him to set a dance on twenty-eight kids, an ensemble piece he called New Tap Generation(s). The NEA funded his next work, which he called The Real Deal. Glover split his kids into two groups to make a point. The first danced to “Anything Goes,” running through the Broadway clichés that Glover had learned in The Tap Dance Kid; the second tapped to hip-hop, still in three-and-a-break patterns but hitting harder and forgetting about their arms. Glover came out dribbling a basketball to make a speech suggesting that the first group should get together with the second. The result wasn’t amalgamation. The first group conformed to the second’s style. They got wise to the Real Deal. This is how Glover expected the New Tap Generation(s) to behave.
He gathered together a company, a crew, and gave it a chest-thumping name: Real Tap Skills. The members were his age and younger, drawn mostly from workshops and classes he was teaching. To them he was a star but also a peer. He made tap a young person’s game, and his serious devotion to the art could inspire serious devotion. Jimmy Tate, who had preceded Glover as the Tap Dance Kid, was brought in as Glover’s understudy for Jelly’s, and rediscovered him in rehearsal: “I had no idea it was possible to get that good,” Tate recalled. Tate, and others like him, started practicing a lot harder.
Around this time, Glover acquired Rastafarian dreadlocks and a scraggly beard, so that when he appeared at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park in August 1994, the young man who had always been described in the press as skinny earned the adjective “hulking.” He and his crew were joined by Drummin’ Two Deep, a duo of bucket drummers that Glover had met outside the Minskoff Theatre. They all treated the Shakespeare in the Park set as their street corner. Along with the new look came a new style. When pressed to supply a label for it, Glover offered “young” or “raw.” He spoke about slang, about steps that had no official names. It was a heavy style: heavy in the heels, heavy on bass. It reflected the music in his Walkman, the groove and flow of hip-hop anthems by Public Enemy or Eric B. & Rakim. The normally inverse ratio between volume and speed no longer applied to him: he could dance faster and louder at once, without having to raise his feet higher off the floor. Though his speediest steps—an in-place duck-waddle that sounded like an endless press roll—tended to monopolize attention, one of his most characteristic moves was a simple slapping of the ground with the ball of a foot: the whack of a bucket drummer by other means. Glover wasn’t concerned with appearing graceful. Following his notion of expressing himself rather than entertaining, he was as absorbed in his rhythms as Steve Condos had been. Yet Glover’s physical force, combined with his look, especially in an age of gangsta rap, made the intensity of his search read as aggressive. He had renounced flips and splits, but at the end of the show, he improvised a cannonball jump into the theater’s moat. Real Tap Skills and Drummin’ Two Deep jumped in after him, ready to follow their leader wherever he chose to go.
BRING IN THE NOISE
The Delacorte program was a tryout. George C. Wolfe, now the director of the Public Theater, wanted to create a project for Glover. What would you like to do? he asked the dancer. “I just want to bring in the noise,” Glover replied, “I just want to bring in the funk.” To Wolfe, this suggested a title, one with meaningless apostrophes and a subtitle. Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk: A Tap/Rap Discourse on the Staying Power of the Beat, the Savion Glover vehicle that emerged in the fall of 1995, was in many ways a throwback, a racial pageant, an all-black musical that told the history of Africans in America one more time. The novelty here was to tell that story through tap and to merge it with a history of the dance, braiding the narratives into a fable about a mystical force called ’da Beat.
In the discourse of Noise/Funk—conveyed through the rapping of Reg E. Gaines, lyrics rendered by Ann Duquesnay, historical facts and figures projected on the backdrop, and the dancing of Glover and four of his friends—’da Beat arrived on the slave ships from Africa and persisted even when drums were outlawed. Tap derived from that thwarted impulse, a way of making “som’thin’ from nuthin’”—much like drawing music from pots and pans, as demonstrated by Drummin’ Two Deep. (Much like, for that matter, the “music in the tin pan” sung about by a blackface character in T. D. Rice’s 1839 Bone Squash.) Racial oppression threatened to destroy ’da Beat. A scene of a buck dancer up on a cotton bale ended in his being lynched; a scene of a hopeful young father migrating to Chicago was followed by a vision of industrial hell; a scene of the good times after the factory workday was interrupted by a race riot. Then came more insidious threats: appropriation, assimilation. A scene of a Harlem Renaissance cabaret, with tuxedoed dancers Charlestoning and a chanteuse singing “I got the beat / You got the beat / The whole world has got the beat,” careened into a blinding flash and a berserk scream. End of Act One.
The first section of Act Two, titled “Where’s the Beat?,” focused more narrowly on tap, tracking the attempts of a character called the Kid to break into Hollywood. On a studio lot, the Kid met a successful duo named Grin and Flash, who twirled their wrists, slid into splits, and advised the Kid to “Give ’em flash / Give ’em style / And big, big, big, big, big, big smile.” Then he ran into Uncle Huck-a-Buck, who tapped up and down stairs, danced with a curly-headed doll, and sang “Who the hell cares if I acts de fool / When I takes a swim in my swimming pool?” Disgusted by these sellouts but rejected in turn by the jazz hipsters on Central Avenue, the Kid ended up selling out himself, following the motto of the tap apostates: “No Beat, Just Flash.” At this point, Noise/Funk abandoned tap history—had no more use for it—and rolled through the postwar decades of black history in four vignettes of life on a Harlem street corner, all summed up in the lyric “Ain’t never gonna change.” The present was represented by a sketch in which four young blacks—a B-boy, a student, a businessman, and a soldier—each tried and failed to hail a taxi. The show closed out with the young hoofers, dressed for the street corner, passing rhythms around with the bucket drummers, and explaining in voice-over how tap saved them from lives of crime.
That was the trajectory of Noise/Funk—except that, directly after the tap-in-Hollywood section, an ahistorical episode was inserted, a solo for Glover. With his back to the audience, he faced a triptych of mirrors and danced to a tape of his own voice, an interior monologue that was part memoir, part manifesto. “Hollywood, they didn’t want us,” said the voice. “They wanted to be, like, entertained.” But Chuck Green and Jimmy Slyde, they were different: “They was educating, not entertaining.” They were hoofing, or “dancin’ from the waist down … People think tap dancin’ is arms and legs and this big ol’ smile. Naw, it’s raw. It’s rhythms. It’s us. It’s ours.” As the voice described four of Glover’s mentors—Green, Slyde, Lon Chaney, and Buster Brown—Glover sampled their signature steps, and as the voice recalled the experience of Black and Blue, how “their steps started changing my style,” Glover demonstrated how his style changed their steps, accelerated them, turned up the volume. During this imitation dance, the voice contrasted “hitting,” or expressing oneself, with classroom tap: “That’s not even tap dancing … I don’t see how people would want to see that old school or, like, old style of tap dancin’ when they know there’s some real hittin’ goin’ on.”
The monologue was rickety with internal contradictions. It drew a hard distinction between entertaining and educating, but praised Brown for being a real showman; it defined hoofing as raw and from the waist down, but admired Slyde as “mad smooth.” Glover could combine reverence for his elders with contempt for the old ways and an adolescent arrogance—he told The New Yorker that tap “will probably go somewhere now we got young hands in here.” But the show’s agenda was more Manichaean. It tried, incoherently, to expose a moral gulf between the audience-pleasing behavior of the Nicholas Brothers and the audience-pleasing behavior of the young hoofers, who perched on their toe-tips more frequently than the Nicholas Brothers ever had and adhered furiously to the LeTang Principle of Repetition.
Like Jelly’s Last Jam, Noise/Funk reserved its arrows for those it perceived to be race traitors. Wolfe didn’t need to invent resentment: the bitterness provoked by the Nicholas Brothers’ Hollywood colony lifestyle and the way they made a point of never calling their dancing “hoofing,” the conflicted feelings about Bill Robinson. The wounded pride of the Kid, rejected by Hollywood, could have been that of Jimmy Slyde. (It was curious, however, considering Wolfe’s preoccupation with color, that no distinction was made between coal-black Robinson and light-skinned tappers such the Nicholas Brothers—or Hines and Glover. Even today, there are dark-skinned hoofers who will tell you that the light ones got famous because of their complexions.) Wolfe said that Noise/Funk wasn’t attacking Bill Robinson but rather examining the stereotyped persona Robinson was forced to adopt, yet coming from the man who put a line like “Don’t worry ’bout me playin’ the shiftless fella / I got lots of money and a fine high yella” into the mouth of Uncle Huck-a-Buck, this was disingenuous. Wolfe could speak intelligently about the tap dancer’s smile as one of the signs of safety that American culture requires blacks to wear, yet the show’s satire was far too snide and self-righteous to get under the minstrel mask.
At a Princeton theater conference a year after Noise/Funk opened, August Wilson, the country’s leading black playwright, told a largely white audience about “two distinct and parallel traditions in black art: art that is conceived and designed to entertain white society, and art that feeds the spirit and celebrates the life of black America.” The first tradition, Wilson explained, began with slaves performing for their masters and led from Harlem Renaissance blacks performing for white audiences to the “crossover” artists of today; the second tradition stemmed from inside the slave quarters and led from the Black Power movement to Wilson’s own work (which, he did not say, had been mostly supported by white institutions). Wilson’s lecture and Noise/Funk both belonged to a third tradition, one that attempted to separate the other two absolutely and strictly—an impossible or necessarily falsifying project, since the two traditions, though real, were inextricably interwoven, interdependent, and often indistinguishable.
Even so, Noise/Funk did realize Wolfe’s initial concept: Savion Glover as a repository of rhythms that could express history, rhythms that contained history. While the reference-riffing of Reg E. Gaines tried to rack up points by name-dropping black cultural figures, Glover’s choreography, in its wordless eloquence, conveyed the resilience of African-Americans in a form at once symbolic and physical.
In the Middle Passage section, Glover sat alone, swaying as if in the hull of a slave ship. Slowly he rose, tracing semicircles on the floor with his feet, tentative scrapings that widened into whooshes and finally broke into a cascade of taps, defiant and mournful: an exile’s lament. Four field hands appeared, each executing a different slow and rhythmic stylization of hard labor. Incorporating the semicircle scrape, they inherited it, building up a collective counterpoint that erupted into a double-time stomp, all hands clapping, with soloists taking turns in the middle of a juba circle, slicing up the field with wings. It was a Saturday night’s release, an emancipation of energy that could chill a slave owner’s blood. The dance that followed was the one of a buck dancer (Baakari Wilder, long-faced, long-armed, and long on soul) tapping the rural blues on a board balanced atop a cotton bale; his dance swaggered sweetly, which made it all the more horrifying when his neck twisted in an imaginary noose, his feet spasmed, and he went still. As the father heading north, Glover conveyed the hopes of a generation, mimicking the click-clack of a train with his skittering riff-walks. A machine dance suggested the influence of industrial sounds upon tap along with the dehumanizing effects of factory work. The “Quitting Time” strut reveled in the loose-fitting grace of black vernacular dance—men exchanging slack-fingered handshakes and watching the girls go by.
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.
Winston inserted into his contract a guarantee that his segment would always be performed without dubbing. His foot music was live, and his smile was sincere. He wanted to make friends. He asked the girls in the show to teach him drills. Trading taps was part of his tradition. “I could see how far the Irish dancing went back,” he told me. “You see, they was step dancing before the Africans. In America, the Irish slaves and the Africans, they were both minorities, mixing together. It just looked logical to me.” This attitude did not make Winston popular with his friends in Noise/Funk. But then, to Winston, Noise/Funk seemed like a cult. “I couldn’t be in Noise/Funk,” he told me. “I’m a tap dancer. It would be like asking Harold Nicholas to be in Noise/Funk. I would’ve had to grow dreadlocks.” When Riverdance sold out Radio City Music Hall, a venue six times as large as Noise/Funk’s, Winston couldn’t resist gloating. He was careful to recount for me the praise he received from the Nicholas Brothers and from Jimmy Slyde, who came backstage with the validating phrase “I heard you.” Winston felt that something essential to the art of his mentors was being neglected. He believed that tap, under Savion Glover’s influence, was growing too selfish, too self-serious. He thought it was losing the style and the class of the men who had taught him and Glover both.
Winston dreamed of a tap production on the order of Riverdance, but he had little hope that tap dancers could muster the necessary cooperation. “No one comes together because everyone wants to be the best.” The international success of Riverdance did seem to demonstrate the universal appeal of rhythm (along with the universal appeal of the hokey and the hackneyed). The post-Riverdance spectacles of Michael Flatley—Lord of the Dance, Feet of Flames, ever more spectacular, expensive, and absurd—appeared to offer the same lessons. Soon, Flatley earned another entry in the Guinness book: highest-paid dancer, $1.6 million per week. He sold out arenas as if he were a rock star, a step dancer with groupies. Tap’s dorkier cousin had made good, and these extravaganzas, along with Tap Dogs, suggested the possibility—threw down the challenge—that tap might become commercial again.
ORDINARY TAPPERS
In the meantime, as a dozen or so young blacks cycled through “Trading Taps,” Riverdance provided a few American tap dancers with the most regular gigs available. The nonprofit, concert-dance model, by contrast, was looking less and less viable. In 1994, Congress had loudly slashed the budget for the NEA, which, under pressure, discontinued its grants for individual artists (with some exceptions for writers and musicians). Tap dancers weren’t making the kind of art that offended Jesse Helms, but those grants had been a key source of capital. And just as it became harder for tap companies and choreographers to get funding, it also became harder for them to get bookings. “Theaters wanted bolder productions, not subtle concert work,” Linda Sohl-Donnell told me. “Presenters started asking how many men were in the company.” Anita Feldman, creator of subtle concert work and the Tap Dance Instrument, disbanded her company and retired into teaching. Manhattan Tap converted to a per-project basis—sophisticated projects, but not many of them. And in the fall of 1995, Woodpecker’s, the home of the American Tap Dance Orchestra, was forced to close. Rising rent was a problem, but also the debt incurred from a protracted court battle over a worker’s compensation policy. A press release insisted that the closing of Woodpecker’s wouldn’t be the end of the orchestra, yet it turned out to be the beginning of the end. Within a few years, Brenda Bufalino would be a solo artist who choreographed mostly for youth ensembles that didn’t have to pay dancers. (Electronic looping allowed her to do counterpoint with herself.) The financial pinch was felt across the dance world, but while other dance forms had developed institutional support structures that could adapt, concert tap had not.
Jane Goldberg, suffering from knee pain, suffered also from feeling passed over. There were no more articles about how she saved tap, and now not even the tap festivals seemed that interested in hiring her. Her old friend Gregory Hines told the Los Angeles Times that the seventies and the eighties had been the revival and that Noise/Funk was the renaissance. He told her to be happy, as he was, about the “natural succession,” the lineage that Glover had reestablished. “We,” Goldberg once explained to me, referring to the white women of her generation, “we were the unnatural succession.” When, she quipped, were young black men going to take care of them?
* * *
Savion Glover, who had no trouble finding bookings, started another company. He called this one Not Your Ordinary Tappers. Its first job, in 1997, was the opening sequence for ABC’s Monday Night Football. ABC also gave Glover his own TV special, Savion Glover’s NuYork. His company appeared in the special, doing a number with a title—“Swing a Little Funk into Gang Gang”—that described itself and the whole program. Later, the group served as Glover’s posse in a silly, gangsta-style tap showdown with the rapper then named Puff Daddy. (This was a retread of Glover’s recent cameo in a Puff Daddy video, a significant bit of cross-marketing considering that Puff Daddy’s album was number one.) Savion Glover’s NuYork was a sequence of music videos demonstrating that Glover’s tapping could mingle with contemporary music: reggae-inflected hip-hop, rap-injected R&B. It could express the sentiments of Puff Daddy’s ode to conspicuous consumption or those of a Harlem church service. Though the situations were manufactured, they weren’t false: Glover really did have that kind of cultural range. The best number paired him with Stevie Wonder, who told a starstruck Glover, “I can see you.” Dance for the blind: I thought it was just a metaphor.
Glover’s next TV special was filmed at the White House. Introducing his young guest as “the greatest tap dancer of all time,” President Bill Clinton laughed in amazement. Glover, looking sharp in his dreadlocks, dark suit, beard, and no socks, made a fine ambassador. He danced without musical accompaniment, humming to help America hear the melody in his footwork. He gave a gracious speech thanking his hosts and mentors and explaining how tap is fun but also a serious discipline, able to express sadness, anger, thoughtfulness, and exuberance. The five serious young people of his troupe tapped out advanced phrases in unison. And then came Jimmy Slyde, swinging with a swinging band: Jimmy Slyde on national television, Jimmy Slyde at the White House, gazed upon by a smitten Savion Glover, who had brought him there.
Glover’s shows were now concerts, more in the jazz than in the modern-dance sense. A jazz band played, mostly improvising on jazz standards, which is mostly what Glover and his dancers did, too. It was natural, if still unusual, for a jazz critic such as the esteemed Gary Giddins to review Savion Glover/Downtown, in 1999, as a jazz concert, and rate Glover as “one of the most inventive, stimulating jazz players in years.” Dance critics tended to signal more unease with Glover’s introversion. His cagey attitude toward his audience had something to do with the politics of Noise/Funk, a discomfort with the role of entertainer. Mostly, his attention was simply elsewhere: listening to the musicians, listening to his feet. His dances were musical compositions, and their variety was musical. Some personality emerged in the solos of the other dancers—in the as yet small space between their styles and his—but all of the group numbers were ordinary compared to what Glover did alone. He could dance allusively—Gregory Hines spoke of the complicated pleasure of seeing Glover quote Hines’s steps at a speed Hines could only dream of—but Glover was less and less interested in weaving together old steps or even in coining his own. He was a man after a sound.
BRING IN THE LADIES
Like Hines before him, Glover traveled with his own heavily miked floor, and at the end of a show, he would open that floor to tap dancers in the house. Twenty years before, when Jane Goldberg had made this a feature of her concerts, it had been like opening the door of a closet long in disuse: forgotten items tumbled out. Now, an eager army of the young pounced onstage, evidence in every way of Glover’s influence. They carried their bodies as he did and tried to address the floor with the same attack. But in other, important senses, they didn’t all look like Glover. Some of them, for instance, were women.
There was even a woman in the group. It wasn’t Dormeshia Sumbry, who had shared the Broadway experience of Black and Blue. (“Eight shows a week,” she told me, “all I did was sit in the wings and take notes.”) More recently, with the Jazz Tap Ensemble, Sumbry had honed her skills, learning to loosen her perfectionist tendencies enough to improvise. (To what level can be seen in a hilarious piece of footage from 1998. Gregory Hines is in challenge mode, trading manly steps with the slick Ensemble member Mark Mendonca while Sumbry hugs the back of the stage. After a while, Hines minces over to the wallflower and kids her timidity. She responds by striking a ladylike pose and then proceeding to repeat everything the men have done, better than they did it, mocking ’em every step. Hines falls to the floor in defeat.) Near the end of the Broadway run of Noise/Funk, Glover invited her to join the cast, finding a place for her in the show by disguising her in drag.
But the woman he invited to join his company had been tapping for only two years. Her name was Ayodele Casel, and though she had been born in the Bronx, she had spent much of her childhood in her mother’s country, Puerto Rico. At the end of high school, she developed an obsession with Astaire-Rogers films, an interest her friends found bizarre. While she was studying acting at New York University, an acquaintance introduced her to another tap dancer, who suggested they practice together. Casel had never imagined anyone could tap as this young man did. He took her to tap jams, explaining, to her astonishment, that the dancers were improvising. He practiced with her once a week for a year. Then the young man, Baakari Wilder, invited her to a show he was in called Bring in ’da Noise. “When I saw it,” said Casel, “it changed my life. I knew it was what I wanted to do.” The lack of roles for a female hoofer did not discourage her. She practiced anyway, hours every day. She attended Noise/Funk so many times that the cast started letting her watch from the wings. Ted Levy allowed her to join the Funk University program. At jam sessions, she wondered why she was one of the only women to brave the floor when the floor got hot. Then she got a call from Glover. (This is how it worked with him: there was no audition; you got a call.) Casel’s second job as a tap dancer was the Monday Night Football gig.
That she was the only girl, and also pretty, with a feisty cool, meant that Casel was going to attract attention, even if Glover hadn’t placed her center stage. Dubbed the Funk Princess, she made the cover of The Village Voice. The accompanying article, by Itabari Njeri, didn’t say much about her, but it juxtaposed her ascent against the historical neglect of black female hoofers, “the forgotten mothers of tap dance.” Njeri cited a recent exhibition at the Philadelphia Folklore Project called “Plenty of Good Women Dancers,” which cast light on Alice Whitman, Jeni LeGon, Louise Madison, and others, questioning why they weren’t better known. The exhibition’s curator, Deborah Kodish, charged that black women had been actively excluded from the tap revival—that black men and white women, in bed together, had kept black women out.
That theory would seem to ignore the participation of Marion Coles, Harriet Browne, and Frances Nealy in Jane Goldberg’s shows and the fact that the young black female hoofers in the article (including Dormeshia Sumbry) had been hired and promoted by the white women supposedly doing the excluding. Why black women hadn’t played a larger role in the tap revival was something that neither Kodish nor Njeri could adequately explain, but the article did reveal the poignant fact that young black women’s knowledge of their predecessors didn’t extend back much further than Dianne Walker. Dismayed by her own ignorance, Casel sought out Jeni LeGon, that onetime partner of Bill Robinson, and tracked her down in Canada, where, fed up with American racism, she had emigrated in the late sixties. The Funk Princess found in the Sepia Cinderella a kindred spirit, a girl playing with the boys because she didn’t see why she shouldn’t. Yet when Casel asked LeGon if she, as a black woman, had ever felt overshadowed, the older dancer’s answer—“I was just happy to dance”—dissatisfied her. LeGon was a woman who showed no compunction in telling reporters about how Fred Astaire was a racist for ignoring her during the filming of Easter Parade, but “I was just happy to dance” could sound weak-willed to a young woman who hadn’t yet been required to adjust her dreams.
Back in New York, Casel presented her own well-received show, Ayo! After that, she says, Savion Glover wasn’t so nice in rehearsals anymore. “The other guys saw it, and were extra nice to me, but they didn’t say anything to Savion.” Casel stopped dancing for two years.
OPEN STYLE, CLOSED STYLE
When journalists asked Glover how it felt to bear the burden of perpetuating the tap tradition, he would say that he was passing the responsibility on to Cartier Williams, a protégé sixteen years younger. This handover was premature. Glover still had the ball and he seemed conflicted about what to do with it. On the one hand, he was a populist who called for tap to be in arenas, on TV, and in the movies. “I’m on a mission to brainwash an entire generation,” he told 60 Minutes. In Savion: My Life in Tap, an excellent young-adult picture book released in 2000, he said his goal was to put tap in “its proper place” at last. On the other hand, Glover was sensitive to any suggestion of “the dance” being treated with less than total seriousness. He was careful about whom he let in the circle, the Hoofers’ Club of his approval. Gregory Hines’s mantra—put on a pair of tap shoes and you’re in—was not Glover’s. “I’m not going to give anyone the feeling, like, come on in, yeah, it’s open,” he told the Los Angeles Times. Yet when Gia Kourlas of Time Out New York asked him if Riverdance and Tap Dogs were bringing tap down, he responded that those shows were all “contributions to the art form,” because when people see them, “then they want to see more. Or they want to see the real thing.”
Perhaps it would be more precise to say not that Glover was conflicted but that he saw no contradiction between wanting tap to become popular again—as popular as it had been in the thirties and forties—and wanting the tap that became popular to be his kind. Around the time Glover was born, Stanley Brown, the vaudevillian who ran the dance studio where Jimmy Slyde learned to slide, had articulated the common wisdom of black show business to Jane Goldberg. He distinguished between a closed style, which dancers performed for each other, and an open style, which got you a paycheck. Glover, who had been told all his life that whatever he did was great, defied that received knowledge. “I’m a tap dancer,” he said, unashamedly, with no desire to be anything more, no implication that anything more might be required of him. He tapped as he wanted and expected everyone to listen.
* * *
This was the Savion Glover I found at the turn of this century kissing the shoes of Buster Brown. Usually, the mood at a Swing 46 jam session reflected Buster’s if-you-can-walk-you-can-tap spirit, all those different types of people bringing their version of tap to the indoor picnic. When Glover slumped into the club, the mood shifted, the collective body language registering that the reigning champ had entered the building. Gregory Hines remained the bigger celebrity, the more beloved figure. Yet Hines was always pointing to Glover.
At Swing 46, Glover’s influence was palpable. Technically, he had raised the bar, so that the average dancer tapped with a speed and complexity previously indicative of the exceptional. Stylistically, he was the dominant model, which meant fewer canned smiles and clichéd arms, and more disregard of the body. Indeed, some of the technical advancement stemmed directly from the demotion of physical presentation: mental energy concentrated in the feet, and physical exploits that a previous generation might have rejected as too awkward-looking—inside-out wings, tip-of-the-toe steps transferred to tip-of-the-heel—were now fair game. That pursuing such feats seemed to be the only goal was, however, a marker of how Glover’s influence was diverging from his own practice. As their idol drilled deeper into sound, the young acolytes topped each other with stunts. Where in Glover’s dancing you could sense the many predecessors who fed into his style, too much of the dancing of Glover’s clones gave off no resonance beyond that of Glover himself. The kids weren’t just stealing Glover’s steps; they were skipping some.
But there was something else happening at Swing 46, one more twist in tap history. If the tradition surviving there was American, it wasn’t exclusively American any longer. There were dancers from Europe, Australia, Brazil. Nearly half the participants were Japanese. And these international dancers weren’t just joining in for the Shim Sham. Among them were some of the best tappers, the most distinctive. An American art had gone abroad, and it had come back home altered. People from other countries, other cultures, had honored the tap tradition by making it their own.