AMERICA’S NATURAL WAY OF DANCING
Tap dancers are very popular in the U.S.A.—silent Negroes, as mechanical as a sewing machine, inexhaustible, holding your interest by beating out a rhythmic poem on the stage with the soles of their shoes … The popularity of tap dancing shows that the old rhythmic instinct of the virgin African forest has learned the lesson of the machine and that in America the rigor of exactitude is a pleasure.
—LE CORBUSIER, When the Cathedrals Were White, 1936
When you come to the evolution of the dance, its history and philosophy … I don’t know how it all started, and I don’t want to know.
—FRED ASTAIRE, Steps in Time, 1956
Fred Astaire in Blue Skies, 1946