same old me again today

Way back in the early days, it was where black performers in Vaudeville were legendary for it in Jazz and Jive routines. At about 1:37, this is where the Nicholas brothers go off.

Tap is a distinctive American art form that comes from a blending of African dance traditions with Irish dance traditions. It was developed by Black and white dancers and came up alongside and deeply entwined with jazz.

Certainly the tap that ends up in musical theater often seems old-fashioned and white but that’s a musical theater issue, not a tap issue. That is only one small part of tap, which continues to have a strong African-American tradition.

The Nicholas Brothers, above, are in a clip from the film Stormy Weather, which has an almost entirely African-American cast. Some of the other scenes in the film include Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, one of the greatest tap artists of all time. He was very well-known generally and was in quite a few Shirley Temple movies in his day. (Shirley Temple, herself, was a tap dancer – which I’ll be real is probably contributing to people thinking it’s old-fashioned and white, because it’s easy to forget the Black man dancing alongside her, I guess.)

Here’s Bill Robinson with Cab Calloway in Stormy Weather – he’s performing a variation of his famous “stair dance” in parts of this clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY3fbvBRiaM

Here’s probably the most widely famous version of the “stair dance”, from The Little Colonel:

There’ve been a lot of white tap dancers through the years – see, for example, everyone’s favorite clip of two men torturing a speech therapist:

… but a lot of its most famous practitioners have been Black and it’s weird to me that people don’t know that.

Have a scene from Tap (1989).

and this from 2014-ish:

And if you are saying, well, I never heard of this guy, I guess today you are going to learn about this guy. But I bet you know THIS guy:

Mumble’s dance is choreographed by, and mo-capped from, Savion Glover.

This guy. This guy is SKILLED, ok? He’s in his 50s now; he’s been a professional tapper for over FORTY YEARS – he made his Broadway debut at age 11. He’s in that movie, Tap, that I linked a clip from above. Sometimes his tap seems a little old-fashioned – other times it is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. This is intentional – he’s paying tribute to his teachers and tappers of the past by learning and performing their signature moves, but also he’s got his own style.

It is absolutely worth going through whatever you can find on YouTube. Look for “Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk” – he was Tony nominated for the choreo & his performances in this musical. (The MDA telethon performance above is an excerpt – he did these for several years on the telethon.)

I like this one, because you can watch modern African-American tap alongside modern-traditional Irish dance and you can see that these are related, but distinct, art forms. They share a common ancestor, but they’re also so different. Right around 4 minutes, Colin Dunne (the man in the cover image below) and Savion Glover start dancing together, trading off, and it’s AMAZING.

Sidenote, if anyone ever hears of a revival of “Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk,” please tell me, I want to see it liiiiiiive.

Let’s finish off with Glover’s special guest performance at the Stockholm International Tap Dance Festival last year:

WHO HURT YOU, SKY?! POINT THEM OUT TO SUN! POINT THEM OUT TO ME!

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JOHN WILLIAM WATERHOUSE