What the eye hears, p.52
What the Eye Hears, page 52
And instead of the simplifying fictions of the credits for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1949, the My One and Only program acknowledged the “special material” Coles had contributed. Accepting a Tony Award, the seventy-year-old publicly thanked Father Time; later, in private, he told Brenda Bufalino that he wished he had won while he could still dance. After two years, Coles joined the national tour and exposed audiences around the country to the pleasure and lesson of his style. In his memoir, Tune tells of a Saturday matinee in Grand Rapids when Coles uncharacteristically failed to deliver his lines. Tune looked to the conductor, who skipped to the song. Coles went through the dance, perfectly, but signaled to Tune that he wanted to avoid the usual encore. He had suffered a stroke onstage, and his dancing days really were over.
TAP DANCE KIDS
My One and Only wasn’t the only Broadway show interested in Honi Coles. The tap patriarch was also offered a cameo as the dead grandfather in The Tap Dance Kid. The offer wasn’t especially flattering, since only a few years before, in a TV after-school special based on the same book, Coles had played the much larger role of the living uncle. The part of the uncle on Broadway, however, had already been given to the neophyte tap dancer Hinton Battle, fresh from his Tony-winning prancing in Sophisticated Ladies. Coles chose My One and Only.
The Tap Dance Kid took its story from Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change, a charmingly frank children’s book by Louise Fitzhugh, the author of Harriet the Spy. Published in 1974, the book presented a black family of the upper middle class—private schools, white maid—in which the son dreamed of becoming a tap dancer like his mother’s brother and her deceased father. The boy’s father, a lawyer, considered that aspiration unacceptable, and this attitude toward tap—that it was shameful, regressive, and sissy—was entirely plausible for the seventies. The story of a kid who’s gotta dance, despite the strictures of his stodgy parents, was also a stock theatrical plot. This did not escape the attention of the team who adapted the book into a musical in 1983.
Serving as choreographer was Danny Daniels, the man who had premiered the Tap Dance Concerto back in 1952. His career as a choreographer had emerged from the limbo of TV specials with the 1981 film Pennies from Heaven, an honest-to-god MGM musical, albeit one that set the fantasy of Depression-era films against the harsh realities the fantasy was meant to escape. The characters lip-synched to period recordings, and the numbers that Daniels devised tweaked movie-musical conventions, raising the sexual subtext to the surface. Though tap was mainly used for period accuracy and rimshot punctuation, there was more of it than there had been in a movie for years. The steps were standard, yet to see a wonderfully sleazy Christopher Walken (once a student of Daniels) slink through them in a bar-top striptease was to see them anew. Unfortunately, the film flopped.
The tap tradition from which Pennies from Heaven drew was the one Daniels understood. In the late seventies, sensing renewed interest in tap at his Santa Monica dance studio, he had assembled a tap history concert, based on his own knowledge and his son’s reading of Jazz Dance. Beginning with the Irish fleeing the Potato Famine for the Five Points, where they ran into freed slaves who had been denied their drums, it found room for minstrelsy, Juba, and tap on roller skates, and it culminated in what Daniels saw as the final elevation of the form, the blending with ballet in his own youth. Although Daniels described tap as “jazz music done with the feet” and “an improvisational art,” he liked to compare tap to ragtime, buried, then dug up (and enjoying a fad following its use in the 1973 film The Sting)—an analogy that lodged tap in the past as a period dance. Meaning well, he taped for the New York Public Library a series of video interviews with tap dancers he knew: Hal LeRoy, Fred Kelly, Louis DaPron, old men who couldn’t agree on terminology yet danced together just fine. In the videos, the guests teach Daniels, who is incredulous that anyone might have learned tap outside of a dance studio, and who exposes his own astonishing ignorance of black tap dancers. Fayard Nicholas, his only black guest, seems the only intersection between black tap and Daniels’s world. In an interview with Jane Goldberg in 1984, Daniels stated his view of tap’s racial origins flat out: “It isn’t black. It’s Irish.” Then he suggested that Honi Coles, new to him, “dances the way I dance” and that Coles must have learned from a Lancashire clog dancer when he was young.
These were the publicly expressed opinions of the man picked to choreograph the first musical about the black upper middle class, a show about blacks coming to terms with their heritage. For the mother’s family, Daniels put together a basic soft shoe, and for “Fabulous Feet,” an I-May-Be-Poor-but-I’ve-Got-Rhythm number, Daniels dared a tiny passage with three different rhythmic phrases going at once. Mainly, his rhythms were square. The father’s vision of tap as a humiliation was answered implicitly by the boy’s perception of tap as something beautiful, and by the boy’s sense that during his big audition, he is guided by ancestors—figures resembling Fred and Ginger, Gene Kelly, and Bojangles. This was a sickly sweet variant of Gregory Hines’s vision of the men who made him, with the cast of That’s Entertainment substituted for the Hoofers and the Copasetics. The show acquired a slightly different charge on the national tour, when Harold Nicholas played the grandfather-ghost. But The Tap Dance Kid was a dream of old Hollywood and Broadway, the dream of a kid who wants to grow up to be not Hines, or even Harold Nicholas, but Hinton Battle.
Casting the show posed a problem. “At the first meeting,” Daniels told me, “I asked the producers, ‘Where are you going to get the black kids? Black kids don’t tap anymore.’ The producers said, ‘No, all black kids tap.’ So we put out a call for young black kid tap dancers. Nobody showed up.” A tap boot camp was established in which aspiring boys were drilled for many months. The role was given to Alfonso Ribeiro, who left after six months to join the cast of the TV show Silver Spoons. Five other boys eventually made it through camp to play the kid.
Ribeiro became enough of a celebrity to market his own how-to-dance book, but what it taught wasn’t tap. It taught the kind of dancing that excited kids his age. Out of the nightclubs of Northern California and the block parties of the Bronx, popping and locking and breaking had been picked up by the mainstream media, most prominently in films where break dancing served the populist function tap once had. Other continuities were easy to spot, from cardboard shingles and challenge dances bounded by a circle to flash moves, legomania, and subtler physical echoes. B-boys, like tap dancers, loved breaks, and they inspired DJs to extend those percussive pockets. The eye-catching style of their Bronx breakdowns attracted outside attention before rap, the more packagable commodity, eclipsed the dancing. And where minstrels were once known as “science niggas,” rappers were said to be “droppin’ science.” When Honi Coles grumbled that he’d seen it all before, he really had. But nothing in The Tap Dance Kid was half as creative as the inventions of the best B-boys, and the young weren’t likely to sense the connections.
Ribeiro also appeared in a music-video-style Pepsi commercial, playing the child counterpart to Michael Jackson. This was a famous commercial, because Michael Jackson was the most famous entertainer in the world. The obvious ties between Jackson’s dancing and tap were the least significant: the routines that he and his brothers had been taught to give their Vegas appearances some adult appeal. A tap number with the Nicholas Brothers on the Jacksons’ TV show in 1977 is a shallow exercise in showman versatility, lacking the groove that made Jackson’s dancing to his own music so thrilling. Jackson was the apotheosis of Cholly Atkins’s Motown, an appropriator on the order of Sammy Davis, drawing from James Brown’s super-bad swivels (which drew from tap) and the snap of popping. He took his gliding Moonwalk not from Bill Bailey but from the Soul Train locker Jeffrey Daniel, yet he also cribbed from Astaire and Fosse, and Astaire via Fosse. Except perhaps for his toe-tip perching, the King of Pop had shed the overt links to tap, and what kid could recognize the hidden ones?
I was a kid then. I took break-dancing lessons, memorized all the moves from Jackson’s videos, and hugely envied Alfonso Ribeiro. Tap, which I also enjoyed, seemed entirely removed. In The Tap Dance Kid, Ribeiro and his successors gestured toward the present with a little popping and the Moonwalk. It was a TV commercial for The Tap Dance Kid directed by Michael Peters, the choreographer of the most seminal Jackson videos, that many credited with keeping the show alive after tepid reviews. But most of the Tap Dance Kids themselves couldn’t see tap as relevant and drifted into other pursuits. It took one of their own to make them see it differently.
THE SPONGE
Savion Glover was born in 1973 in Newark, a poor black-majority city still scarred by the riots six years earlier. He was the youngest of three brothers, each with a different father but all raised together by their mother, Yvette. She knew that Savion was going to be special, because God had told her so. Just before giving birth to her third child, she asked God for a name and saw a vision of a blackboard upon which the hand of God was writing the word Savior. That seemed a little blasphemous, even if divinely inspired, so in her mind she added a small stroke to the last letter and coined a name for her son. This is how she would tell the story to Savion’s biographer, Bruce Weber, in the mid-nineties, when it would seem a fitting tale of origin for the young man widely considered the Savior of Tap, the messiah prophesied in the Book of Jerry Ames.
He grew up around music. Yvette was a gospel and jazz singer, and her parents were musicians. Before he could walk, Glover was banging on his mother’s pots and walls and body, testing the tones of colanders and teakettles and putting on shows with his brothers. When the boy was four and a half, Yvette enrolled him in drum classes, only to have the teacher reject him as too advanced and forward him to the Newark Community School of the Arts. When Savion was six, Yvette’s manager enlisted him as the drummer of a kids’ band that played jazz in parks and schools. One day in 1982, the band performed at a Manhattan dance studio run by Maurice Hines and the jazz dancer Frank Hatchett. Two things happened that day, independently: Yvette Glover decided to sign her boys up for tap class, and Savion Glover was first exposed to Chuck Green and Lon Chaney. Fascinated by rhythms like none he’d heard before, the kid followed the big men into their dressing room, where Chaney explained how he had been a drummer before he devoted himself to tap. He complimented the boy on his drum work and suggested he try hoofing.
Once Glover started, he didn’t stop. Walking down the street, waiting for the bus, in the shower: the tapping never ceased. This tapping wasn’t Chaney-style; they didn’t teach that at Hines-Hatchett. But from classes there, Glover moved into the Tap Dance Kid workshop and onto the stage of the Minskoff Theatre in September 1984. Eight shows a week, for some three hundred performances, the eleven-year-old incarnated Danny Daniels’s idea of a tap dancer and followed Hinton Battle’s model of how to please an audience. Doing splits in ruby sequins, Glover looked completely in his element. “I didn’t really feel like I was performing,” he would recall. “That was my life up there.” His life: picked up by a chauffeur in the morning, who drove him to the Professional Children’s School, to the theater, and back home to Newark—a life not so different from that of the Hines Kids or the Nicholas Kids before them.
Meanwhile, Leon Collins had died of cancer. On his deathbed, the Boston master had raised himself up to look in the face of his student Dianne Walker and tell her what his older sister had told him on her deathbed: “You dance for me.” Walker got her first chance in 1985, when she replaced her mentor at the International Festival of Tip Tap in Rome, doing his “Flight of the Bumblebee” on a bill that brought together the Copasetics and the Hoofers on neutral turf. The producers wanted some kids in the show, so Walker brought three boys she had been teaching in Roxbury and had trained to mimic Chuck Green, Sandman Sims, and Bunny Briggs for a No Maps on My Taps concert. The producers also wanted girls, so Walker summoned two of them from the school that Paul and Arlene Kennedy, offspring of the Boston dancer-turned-teacher Mildred Kennedy, had established in Los Angeles. Since The Tap Dance Kid was closing, the current Kid was invited as well.
Walker had been thinking that tap, the kind she had learned from Collins, needed a kid. Compared to the other children, Glover had been minimally exposed to that tradition, yet it was immediately clear to Walker that he was the One. While the other kids played, Glover never left the rehearsal hall. He never left the adults. A boy wanting male role models found an abundance of them, dapper, confident, dazzlingly talented and warmhearted men, a dozen fairy godfathers. He already had a mother, and Walker already had children, but while her own children mocked her propensity to talk at great length, she could talk tap as long as she liked with the boy. Soon he was calling her Aunt Dianne. Everyone began referring to him as the Sponge.
THE KID IN FRONT
In the days of the Apollo, such a child would have had ample opportunity to absorb the lessons of his art. Those days were gone. Yet Glover was offered a chance almost as good. It came from two Argentine designers-turned-producers who specialized in sprucing up neglected music-and-dance traditions. Beginning with tango, Claudio Segovia and Héctor Orezzoli had moved on to flamenco, and now, with Black and Blue, they were attempting to resurrect the between-the-wars European revues that had starred American blacks. They hired three belting blues divas, and for dancing, they signed up some of the Hoofers, a tapping chorus choreographed by Henry LeTang, and one of LeTang’s young pupils, Savion Glover.
This revue noire opened in 1985, in Paris, where the revue tradition had never really died. (LeTang couldn’t believe it when people came backstage to meet the choreographer; that had never happened to him in America.) Scheduled for eight weeks, the show was held over for six months, six months during which Glover spent all his time with Jimmy Slyde and Lon Chaney and Buster Brown. Offstage, Chaney taught the kid to box and to understand tap as a fight, “against the history, against Broadway.” Onstage, the twelve-year-old danced a duet with the seventy-nine-year-old George Hillman, still a Charlestoning man of high kicks and low bends. With Robinsonian grace, Hillman demonstrated a stair dance. Glover countered with splits. This dynamic was repeated in the finale, when groupings of the cast cycled through as Glover stayed out front and tapped along with all of them. He was the inexhaustible youth, the inheritor. He also joined the Hoofers’ Line, watching and participating in the successive solos of the Track, learning how each man built off of the final phrase of the man before him. “This is nothing like what I was taught in dance class,” Glover remembered thinking. “I saw it wasn’t about pleasing the audience; it was about expressing yourself.” To a child’s mind, it had to be one or the other.
Although Segovia and Orezzoli’s previous productions had been surprise successes in New York, it took until 1989 for Black and Blue to open on Broadway. In the interim, it acquired three more choreographers: Fayard Nicholas, Cholly Atkins, and the Savoy swing dancer Frankie Manning. In Paris, Dianne Walker had danced in the chorus, years older and several sizes larger than the average chorus girl; in New York, she became assistant choreographer and swapped a LeTang softshoe trio for one of Atkins’s devising. Set to Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You,” from Blackbirds of 1930 (where it was sung by a mammy on a plantation), the number was the most sophisticated routine in the production, a trio that coyly shifted its orientation as a female model might angle her shoulders. Easing her way through the number’s slow intricacies, Walker demonstrated why she had already earned the moniker “Lady Di.” She was prim, delicate. At the end of the show, she joined the Hoofers’ Line in a gown, the sole woman up there with the old men, a lady who could hoof.
Fayard Nicholas contributed a bouncy, flirty confection glazed with his trademark steps and circling wrists. LeTang’s ensemble routines were the least distinguished, one number easily confused with another despite effects with curtains and lights. LeTang was a master of convention who had pumped out hundreds, maybe thousands, of similar routines. His dances had a mass-produced look—two measures of this, two measures of that—and he pandered to a fixed idea, cemented by decades of success, of what an audience could understand. During one rehearsal, Dianne Walker caught LeTang dancing in the Hoofer style, “and he let you know he could.” That style, he told her, “never made me no money.” Black and Blue earned him his third Tony nomination and his first win. It was a long time coming since his first credited show, the failed 1952 revival of the 1921 Shuffle Along.
Some of the young dancers in the chorus had stronger claims to lineage than the usual Broadway gypsies. Bernard Manners, whose feathery elegance came across in an Astaire-like shadow dance, had been performing as the youngest member of the Hoofers since the mid-seventies. Ivery Wheeler and Van “The Man” Porter had been trained in Vegas by Maceo Anderson, one of the original Four Step Brothers. Deborah Mitchell had stumbled upon the Copasetics in 1979. Bubba Gaines bequeathed to her the jump-rope tap he had learned from his Three Dukes partner James “Hutch” Hudson. Gaines told Mitchell that before Hudson overdosed on heroin, he had vowed to return. “But he never told me that it would be as a girl.” Ted Levy’s mother had been a Dyerette at Chicago’s Club DeLisa, and his father had forced him into classes at Sammy Dyer’s studio. During the jam session after a Jane Goldberg production in 1985, Levy so impressed Cookie Cook that Cook dragged the attention stealer off the stage. Dianne Walker was also in that show, and Levy showed up at her hotel room carrying a TV and a VCR so that they might bond over tap videos till morning. He had the flair to do Fayard Nicholas steps justice, and along with Manners, he earned a place on the Hoofers’ Line.
