What the eye hears, p.58
What the Eye Hears, page 58
In her autobiography, Künneke tells of meeting Adolf Hitler in 1938, at the premiere of one of her father’s operettas. Der Führer wanted to talk about tap. As a movie buff, he considered himself a connoisseur. Tap, he told her during a twenty-minute discourse, was “cheering, fresh, and precise,” dashing in a military sense. The highest exemplar of the form, in his opinion, was Astaire. Presumably, Hitler was aware that he shared a country of origin with Astaire’s father but not that the dancer’s paternal grandparents were Jewish.
During the war, Astaire’s films were forbidden. Hitler enjoyed them in private. After the war, Germans greeted the movies with enthusiasm. Evelyn Künneke’s postwar career sputtered until the seventies, when, rediscovered by the filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, she emerged as an exemplar of prewar cabaret and a gay icon. Marika Rökk, sullied by her association with the Nazis, pleaded naïveté and was making movies again by 1948, tapping less and less. (Her later films are marvelous kitsch: look for Bühne Frei für Marika, in which she plays a bored Martian who visits the African jungle.) By the mid-fifties, she faced stiff competition from a younger, Italian-born singer, the multitalented, multilingual Caterina Valente. On a 1964 episode of the American variety show Hollywood Palace, Valente jammed with four great jazz drummers, not exactly trading but keeping up in a manner it’s hard to imagine Rökk matching. The jazz feeling is only intermittent in the German musical films Valente made in the fifties, but a couple of those films included John Bubbles. In Liebe, Tanz und 1000 Schlager (1955), the Father of Rhythm Tap makes an appearance as a blithe spirit, an expatriate vaudevillian. Bubbles was playing himself again; he spent much of the fifties in Germany. In the film, he taps as he serves drinks. He holds his tray steady, but his fellow Americans Jackson, James, and Carnell spin theirs: that was their trademark, tapping while twirling trays. German film gave these particular black dancers a specialty spot that Hollywood never did. Carnell Lyons stayed in Germany, ekeing out a living as a soloist on military bases and eventually touring Japan with his East German contortionist girlfriend.
In the late seventies, when the work dried up altogether, Lyons began to teach—in Berlin, and as demand rose, in workshops across the country. After class, he would invite students to bring their sleeping bags to his apartment and stay up late hearing stories and sampling his exile’s library of tap footage. All of a sudden, there were people deeply interested in what Lyons had to offer. The tap revival had spread. In Germany, as in America, a split developed between those excited by Broadway and old Hollywood and those inspired by the movies of Gregory Hines and the tradition that Hines represented and revealed. Members of the second camp began to invite leading American figures to teach in Germany. In 1987, when Nürnberg first experienced Brenda Bufalino, a few of Lyons’s students brought in their master from Berlin to vet her. Bufalino’s treatment of a tune by Lyons’s schoolmate Charlie Parker earned his quick endorsement. “She’s a genius,” he exclaimed. “She comes from Honi Coles.”
For a few American teachers, a trip to Germany became a yearly ritual, sometimes the most reliable gig on the calendar. On Sam Weber’s initial visit, he found his students very serious. Most were musically literate, yet they had trouble swinging. “Their aesthetic was: the more even, the more equally loud, the better. Like the teeth on a comb.” It wasn’t long before German enthusiasts moved from attending workshops with visiting Americans to attending tap festivals in America. Tap festivals soon sprouted on German soil. One measure of interest was the turnout for the Tap-o-Mania event that the American expatriate Ray Lynch organized in Stuttgart in 1998: nearly seven thousand participants tapping together in a train station.
If, at the height of his success in the forties and early fifties, you had told Carnell Lyons that his act would live on into the twenty-first century in the form of two Germans, he would have found your humor odd. But it was two of Lyons’s German students—the bald and lanky Kurt Albert and his compact partner, Klaus Bleis—who resurrected the art of tapping while spinning trays. Rather than an exact copy, “Tap and Tray” was new wine in old bottles. The sight of these Germans in blue serge suits honoring outmoded conventions of black showbiz was comical, but it wasn’t ridiculous. Their droll demeanor suggested that they were in on the joke, mostly. Rhythmically, they could have passed any blindfold test. “I never thought of being a dancer,” recalled Albert. “I wanted to make that rhythm and make it look cool.”
Many Germans latched onto the idea of the tap dancer as musician and let the body follow. For Sebastian Weber, much of the initial appeal of tap was that he could “be a dancer and not have to stand up straight and move my arm nicely.” In 1989, as a teenaged exchange student passing through Boston, he stumbled upon the tap elders. More trips to the United States followed, and at La Cave, he came under the spell of Chuck Green, who took him on as a disciple, passing down steps on kitchen linoleum and stories interrupted by sudden slumber. To Weber, being invited into Green’s life felt like being given the key to “a second world parallel to the one you know.” One day, Green informed Weber that Weber had his own style. Back home in Germany, he founded Tapshot, a jazz combo. Twice, he toured with Buster Brown, trading taps with a hero sixty years older and two feet shorter. Weber is an intelligent musician with a near-total lack of physical grace. His productions can be conceptual—European-style Tanztheater with incisive grooves. He feels that the absence of a German tap tradition—to him, Germany doesn’t have one—leaves him with greater creative freedom. His work is “absolutely not American” and at the same time “absolutely connected to the heritage of Chuck and Buster.”
BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Born in Soviet Georgia, Alexander Ivashkevich was studying acting in Ukraine when, like any boy in Kalamazoo, he saw an Astaire film and fell in love with tap. This was in the late seventies, and he could find no one to teach him. Eight years later, after he had established himself as an actor in Estonia, he saw some tap in the Russian movie Winter Evening in Gagry and, inspired again, tried again to find a teacher. This time, he managed to track down Yuri Gusakov, a retired Russian tap dancer, who told him, “You cannot dance.” Ivashkevich collected video clips—the Nicholas Brothers, The Cotton Club—and struggled to teach himself. Then, in 1992, “from God,” the American Tap Dance Orchestra arrived in Estonia on a State Department–sponsored tour of Eastern Europe.
Ivashkevich’s English vocabulary consisted of “yes, no, and Coca-Cola.” He came to the ATDO workshop with tap shoes he had constructed himself. His mind harbored a thousand questions, and he could ask none. Through a friend with slightly better English, he requested more lessons, and Barbara Duffy offered him free instruction if he came to New York. The American embassy in Estonia provided him a plane ticket. Someone stole his money. Someone gave him a cat to deliver. In New York, after each class at Woodpecker’s, Duffy would write him pedagogical notes, which the Russian friends he was staying with would translate in the evening. In this fashion, Ivashkevich learned, and when he returned to Estonia, he opened a dancing school that he named Dufftap, after his teacher. Without giving American hoofers much competition, he became the best tap dancer in Estonia, soon to be surpassed by his students. They believe as he does that “tap dance is freedom.”
* * *
In the memoirs of the Russian choreographer Bronislava Nijinska, sister of Vaslav Nijinsky, she recalls receiving her very first dance lessons, in the early 1890s, from the black American tap dancers her father brought home from the Nizhny Novgorod café chantant where he worked. The men spread sand on a plank to teach her, and she was as much fascinated by their diamond pinkie rings as by their rhythms. Russian steps were a key ingredient in the repertoire of the black Americans Greenlee and Drayton when they arrived in the Soviet Union in 1926 with The Chocolate Kiddies, an offshoot of a Sissle and Blake revue. The Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov included a few seconds of The Chocolate Kiddies in his One-Sixth of the World, where his sandwiching of the snippets between images of Africans toiling in the fields and images of the furred bourgeoisie would seem to suggest the capitalist exploitation of blacks. The Soviet critic Vladimir Blum complained that the Chocolate Kiddies troupe wasn’t even Negro, since it included mulattos, and dismissed the show as an orgy that perverted the unfortunate race. But he praised the cast as masters of their craft, carefree as children: “These people have rhythm, and contemporary European music could learn something from them.”
Blum’s critique touched both sides of the Soviet ideological response to tap and jazz: they could be disparaged as decadent, bourgeois, and immoral, or they could be defended as the folk expression of the oppressed black proletariat. The popularity of tap and jazz in the Soviet Union escaped either explanation, but in the wild oscillations of Soviet policy, the folk defense proved enduringly effective. A blending of tap with local folk forms happened both naturally and intentionally, as political cover. Leonid Utesov, a Jew from Odessa and the most popular Soviet musician of the thirties, at one point declared that both jazz and tap had been invented by street musicians at Jewish weddings in his rough-and-tumble hometown. This was a joke, one that mocked—while seeming to indulge—the Soviet propensity for claiming foreign imports as homegrown inventions. Similarly, Utesov could sneak in the suspect music his audience craved under the disguise of parody. He was a clown, and his theatricalized jazz, and the tap that went with it, was a jolly assault on decorum. Utesov marked seeing The Chocolate Kiddies as a seminal moment: the musicians didn’t get the standing ovations, he noticed; the tap dancers did.
It was in the role of a Crimean shepherd that Utesov starred in the first Soviet musical, the 1934 farce The Jolly Fellows. His sidekick was played by Lyubov Orlova, the socialist Cinderella of a cherished series of musicals directed by her husband, Grigoriy Aleksandrov. On a trip to Hollywood, Aleksandrov had been inspired by the work of Busby Berkeley and had resolved to make Soviet-style musicals, ideologically correct entertainments. In Aleksandrov’s Circus (1936), Orlova plays an American who flees a lynch mob after giving birth to a baby with a black father; only in the Soviet Union does she find love and acceptance. Orlova was a bright-eyed beauty, an operetta singer, a comedian, and no dancer. When her character emerges from the top of a cannon in a flapper dress, the syllables she sings are nonsense—“Diggy, diggy, do!”—and the noises she makes with her feet are even less articulate. As propaganda, Circus wasn’t anywhere near as reprehensible as the musicals that idealized the murderous collective farms. (In place of dance numbers came choreographed harvesting; instead of Tiller Girls, there were girls tilling.) Yet Circus did demonstrate how tap’s joyful associations might be co-opted for a legitimizing myth.
During the Second World War, the alliance with America allowed for a limited importation of American films. (Marika Rökk films were also treated as treasured booty by Soviet troops.) When Sun Valley Serenade, released in the United States in 1941, arrived in the Soviet Union in 1944, it was embraced by jazz fans for the Glenn Miller songs and by tap dancers for the Nicholas Brothers’ rendition of “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” In isolation, the film assumed an outsized importance. The Gusakov Brothers, Yuri and Boris, made a career of dancing to songs from Sun Valley Serenade. They had begun their study of tap as teenagers in 1937, when their father was sent to a labor camp, and they studied with a Polish dancer who claimed to have been to Hollywood, but much of their technique derived from this single film.
After the war came another ideological crackdown. Jazz musicians were censured, arrested, sent to Siberia. With the orchestra of that wily kitsch king Utesov, the Gusakovs danced a number called “American Puppets,” demonstrating the corruptibility of the American electoral system to a boogie-woogie beat. Folk routines remained a refuge. Hence the sombreros that the Gusakovs wear in their most famous tap dance: a mostly unison Mexican waltz in the 1956 film Carnival Night. The film is about workers who put on a show in defiance of an uptight bureaucrat, a plot that gave extra pleasure in the Soviet Union. The movie would be aired on Soviet television every New Year, serving a function like that of It’s a Wonderful Life in America. The Gusakovs are stiffer than the Condos Brothers, and despite the Latin tinge, their foot rhythms are so even, they could be German. Still, like the nutty jazz and warmhearted festivities that surround them, their tapping signified play. In a later movie, the Gusakovs dance to jazz—a compilation of riffs built on the skeleton of “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” They tap in sweaters and fur hats upon a block of ice, and even without the hints in the mise-en-scène, you might suspect that the dancers were Russian, just not that the year was 1968. Tap was no longer ideologically dangerous, but neither was it current. Rock and roll, its popularity stoked by official disapproval, had taken over.
Ignored, tap could return as nostalgia, which it did in the film Winter Evening in Gagry. Released in 1985, the same year as White Nights, this Soviet film is not a Cold War drama. America doesn’t even get a mention. But the movie does concern a tap dancer, famous back in the fifties and now forgotten in a present of synthesizers and rock ballet. Divorced and alone, he watches a TV program that commemorates him as one of the honored dead. When he calls to protest, a producer offers to revive his signature number, but the old man replies that there aren’t any tap dancers left to dance it. The one pupil who approaches him has no talent. This is not a Hollywood musical. The protagonist dies, and the film concludes in equivocal melancholy. Before that, however, we have seen the old man’s Rosebud moment, a flashback to when his daughter joined his act one winter evening at a Black Sea resort. We have seen his signature routine—essentially, a solo version of the Gusakov Brothers’ Mexican number—and another glimpse of him in his prime, tapping between drums à la Astaire. The tapping in Winter Evening is bland, the music awful, yet the film is affecting. It’s touching that a Soviet film could express nostalgia for Soviet tap, a sense of loss about something that looks from the outside like an inferior substitute. It may have been inferior, but it was theirs.
Vladimir Kirsanov, who choreographed the tap sequences for the film, liked to quote his teacher, Vladimir Zernov, who compared tap to an old prostitute, loved by all but not respected. Kirsanov began his studies with Zernov at the State Circus School in 1965. When Konstantin Nevretdinov attended the Circus School in the early eighties, Kirsanov was his teacher. Watching American musicals at the State Film Fund, young Nevretdinov became convinced that to learn American tap he would have to go to America. “But I was impatient,” he explained to me. “I wanted to amaze now.” So, using his acrobatic skills, he painstakingly taught himself to tap upside down, on his hands. During the years when tap in America was transforming into a concert form, tap in Russia lived on in the circus.
It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union that a tap festival sprang up. The first Moscow Tap Parade, in 1993, brought in Jerry Ames, whose American career had been nearly nonexistent for a decade. It also brought back Michael Kushner-Gusakov, who had performed as a Gusakov Brother and who had moved to New York. With “Tap on Hands” Nevretdinov, Kushner-Gusakov opened the Russian School of American Tap Dance in Moscow. By the 2002 Moscow Tap Parade, the organizers were clued in enough to invite Brenda Bufalino, Sarah Petronio, Tap and Tray, and Savion Glover. The Americans marveled at the profusion of the Russian acts, all the old-fashioned routines set to taped and antiquated music. (They took special delight in Oleko Abdullaev, who kept the secret of his four-legged tap dance hidden underneath his shiny black trench coat.) The Russians were equally amazed by Savion Glover and his twenty-minute improvisation. It wasn’t long before Vasily Sedykh, exactly Glover’s age, was mimicking Glover’s style and fashion sense. A reporter for Moskovskij Komsomolets asked Vladimir Kirsanov what Russians needed to learn if they were to dance like Glover. His answer: “Freedom.”
THE SOUND OF JAPANESE SANDALS
Tap may have first arrived in Japan on the black ships of Commodore Perry. In the course of persuading the Japanese to open trade with the United States in 1854, Perry invited the Japanese delegation to a banquet on his flagship. There, aboard the steam frigate Powhatan, Perry’s sailors put on a minstrel show. The official account doesn’t mention dancing, but Japanese sketches capture the blackface performers: banjo players, Tambo and Bones, two dancers with legs extended hip-high. The playbill for one of several subsequent Ethiopian concerts in Japanese ports advertises a pas de deux, and it seems improbable that a portrayal of “Plantation Niggas of the South” would neglect a breakdown. About the actual black crewmen noted in the record, little is known, except the remark of an Anglican missionary that their dancing pleased his children.
After such a portentous beginning, further reports of tap in Japan are hard to uncover, even through the 1920s, when jazz took over Japanese dance halls. Tap surfaced in musical revues, mostly in the world-conquering form of girl troupes. George Hori, who learned tap while working as a dishwasher in Los Angeles, trained such a troupe and opened what seems to have been the first tap studio in Tokyo, in 1932. He wrote a manual that stressed speed and pep, characterizing tap as an attempt to “reflect that alert spirit that personifies America and American progress.” Since tap shoes were scarce, some students wore wooden sandals, or geta, studded with rivets.
Since tap was an American art, Japanese-American entertainers were perceived to have an edge on authenticity. Born in Hawaii, Alice Fumiko Kawahata grew up in Los Angeles. Supposedly another pupil of Bill Robinson, she was best known for wrapping a leg behind her neck while standing. In Japan, she became a recording star, a popular icon for “modern girls” and “modern boys.” In 1933, at the age of seventeen, she wrote, choreographed, and starred in the inaugural revue of the Nippon Gejiko theater, Tokyo’s answer to Radio City. No copies of her 1935 Japanese film Back Alley Symphony would survive the war, yet some of her recordings did—her taps are clear and simple. By 1939, she had married and retired. Nakagawa Saburo, a student of George Hori, took off for America at the age of seventeen. Interviewed by the Associated Press in 1935, he explained how he had found his inspiration to tap from American films and the best rhythms in the New York subway. His favorite dancer was Astaire: “He’s got the Japanese personality.” One Nakagawa film survives, Whispering Sidewalks, the musical he made upon returning to Japan in 1936. In a tux and a fedora, he looks slim, attractive, and very young. His knock-kneed tapping lunges in the direction of off-rhythms like someone trying to be Astaire.
