Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing

Stepping into Time

At the Village Vanguard The late 1970s is a period of retrenchment in the arts. We are in a time of uncertainty. The accepted projects of the 1960s have all but exhausted themselves. The very nature of the crisis breeds a respect for the past as if we fear that we have taken the wrong route. In visual art there is a desperate lurch in the direction of realism, both in terms of photography and photo-realism. In dance as well, the radicalism of the 1960s has been confounded, yielding a special kind of lull in which a yearning for freedom from what are now the oppressive freedoms of postCunningham dance has insistently emerged. The spirit of the times calls out for discipline; this is true of dance as it is of many other fields. But not the sort of discipline that Arlene Croce barbarously calls “mercist.” Ballet has a new respectability among young dancers, and young audiences . And, though a minority movement, so does tap. 37 k Stepping into Time Charles Cook, Jane Goldberg, and Andrea Levine    : SoHo Weekly News, April 6, 1978 But what is tap? It seems a commonplace thing. And yet it is so close to the roots of dance that it seems a natural target for our modernist sensibilities. Tap is a temporal art; tap, unlike ballet, is stylized walking. Both these attributes make it a likely subject for the artist committed to investigating the mysteries of the medium. That is, tap dancing affords a phenomenology of something quite ordinary—walking—while also interrogating the origins of an art. Our sense of time originates in movement. Our bodies have learned how to measure time and space by walking even before we learn numbers . Time is biologically linked to the foot. Our gait and the cadence of that gait is our first inkling of time—we punctuate the world in terms of the number of steps it takes from here to there, and their rhythm. Tap celebrates the fact that our temporal sense grows out of our feet as it beats out wonderful contractions and expansions of the moment, making clocks of felt duration beyond the ken of the most profound Swiss craftsperson. Tap dancing is a quintessentially American form of dance, our oldest theatrical dance style. A random alloy of the syncopated rhythms, sliding steps, and flexible body parts of African dance, and the off-on footwork and held torso of English and Irish step dancing, tap first became popular as entertainment in America’s white culture by white minstrels “blacking up” to portray their vision of black culture. Black minstrels, in turn, imitated whites imitating blacks. Despite the racist origins of the form, its birth in a violent clash of cultures, since the midnineteenth -century tap dancing has often provided a situation where racial tensions could be temporarily ignored. Blacks could coach and teach whites, even though they performed in segregated entertainment circuits. From pre-Civil War saloons in New York City’s Five Points district to pre-World War II Harlem clubs, black and white dancers contended informally and amicably, trading new steps, scrutinizing each other’s styles, and “borrowing” routines for their own acts. For various reasons hoofing flourished in black vaudeville, and black vaudeville lived on, long after jazz-ballet had edged tap out of white Broadway musicals. So today when our love for elegant discipline fuels a revival of tap among blacks and whites, many of the old black hoofers are still around, teaching and once again performing the almost-lost art. Jane Goldberg, a young white modern dancer, has been seeking out the old masters over the past few years, learning some of their routines, helping to set up concerts and teaching situations. Last year she helped 38    organize concerts in New Paltz by the Copasetics—a loosely organized group of musicians and dancers who got together in the 1940s in honor of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, whose favorite expression was “Everything is copasetic!” Last month Goldberg collaborated on a loft concert with Andrea Levine and Charles Cook, a Copasetic and part of the old vaudeville team Cook & Brown. Now Cook, Goldberg, Levine, and various guest dancers had a weekend of performances to packed houses at the Village Vanguard. Though we’ve seen several of the fifteen or so numbers they performed, the pleasure of watching the dancing was heightened in the compressed space and close-range view at the Vanguard. The format of the concert was more concise as well...