Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History

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It is to revel, after days of painstaking research, in newly-found bits of information as if they were nuggets of gold. Tap dance, our first American vernacular dance form, and the most-cutting edge on the national and international stage, has suffered a paucity of critical, analytical, historical documentation. While there have been star-centered biographies of such tap dancers as Bill Robinson, Fred Astaire, and Savion Glover, there remains but a handful of histories exploring all aspects of the intricate musical exchange of Afro-Irish percussive step dances that produced the rhythmic complexities of jazz tap dancing.

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Tap Dancing America A Cultural History Constance Valis Hill The first comprehensive history of tap dancing in its three-hundred-year evolution in America Meticulously researched, drawing on a bevy of primary and secondary sources over 20 years Challenges the notion that tap "died" in the s and s Foregrounds the contributions of women in tap dance, the history of which has otherwise privileged male soloists.

With hair perfectly bobbed and smiles plastered across their faces, Foster and the cast executed choreographer Kathleen Marshall's steps with an almost scary level of synchronicity.

Tapping joyfully to the syncopations of Porter's song, the performers seemed to embody the possibility of a simpler, more innocent moment of American entertainment history when nothing could more purely express the unbridled optimism of the American spirit than a chorus of boys and girls hoofing together onstage.

Tap dancers and enthusiasts have long recognized the problem imposed by devotion to a dance form that reached its popular apogee in the s and 30s: Indeed, the latter half of Hill's book makes an impassioned case for the ongoing relevance of tap as a uniquely American aesthetic form.

But reading Hill's book front-to-back, it is hard to avoid the impression that tap enthusiasts have struggled to overcome the loss of the form's Halcyon days, when tap dance performers and choreographers of Harlem, Hollywood, and Broadway directly channeled the throbbing pulse of the American cultural ethos. Despite the work of contemporary innovators like Gregory Hines, Dianne Walker, and Savion Glover, it is hard to imagine that tap will ever occupy the cultural centrality that Hill's work documents.

At its best, her book shows how tap dance has reflected and contributed to broader developments in American expressive culture.

The history of tap dance, Hill demonstrates, is impossible to unlink from broader contestations around race, class, and gender. As she notes in her Introduction and early chapters, the history of tap has been marked by two distinct, if constantly intertwining, strains: Classical, Early, and Medieval World History: Civil War American History: Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.

A Cultural History Constance Valis Hill Abstract This is the first comprehensive, fully documented, intercultural history of tap dance, a uniquely American art form, that explores all aspects of the intricate musical and social exchange that evolved from Afro-Irish percussive step dances like the jig, gioube, buck-and-wing, and juba to the work of contemporary tap luminaries.

More This is the first comprehensive, fully documented, intercultural history of tap dance, a uniquely American art form, that explores all aspects of the intricate musical and social exchange that evolved from Afro-Irish percussive step dances like the jig, gioube, buck-and-wing, and juba to the work of contemporary tap luminaries. Bibliographic Information Print publication date: Authors Affiliations are at time of print publication.