A tap dance quiz for National Tap Dance Day
25 May is National Tap Dance Day, commemorating tap dance, our earliest American vernacular dance form and a national treasure. But how how many notable tap dancers can you name?
Digging into the origins of 20th-century American tap dance
To be a tap historian is to be a sleuth. It is to revel, after days of painstaking research, in newly-found bits of information as if they were nuggets of gold. At the New York State Library in Albany, New York, I found the premiere date for Darktown Follies of 1914 (3 November 1913, Lafayette Theater), a date that had eluded tap historians for many years.
The missing scholarship of American tap dance
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.