Abstract
Speaking to an audience of tap dancers in 2016, tap legend Brenda Bufalino said, “Whether you know it or not, I have history with you. I am in your shuffles.” Bufalino’s comment characterises a concept I call dancestry. Similar to following bloodlines through ancestry, dancestry traces movement legacies through dancers’ bodies. Drawing together social-habit memory (Connerton, How Societies Remember. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1989), the repertoire (Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), and performance genealogies (Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996), dancestry is a facet of cultural memory that connects bodily legacies across generations, makes sense of contemporary steps and aesthetics alongside performances from the past, and processes and performs social, cultural, and historical memory. Grounded in the body, dancestry embodies ethnic, racial, and class-based cultural knowledge not necessarily transmitted by other means.
Examining tap dance, I propose dancestry as a way of tracing long-established cultural memories of the Afro-Irish legacy of tap dance (Hill, Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) through contemporary practitioners. I show how dancestry is maintained and transmitted through classic choreographies like Coles Stroll, and I contend stories conveyed by tap legend Dianne Walker enable affective attachments to dancers of the past. Overall, I characterise dancestry as a particularisation of theories of cultural memory that conveys specific dimensions of tap dance’s past in the present.
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Notes
- 1.
On the origins of the Shim Sham, Constance Valis Hill states, “While Leonard Reed claims to have created this routine combination with his partner Willie Bryant, it is more likely that it evolved in collaboration with the female chorus of the Whitman Sisters troupe” (2010, p. 80).
- 2.
Many tap dancers have written autobiographical accounts of their experiences. For example, see Brenda Bufalino, Tapping the Source: Tap Dance Stories, Theory, Practice (New Paltz, NY: Codhill Press, 2004); Anita Feldman, Inside Tap: Technique and Improvisation for Today’s Tap Dancer (Pennington, NJ: Princeton Book Co., 1996); and Jane Goldberg, Shoot Me While I’m Happy: Memories from the Tap Goddess of the Lower East Side (New York, NY: Woodshed Productions, 2008).
- 3.
Constance Valis Hill describes Baby Laurence “the first” bebop tap dancer and “the king” (2010, p. 174).
- 4.
This sort of breakdown in dancestral education is not uncommon as many dancers are never taught the history of the form.
- 5.
Formerly known as Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, this iconic tap dancer now goes by Dormeshia.
- 6.
PillowTalk: Tap Today (2017, pp. 33:30).
- 7.
For more on dancestry in And Still You Must Swing, see Janet Schroeder, Ethnic and Racial Formation on the Concert Stage: A Comparative Analysis of Tap Dance and Appalachian Step Dance, unpublished dissertation (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University, 2018), chapter 4.
- 8.
I liken the inheritance we gain through classic choreographies to the lessons I learned in the kitchen with my grandma while making her signature “parker house rolls.” This inheritance includes the handwritten recipe and the practical experiences of preparing the dough. Like a recipe that gets rewritten with each baker, classic choreographies pass from dancer to dancer, perhaps reshaped stylistically, sometimes rhythmically, but the core of the dance remains.
- 9.
- 10.
The ring shout, walk around, and cakewalk share features such as travelling in a circle in a counter-clockwise direction and improvisation by dancers. The ring shout, a spiritual practice engaged by enslaved Africans on southern plantations, featured shuffling steps that looked more like flat-footed walking than dancing, which was purposeful as dancing was not permitted on plantations (Toll 1974, p. 44; Thompson 2014, p. 176; Stearns and Stearns 1968/1994, p. 31; Hill 2010, p. 34; Abrahams 1993, p. 96). In contrast, the cakewalk was characterised as much more ostentatious, as noted in this description of the finale of Darktown Follies in 1914: “the entire cast paraded before the audience—bowing, prancing, strutting, and high-kicking with arched backs and pointed toes, in a grand cakewalk” (Hill 2010, p. 45). Katrina Dyonne Thompson additionally includes the buzzard loop, a circular plantation dance, in the genealogy of African and African American dance practices related to the walk around (2014, p. 177).
- 11.
It was not until much later when the Copesetics had been performing it regularly that Coles named the dance Coles Stroll, thus staking a claim in this particular sequence of steps and rhythms. In contrast to the walk around of minstrelsy and vaudeville, which closed the show, for the Copesetics and for duet shows between Bufalino and Coles, Coles Stroll served as a concert opener. See Bufalino (2004).
- 12.
Gottschild describes “the shuffling syncopation of the Ring Shout…[as] Africanist ancestors in the evolution and development of tap dance” (my emphasis, 2003, p. 114).
- 13.
For analysis of the corporeal residue of the vaudeville class act on current rhythm tap dance performance, see Janet Schroeder, Ethnic and Racial Formation on the Concert Stage: A Comparative Analysis of Tap Dance and Appalachian Step Dance, unpublished dissertation, (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University, 2018).
- 14.
One such example comes from Honi Coles and his dancing partner Cholly Atkins. In 1949, the tap duo was hired to appear in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on Broadway. They worked up a routine with musical arrangement by Benny Payne, but none of the men were given credit for their creative work. Instead, Agnes de Mille was listed as choreographer. See Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (1968, Reprint, New York, NY: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1994), 309.
- 15.
For an analysis addressing appropriation and tap dance, see Clover, C. J. (1995). Dancin’ in the Rain. Critical inquiry, 21(4), 722–747.
- 16.
For more details on Walker’s life and career, see Hill (2010).
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Schroeder, J. (2021). Tap Dance and Cultural Memory: Shuffling with My Dancestors. In: Parfitt, C. (eds) Cultural Memory and Popular Dance. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71083-5_2
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