THEATRE-USA: ‘Bring in da Noise’ Brings Back the History of Tap

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Jan 30 1996 (IPS) - When most audiences think of tap dance, they might think of Fred Astaire softly stepping up and down walls in his movies with Ginger Rogers, or the big Broadway productions now typified by Tommy Tune.

Of course, the roots of tap dance lie not in Broadway or Hollywood but in the African American community, and the history of the style goes back to the days of slavery. And for anyone who might have forgotten that, a new hit show in New York provides a stark reminder that there is more to tap than Astaire.

The production at New York’s Public Theatre, by award-winning director George Wolfe, brings back the history of tap. The show, ‘Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk’, gives a sweeping view of the dance style from the slavery era to the modern days of hip- hop.

Starring Savion Glover — a 22-year-old tap dancer who is regarded as a phenomenon in the world of dancing — the show has been playing to sold-out crowds since it opened two months ago, extending its run in New York with another month.

‘Bring in da Noise,’ combining as it does rap music, tap, fiery gospel singing and dozens of different styles of drumming, has become one of the major hits in New York theatre.

The show originated from Glover’s idea to pay tribute to the real originators of tap dance, brilliant but virtually unknown dancers including Glover’s own mentors, Lon Chaney and Jimmy Slyde.

From that starting point, Wolfe and Glover developed what they call “a tap/rap discourse to the staying power of the beat”. The show traces the inception of a type of dancing that always provided its own rhythmic backdrop: tap dance, where the dancers thudded and clicked out the beats as they moved.

Providing one’s own beat was not only economical; in some of the darker days of black life, it was the only way musical rhythms could be heard at all. In 1740, after a failed slave insurrection, the South Carolina government banned the use of drums by slaves.

From that point on, ‘Bring in da Noise’ suggests, tapping your own music — or banging on kettles, pans and other objects — was the only way to keep alive a form of musical communication that the slave-masters feared as potentially revolutionary.

Glover and his fellow tap dancers — equally young talents Baakari Wilder, Jimmy Tate, Vincent Bingham and Dule Hill — forcefully illustrate the insurrection contained within tap with their energetic, often angry, and always evocative dancing.

Percussionists Jared Crawford and Raymond King — both church drummers, capable of beating on any object to make music — display the same lesson as they keep the beat going on everything from kettles in slavery-era numbers to trashcans in modern pieces. (MORE)

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