Backstage: Tony Waag
Tony Waag, the artistic/executive director of the American Tap Dance Foundation (ATDF), has been on a mission ever since he was introduced to tap. He took his first class in Fort Collins, CO, and couldn’t shake the experience. He started college at the University of Utah as an art major, but soon found himself seeking out tap masters such as Brenda Bufalino, Charles “Honi” Coles and Charles “Cookie” Cook for guidance and tutelage. He traveled back and forth to New York City and changed his major to dance, but he still wasn’t tapping enough. So he packed his bags and moved to San Francisco, studying with Tony Wing and Eddie Brown. Finally, in 1981 he decided NYC was the place to be. He bumped into Bufalino on the street and the rest is history. The two formed a partnership, launched a dance ensemble, opened a studio, created a tap festival and eventually developed the American Tap Dance Foundation together. [ital: Dancer] talked to Tony about his passion for tap, and his vision for the future of the dance form.
Q: How did your first dance company, the American Tap Dance Orchestra, come about?
A: It was a brilliant idea that Brenda had. Her artistic choreography at the time was based in jazz, but it was a contemporary approach. We thought of the dancers as musicians. So, we started talking about this name for her group called the Tap Dance Orchestra. I just kind of jumped in there and said, “If that’s what you want to do, let’s do it.” I was part of it, but I was still studying with her. We got our first gig, asked all the dancers that we wanted to be a part of it and built it from scratch. Our first performance was at a Fourth of July celebration down at the Statue of Liberty. We were literally born on the Fourth of July! We just started promoting the project and asking for donations and getting more support. That ensemble performed for 15 years all over the world. Then everybody started forming their own projects and moving on to their own ideas and choreography. It’s a tight little family, but it’s grown. There’s an amazing group of different styles and people doing different things.
Q: Your and Brenda’s project expanded beyond performance to teaching. Tell us about the first dance studio you opened.
Tony Waag
photo by Lois Greenfield
A: In 1989, we opened a studio down in SoHo called Woodpeckers Tap Dance Center. For six years we had our own space. We presented tap dance intensives, ongoing classes, performance series and lecture series. It all went really well, and that certainly is where I cut my teeth presenting and producing tap projects. But after six years, those doors closed because of financial problems and again people started moving in different directions. It was a little bit premature at the time. Back then, there were a couple of handfuls of other studios in New York. Today, there are much fewer studios. We didn’t have the support or staff or funding to keep it going.
Q: After your first studio didn’t work out, what made you decide to create the Tap Dance Festival?
A: I started the festival in 2001. Before us, there had not been a tap festival in New York. I went to former board member Gregory Hines with the idea and he said, “Great! What do you want me to do?” I asked him to teach and perform, and the rest is kind of history. With his stamp of approval, I knew I was on the right track. That re-energized the organization and we started building from that point on.
Q: At some point, you changed the name of your organization from American Tap Dance Orchestra to its current name, the American Tap Dance Foundation. Why the name change?
A: The name change was to prevent confusion because there wasn’t an ensemble anymore. People were like, “What do you mean an orchestra? What does that have to do with tap dance?” But, without the ensemble in existence it was time to change the name to reflect the many different programs that we now do. We have preservation projects, year-round education programs and the festival. Sooner or later, probably in the next couple of years, we’ll have our own space again and will start year-round programming from our own studio. Right now we rent space at Chelsea Studios for our youth and adult programs, and rent theaters for different performances. We also have the touring company, Tap City on Tour, which started about four years ago. No matter how many programs we add, the mission will always remain the same: to preserve, present and perpetuate American tap dance.
Q: You have so many projects through ADTF. How do you manage juggling so much at once?
A: First of all, I have a lot of support. I have a great staff, a great board, a lot of students and parents. The art form itself is so appealing and joyous and it’s a great little community. It’s open to everybody and it’s a lot of fun, no matter what. I just always go back to the fact that when I first saw tap dance, and I first learned how to tap dance, it was great fun. It was hysterical. There was a lot of humor involved. When things get a little rough, I have to remember it’s a fun thing to do. How many things are like that right now? So many things are doom and gloom. It’s very difficult to keep an arts organization together. It’s difficult to stay on course and get funding, especially now, but I’ve been through these things before. It’s no different from how it was a year ago. We’re still looking for money, we’re still writing grants and we’re still doing our best.
Q: Do you think tap dance gets overlooked or marginalized in the arts world?
A: I think it’s been a slow, slow, almost painfully slow, steady increase in perception and knowledge about tap dance on all fronts. It’s taken the American public a long time to even understand that it’s an American art form. In fact, sometimes it’s ironic that many international communities understand that even more. For example, Germany and Japan are totally interested in American culture—jazz, and then consequently tap because they are related. Trust me, when we started the American Tap Dance Orchestra 20-something years ago and said we were a tap dance company, everybody was like, “What? What are you talking about?” At that time, people thought of tap dance as something Shirley Temple or Fred Astaire did. But then Gregory Hines came along and produced movies about tap dance. Now we have the St. Louis Tap Festival, the Chicago Tap Festival and the Austin Tap Festival. We have people tap dancing all over Japan, Germany and Russia. None of that was going on 30 years ago. We have this huge circuit of festivals around the world. In fact, the festivals are almost old school. People are now producing shows. Savion did it with “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk,” and then Derick Grant did it with Imagine Tap!. Cirque du Soleil is doing a show with tap dance in it in 2010. I think we’re here to stay. There’s a lot of action right now. We just hope that the economy doesn’t screw us all up. I think history has shown that the arts rise at times like these because people need to be entertained. They need to be taken away.