Tap Legacy Foundation—Take Your Shoes Off, Stay Awhile
Like tap but wish you knew more about it? Andrew Nemr has a solution to that problem. It's the Tap Legacy Foundation, meant to gather, catalogue, even demonstrate everything "tap."
"I founded it with Gregory Hines in 2002, myself, my father and Gregory. In kind of pitching this project to Gregory, he said he had one concern and that was that everybody who he's seen go from tap dancer to organization leader stopped dancing, and so I made a promise to him and said, 'I will never stop.'"
"I teach regularly at Broadway Dance Center. So the questions that I get nine out of ten times from dancers coming in are, 'Where can I go to see this? Where can I go to do this? Where can I go to practice?'
"In starting this foundation, my personal goal has been to sort of establish a level playing field for the presentation for all aspects of the dance, so that anyone interested in learning more about what it is that they're seeing can come to a place and trace somebody's influences back." That would mean that a dancer could start with a fabulous tap dancer--say, Andrew Nemr--trace his evolution as a performer back through influences like Henry LeTang, Bunny Briggs, Jimmy Slyde and Gregory Hines (among others). From there, he could then take any of those influences and start the learning process all over again.
Tap Legacy Foundation's archives will house a rich history indeed. "There's this cat who used to tap dance on vibes and that was his act, to have vibraphones, and his promo shot was him in a top hat and tails almost surfing on this vibraphone. And so we know where those vibraphones are. And that's something that nine out of ten dancers don't even know existed. I don't think a film clip even exists of this man...So if you wanted to spend the time and figure out how to do that, just know you have a reference now. That it has been done before. It can be done. That's the excitement for me. Just to get a lot of that out in the open so people understand that they are continuing something, as opposed to inventing something."
But it all takes funding. "I've grown up in a very for-profit mindset that you do your work, you develop a product, you sell it, people buy it, and then you're ok. And it seems to be backwards in the grant world, or at least a little different, to say the least. So we're learning what they look for and how to word the programming the right way to make sure this will be something fundable. I find it difficult because tap dancing to me is a universal art form, open to all people, accessible to all people. You're using the first instrument, as it were, the body. So when somebody says, 'What is your target demographic?' I'm like, 'Everybody,' and I feel if I don't say it's everybody, I'm doing the art form a disservice."
"One thing that people have tried to do in the past, is put tap dancing into the modern dance infrastructure, or the dancer infrastructure which is company based, choreography based and very academic, so if you can't make a syllabus out of what you're doing, nobody will fund it because they don't understand it. And in an art form where we consider the highest attainable goal is complete self-expression, there's no real way to explain that. So we essentially need an organization that will understand that, will fund that."
One thing that helps get the point across is the Finger Lakes Tap Dance Festival, a three-day festival that TLF produces each year in Ithaca, New York. It offers intimate-sized classes, performance opportunities, a panel discussion with a top-notch faculty and a workshop on improvisation. The festival also includes "Walking in Time," a tap dance show held at the historic State Theatre. It's a perfect opportunity to see what good tap dance is all about and the work it takes to rank as one of the best.
Good tap dance means influencing another generation of good tap dancers who will then continue the legacy. And what they're continuing is arguably the most unique of the dance genres. "The tap scene is very different from the modern dance scene or the ballet scene. You're not going to get modern dancers to come to a jam session on a Friday night with a live band." Why? Because other dance forms concentrate on individual development, focusing on a strong technique that can then be presented to the public. Tap, however, is much more than a show of technique; it's primarily an exchange between artists and if there just happens to be an audience to listen and watch, all the better. As Andrew said, "For us, it's a conversation." And very soon, thanks to the Tap Legacy Foundation, everyone can join in. For more information, please visit www.taplegacy.org.