No Maps On My Taps | |
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Directed by | George Nierenberg |
Written by | Lynn Rogoff |
Produced by | George T. Nierenberg |
Starring | Howard Sims Bunny Briggs Chuck Green Lionel Hampton |
Music by | Lionel Hampton |
Distributed by | PBS Direct Cinema Limited |
Release date |
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Country | United States |
No Maps on My Taps is a 1979 American documentary film directed by George Nierenberg. The film recounts the history of tap dancing in America through the lives of three influential tap dancers, Chuck Green, Howard Sims, and Bunny Briggs, and showcases their dancing skills in a historic live performance at Smalls Paradise nightclub in Harlem. [1]
The film is a wistful tribute to the careers of the performers and to an art form that at the time of filming seemed to be waning. According to a review in The New Yorker , "Ironically, “No Maps on My Taps,” whose participants regarded it as an elegy, helped to start a tap revival in the eighties. The film was shown in festival after festival. Its stars travelled with it and danced, live, after the screenings." [2]
The film won Lionel Hampton a News and Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Musical Direction in 1981. [3] [4]
The dancers all recount their biographies and influences while rehearsing for a gala performance at a nightclub. Scenes of the performers dancing and kidding each other are interspersed with archival images and film footage of their early days. Also shown are archival film scenes featuring performances by John W. Bubbles and Bill Robinson. The film ends with a climactic dance-off in front of a live audience, with music provided by a jazz band fronted by Lionel Hampton. [5]
Tap dance is a form of dance that uses the sounds of tap shoes striking the floor as a form of percussion; it is often accompanied by music. Tap dancing can also be a cappella, with no musical accompaniment; the sound of the taps is its own music.
Gregory Oliver Hines was an American dancer, actor, choreographer, and singer. He is one of the most celebrated tap dancers of all time. As an actor, he is best known for Wolfen (1981), The Cotton Club (1984), White Nights (1985), Running Scared (1986), The Gregory Hines Show (1997–1998), playing Ben on Will & Grace (1999–2000), and for voicing Big Bill on the Nick Jr. Channel animated children's television program Little Bill (1999–2004).
Eleanor Torrey Powell was an American dancer and actress. Best remembered for her tap dance numbers in musical films in the 1930s and 1940s, she was one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's top dancing stars during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Powell appeared in vaudeville, on Broadway, and most prominently, in a series of movie musical vehicles tailored especially to showcase her dance talents, including Born to Dance (1936), Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937), Rosalie (1937), and Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940). She retired from films in the mid-1940s but resurfaced for the occasional specialty dance scene in films such as Thousands Cheer. In the 1950s she hosted a Christian children's TV show and eventually headlined a successful nightclub act in Las Vegas. She died from cancer at 69. Powell is known as one of the most versatile and athletic female dancers of the Hollywood studio era.
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Charles "Honi" Coles was an American actor and tap dancer, who was inducted posthumously into the American Tap Dance Hall of Fame in 2003. He had a distinctive personal style that required technical precision, high-speed tapping, and a close-to-the-floor style where "the legs and feet did the work". Coles was also half of the professional tap dancing duo Coles and Atkins, whose specialty was performing with elegant style through various tap steps such as "swing dance", "over the top", "bebop", "buck and wing", and "slow drag".
Howard "Sandman" Sims was an African-American tap dancer who began his career in vaudeville. He was skilled in a style of dancing that he performed in a wooden sandbox of his own construction, and acquired his nickname from the sand he sprinkled to alter and amplify the sound of his dance steps. "They called the board my Stradivarius," Sims said of his sandbox.
Charles Green was an American tap dancer. Green was born in Fitzgerald, Georgia. He would stick bottle caps on his bare feet as a child and tap dance on the sidewalk for money. He won third place in a dance contest in 1925, in which Noble Sissle was the bandleader. Soon, Green would be touring the South tap dancing.
Thomas Chapin was an American composer and saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. His music spanned the full range of 20th century creative music, from his time as Lionel Hampton's bandleader to modern jazz and his own avant-garde explorations. He helped create the Knitting Factory scene in New York City in the early 80's and was the first artist signed to Knitting Factory Records. Though primarily an alto saxophonist, he also played sopranino, as well as soprano, tenor, baritone saxes and flute. Many of his recordings as a leader were in a trio with bassist Mario Pavone and drummer Michael Sarin. Chapin studied with Jackie McLean, Paul Jeffrey, Kenny Barron, and Lionel Hampton. He died of leukemia at age 40. He played at a benefit concert two weeks before his death.
Maurice Robert Hines Jr. was an American actor, director, singer, and choreographer. He was the older brother of dancer Gregory Hines.
Lynn Rogoff is an American film and television producer, playwright, screenwriter, theatre director, and academic. She is best known for writing the 1979 Emmy Award winning documentary film No Maps on My Taps and the 1983 play Love, Ben Love, Emma; the latter of which examines the correspondence between Emma Goldman and Ben Reitman. She is an associate professor at the New York Institute of Technology.
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Suzushi Hanayagi,, was a Japanese dancer and choreographer. Born in Osaka, Japan, she found her way in the international art world through her Japanese classical dance theater forms and experimental performance art forms. For more than 50 years she actively performed, taught and choreographed in classic Japanese dance forms and contemporary collaborative multimedia performance works. She appeared in Japan, the United States and Europe as a choreographer. She collaborated on many of famed director and designer Robert Wilson’s most revered works created during the years 1984 through 1999.
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Bunny Briggs was an American tap dancer who was inducted into the American Tap Dancing Hall of Fame in 2006.
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Dawn Hampton was an American cabaret and jazz singer, saxophonist, dancer, and songwriter. Hampton began her lifelong career as a musical entertainer touring the Midwest as a three-year-old member of the Hampton family's band The Hampton Sisters in the late 1930s. During World War II and into early 1950s, she performed as part of a quartet with her three sisters and in a jazz band with all nine of her surviving siblings. Hampton moved to New York City in 1958 to pursue a solo career as a cabaret singer. She became a singer/songwriter and dancer, which included off-Broadway theatre performances and swing dancing in Hollywood films. Along with other members of the musical Hamptons, she was a recipient of the State of Indiana's Governor Arts Award (1991) and honored at the Indy Jazz Fest (2000) in Indianapolis, Indiana.
George T. Nierenberg is a New York-based documentary filmmaker and creator of GTN Creative.