Location | New York City (various locations) |
---|---|
Founded | July 2001 |
Founded by | Tony Waag |
Artistic director | Tony Waag |
Festival date | Held every year over 7 to 10 days in July |
Website | www |
Tap City, the New York City Tap Festival, was launched in 2001 in New York City. [1] Held annually for approximately one week each summer, the festival features tap dancing classes, choreography residencies, panels, screenings, and performances as well as awards ceremonies, concert performances, and Tap it Out, a free, public, outdoor event performed in Times Square by a chorus of dancers. The goal of the Festival is to establish a "higher level of understanding and examination of tap’s storied history and development.” [2]
Tap City was designed to bring attention to New York City's tap community. [3] Its first iteration was held from July 7 through July 15, 2001, at various studios and performance spaces around Manhattan. Chaired by Hoagy Carmichael Jr., and Gregory Hines, the Festival began with an open jam session at the Broadway Dance Center in midtown Manhattan. Over the ensuing eight days, an international roster of over 90 performers appeared, which according to the New York Times , writing the day before the event, was to include "well-known tapsters like Jimmy Slyde, Prince Spender of the Four Step Brothers, Brenda Bufalino, Jane Goldberg, Lynn Dally, the Silver Belles and Gregory Hines. Many of the performers will also teach classes." [4]
Venues over the years have included The Joyce Theater, the Duke on 42nd Street, Symphony Space, Chelsea Studios, the Hudson River for a waterborne tap jam, and the amphitheater at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Highlights of the festival now include:
Film presentations and performances honor recipients of the Hoofer and Tap Preservation Awards and inductees into the International Tap Dance Hall of Fame.
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The Festival officially kicks off every year on the Circle Line with performances and a tap jam accompanied by a live jazz band. [5]
The festival includes at least one Mainstage event. Recent iterations include Tap Forward, which featured new work created and performed by soloists, contemporary tap ensembles, new talent and so-called "tap dance masters.” [6]
The festival finale, which features hundreds of tappers dancing in tandem in a free public, outdoors event. [7]
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. animated children's television program Little Bill (1999–2004).
Savion Glover is an American tap dancer, actor and choreographer.
Dianne Walker, also known as Lady Di, is an American tap dancer. Her thirty-year career spans Broadway, television, film, and international dance concerts. Walker is the artistic director of TapDancin, Inc. in Boston, Massachusetts.
James Titus Godbolt, known professionally as Jimmy Slyde and also as the "King of Slides", was an American tap dancer known for his innovative tap style mixed with jazz.
Brenda Bufalino is an American tap dancer and writer. She co-founded, choreographed and directed the American Tap Dance Foundation, known at the time as the American Tap Dance Orchestra. Bufalino wrote a memoir entitled, Tapping the Source...Tap dance, Stories, Theory and Practice and a book of poems Circular Migrations, both of which have been published by Codhill Press, and the novella Song of the Split Elm, published by Outskirts Press.
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".
Arthur Chester Duncan was an American tap dancer, also called an "Entertainer's Entertainer," known for his stint as a performer on The Lawrence Welk Show from 1964 to 1982. This, along with his earlier inclusion on The Betty White Show in 1954 and with the help of White herself, made him the first African-American regular on a variety television program. He performed all over the world, and notably at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.
Maurice Robert Hines Jr. was an American actor, director, singer, and choreographer. He was the older brother of dancer Gregory Hines.
Ernest "Brownie" Brown was an African American tap dancer and last surviving member of the Original Copasetics. He was the dance partner of Charles "Cookie" Cook, with whom he performed from the days of vaudeville into the 1960s, and of Reginald McLaughlin, also known as "Reggio the Hoofer," from 1996 until Brown's death in 2009.
The Flo-Bert Award honors "outstanding figures in the field of tap dance".
The Bridge Stage of the Arts, Inc. was started by its Artistic Director, Avra Petrides, in 1980; and has produced music-theater festivals in the South of France with American musical-theater artists such as Alan Jay Lerner, lyricist and librettist of My Fair Lady, and Betty Comden and Adolph Green screenwriters and lyricists of Singin' In The Rain. These artists performed and also gave master classes on musical theater to lyricists, librettists, playwrights, composers, directors, and performers from all over the world.
Max Pollak is percussive dancer and World Music expert. He was born in Vienna, Austria and became known for his work in percussive dance, World Music, tap dance, and choreography. He created "RumbaTap", which merged American Rhythm Tap with Afro-Cuban music and dance. He is the only non-Cuban member of the Afro-Cuban Rumba and folklore ensemble Los Muñequitos de Matanzas. For the 19th and early 20th centurygraphic artist, Max Pollak.
The American Tap Dance Foundation is a nonprofit organization whose primary goal is the presentation and teaching of tap dance. Its original stated purpose was to provide an "international home for tap dance, perpetuate tap as a contemporary art form, preserve it through performance and an archival library, provide educational programming, and establish a formal school for tap dance."
Michelle Dorrance is an American tap dancer, performer, choreographer, teacher and director. Awarded a MacArthur "Genius Grant", she is the Founder and artistic director of Dorrance Dance. Dorrance is known for her creative ensemble choreography, rhythm tap style and ambitious collaborative projects with fellow tap dance choreographers and musicians. She is currently a 2017 Choreographic Fellow at New York City Center and an Artist in Residence at the American Tap Dance Foundation. Dorrance lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Tony Carl Waag is a tap dancer, director and producer living in New York City. In 2008, he was dubbed "The Mayor of Tap City" by TheaterMania. He is currently the Executive/Artistic Director of the American Tap Dance Foundation.
Tamangoh Herbin VanCayseele Stanislas is a French Guianese/American tap dance artist and dance troop organizer.
Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards is an American tap dancer, choreographer, and instructor who has been called "the mastress of her generation." In 1998, she married fellow dancer Omar Edwards and opened a studio with him in Harlem; they have three children.
Ted Louis Levy is an American tap dancer, singer, choreographer, and director. He is widely celebrated as one of America’s premier tap dance artists.
James "Buster" Brown (1913-2002) was an American tap dancer active from the 1930's to 2000. Brown started his career in African-American dance circuits while still in high school and went on to perform internationally, accompanying acts like Duke Ellington and dancing with Savion Glover. Having appeared in numerous films and documentaries, including Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club, he has been described as an inventor of the tap dance art form and one of the most prominent figures in the world of tap dance.
[[Category:Festivals established in 2001]