CHICAGO ON TAP
The show’s curator, Sarah Petronio, chose to include both old-time tappers and young dancers. One of the young dancers, Chicago native Ted Levy, started the show by walking onstage, tapping out a syncopated jazz rhythm, repeating it, then tapping out variations on it. When the rhythm became baroquely complex, he stopped and joked with the audience: “I just want to see if it works.” He gestured to the four-piece jazz band, they started to play, and Levy became the band’s soloist. I could almost hear a melody singing behind his rhythms. His body does not have the looseness and elasticity of Astaire’s or the clean lines of a classical dancer; he uses it mainly as an instrument.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The older generations don’t mix tap with other musical and dance forms, but together they cover almost the whole history of tap dancing. Lon Chaney, a portly elderly man, is a former prizefighter who invented a step called the “paddle and roll.” He had the misfortune to follow Porter’s flashy break dancing, and came to the microphone to say he was “going to hit one first.” He waved at the band to keep them from playing, then tapped out a steady stream of rhythms just moving his feet. Though he was wearing a tuxedo, he seemed to have stepped out of some old documentary film of a bunch of guys tapping, each guy trying to one-up the next. Chuck Green once danced with Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, and Louis Armstrong. He just stands in one place and taps out a rhythm as if he had all the time in the world. His perfect sense of cool was completely winning.
This style of tap, which is more music than dance, seems as new as jazz was in the 1920s. Faced with this lineup of styles and personalities, I was starting to settle into a fan’s daydream, picking a dream team of dancers. But Sarah Petronio may have already found them.
