Tapping into the history of dance

Savion Glover lays unexpected stresses on words as he speaks, as though feeling his way through thoughts, beat by beat, surprising himself as he goes. This inquisitive rhythmic sense feels like a clue to his claim to fame: 40-year-old Glover is regarded by many as the greatest tap dancer in the world.

But he doesn’t let the appellation hang heavy on him.“That’s the showbiz stuff,” he says, dismissively. “Yeah, OK, good, that’s what you think, great – but I don’t tap dance for the sake of applause. I don’t tap dance for the sake of spectacle. I tap dance for equality, I tap dance for the recognition of the man in this country, what we had to go through as a people in order to claim existence in this country.”

In other words, the style we see now has its roots in a faithful and meticulous study of tap greats. Glover has assimilated the footwork and sensibilities of dancers such as Jimmy Slyde, Sammy Davis Jr. and Gregory Hines and combined them to make something distinctively his own. That includes hitting the floor harder and louder than most in an especially forceful style he’s named, “free style hard core”.

What goes through his head as he is dancing? “It’s an exploratory event. It’s up, it’s down, it’s sad, it’s happy, it’s reflecting, it’s everything.”

We’re speaking in his studio, a large and rambling building on an unremarkable street in Newark, New Jersey. It used to be Newark Community School of the Arts and it was here, “right upstairs” that four-year-old Glover took his first drumming lesson before going on to become the youngest person in the school’s history to receive a full scholarship. Thirty or so years later, the empty building came up for sale and he bought it. Now it’s a school once again – his Hooferzclub where he teaches kids the history, as well as the practice, of the form.

“The purpose of the building now,” he says, “aside from the sacredness it already had, aside from the fact that I was first able to start learning here, is to open it up to people who seek education through the dance. It’s become,” he laughs, “ holy ground of some sort.”

Despite the laugh, he’s not really joking. Tap has an uneasy racial history. As he puts it: “As far as black people are concerned, tap has always, from the very beginning, been related to buffoonery. I see news clippings that say, ‘Savion Glover is trying to restore the African roots of tap dance’. I’m not trying to do that, but I am trying to raise the level of consciousness as far as tap dancing goes, allowing us to understand that these men, their style and approach, comes from when we were stripped of our ability to communicate as African American people.”

A book of Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance poet, prominently propped in a window sill, seems to function as a miniature shrine. So do the stacks of John Coltrane and Muddy Waters records. Photographs of Gandhi, the Dalai Lama and Gregory Hines gaze out from the walls. When his assistant showed me into the main studio it was with a flourish and the words, “this is the sanctum sanctorum.”

Glover is a teacher but the way he approaches his art makes him seem more like a priest. ”When I look back at what I’ve accomplished so far the most commercial, showbiz thing, was my participation in this Happy Feet movie.” This is the 2006 animated film featuring dancing penguins for which Glover provided choreography.“Everything else,” he says, “has been for the advancement of the dance. Everything.”

Glover was born in 1973 and grew up on Livingston Street, a few blocks away from where we’re talking, with two older brothers and siblings from his father’s side. “We didn’t have much but people around us made it seem like we had everything. We were blessed with a wealth of knowledge, versus anything monetary.”

His single parent mother, a jazz and gospel singer, tells stories about him tap dancing in the womb. “She kept us involved in everything – from boy scouts to drumming – and tap was just one of those things added to the list. In the very beginning I had no deep interest in becoming a tap dancer. I just wanted to play basketball and chill out. Once I started tap dancing though, things happened.”

At the age of 10 he was cast in The Tap Dance Kid on Broadway and his dance education began. Glover’s technical skills were precocious, but not as precocious as the seriousness he brought to learning from luminaries like Gregory Hines, Lon Chaney and Buster Brown. “Once I got to know these men, their influence, I felt I had to tap dance in order for their story to live.”

A few years into its run, Hines saw The Tap Dance Kid and came backstage to tell the then 13-year-old that he wanted him to play his son in the movie Tap. In 1989 Glover made his screen debut alongside Sammy Davis Jr and Jimmy Slyde. Then came 1989’s Black and Blue, a Broadway revue celebrating interwar Parisian black culture which earned 15-year-old Glover his first Tony nomination.

In 1992, he starred alongside Hines again, this time playing the young version of jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton to Hines’ older version in the musical Jelly’s Last Jam. It was also in the early nineties that he began appearing on Sesame Street – a genial youth ambassador for his art as he rapped and tapped with enthusiastic muppets. He was an inspiration. When I mention his name to a friend she confesses that it was seeing him and Elmo tap dance that made her nail horseshoes to her father’s old trainers in an effort to make herself tap shoes.

In 1996 Glover won a Tony for Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk, a musical which told the story of black history through tap. His hope for his new show, SoLe Sanctuary, which opens at Sadler’s Wells next month, is that it will allow audiences, “to appreciate our appreciation for these great men and women responsible for our journey in the dance thus far.”

Tap isn’t the most fashionable of forms but Glover believes that, “it’s always going to be here.” Then, as if tuning in to some unheard frequency, he begins to sketch out a pattern on the floor. The ugly, clompy brown shoes on his feet become things of precision, instruments of staccato intricacies. His eyes remain softly focused on the floor, his arms hang loose, his head a little flopped to the side; he seems to be listening to something. “I think tap is in a safe place here in Newark, New Jersey,” he has said. It’s hard to disagree.

Savion Glover - SoLe Sanctuary, is at Sadler’s Wells from April 3-6. Tickets: 0844 412 4300; sadlerswells.com

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