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Tap Dance, and the Hard Work of Making It All Look Easy

Jimmy Slyde in George Nierenberg’s newly restored documentary “About Tap.”Credit...George T. Nierenberg, via Milestone Films

At the start of George Nierenberg’s 1985 documentary, “About Tap,” Gregory Hines ambles into the alley behind the Apollo Theater in Harlem and recounts the tap training he received there as a child in the 1950s. He remembers the dancers, like Sandman Sims, who took the time to work on steps with him, and he recalls what they taught him: that imitation wasn’t enough, that he had to assimilate what they did and forge his own style, as they had. “I found myself through them,” he says.

This lesson about tap tradition and individuality is the core theme of “About Tap,” as it is of Mr. Nierenberg’s earlier documentary “No Maps on My Taps,” from 1979. The films, which I consider the two best ever made about the art, didn’t just record tap history; they became part of it, helping to stoke a revival.

Milestone Films has restored them from the original negatives and is presenting them as a double feature at the Quad Cinema (Friday, July 7, to July 13). That’s just in time for this year’s edition of Tap City, the New York City Tap Festival (July 8 to July 15). Many of its young leading lights, like Sarah Reich and Caleb Teicher, had not yet been born when the documentaries were released, but they’ve grown up studying them, finding themselves through the films.

Before he made “No Maps,” Mr. Nierenberg had little notion of tap and its history. In his mid-20s, he was a young filmmaker searching for a subject for his second movie when someone suggested black tap dancers. He looked up Mr. Sims.

Mr. Sims, around 60 at the time, was down but not out, blaming rock ’n’ roll for tap’s decline in popularity in the 1950s and ’60s, a cultural shift that had put the best dancers of his generation largely out of work.

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Cast members from the traveling show “No Maps on My Taps and Company”: Howard Sims (a.k.a. Sandman), Buster Brown, Chuck Green and Mr. Nierenberg.Credit...via George T. Nierenberg and Milestone Films

“Sandman was trying to keep tap alive, and he saw me as a vehicle,” Mr. Nierenberg recalled in a recent interview.

Mr. Nierenberg began spending all his time with Mr. Sims, getting to know him and other dancers. After a year or more, he decided to focus on three — Mr. Sims, Chuck Green and Bunny Briggs — whose life stories would illuminate the connections between dancer, dance and culture in an art that Mr. Nierenberg feared was dying.

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Chuck Green, center, in Mr. Nierenberg’s “No Maps on My Taps.”Credit...George T. Nierenberg, via Milestone Films

“I fell in love with them,” he said, “and I was trying to recreate my experience for viewers. When you see them dancing, I wanted it to make sense — that this style would come out of that person.”

That’s what “No Maps” does. Mr. Nierenberg constructed the film around an artificial, anachronistic scenario — a competition-performance with Lionel Hampton’s big band at a Harlem nightclub. But as the camera watches the three men prepare for the show and dance in it, they talk about their lives and reveal themselves.

Mr. Sims is a sinewy show-off whether scuffing sand like a drummer with brushes or tossing off flashy tap steps; he both provokes the other guys and promotes them. Mr. Briggs is delicate, courteous, sentimental; his dancing is at once the most eye-pleasing and the most musically abstruse. Revered by the others, Mr. Green lays down the cleanest, clearest rhythms even as his large body teeters and lumbers. He’s abstracted, poetically strange. We learn that he spent more than a decade in a mental hospital, where he continued to dance.

Mr. Nierenberg folds in footage of some of the men’s distinguished predecessors, like Bill Robinson and the highly influential but mostly forgotten John Bubbles. But the connections to tap’s past stay personal — how Mr. Bubbles mentored Mr. Green, how Robinson offered to take Mr. Briggs on the road when he was only a boy — so the film feels present and alive, rather than dryly historical.

“This is probably the last hooray,” Mr. Sims says in the film. But it wasn’t quite. “No Maps,” which toured the United States and Europe packaged with live performances by its stars, was part of a tap revival and a wave of renewed interest in dancers of Mr. Sims’s generation.

Mr. Nierenberg, though, wasn’t satisfied, so he raised money for another film, “About Tap.” Again, he focused on three veteran dancers: Mr. Green joined by the supremely cool Jimmy Slyde and the ebullient innovator Steve Condos. But in the interviews, adroitly braided with solo performances, the men don’t speak of their lives, as in “No Maps,” but about their approaches and the broader aesthetics of tap. Their personalities color their pithy elucidations of musicality, discipline, imagination and the hard work of making it all look easy.

“No Maps” had a last-of-a-dying-breed tone, but Mr. Sims’s prediction in it that “there will be others” had already come true by 1985, most notably in the person of Mr. Hines, a movie star who generously introduced “About Tap.” And another generation was growing up, soon to be led by Savion Glover. These young dancers would experience the firsthand transfer that Mr. Hines describes in “About Tap,” with the same dancers now serving as surrogate grandparents. Yet they also studied Mr. Nierenberg’s films closely. Three of its top dancers titled their extraordinary show at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival last summer “And Still You Must Swing,” quoting Mr. Slyde in “About Tap” as if his words were scripture.

But as generation followed generation, opportunities diminished for direct interactions with the dancers of Mr. Sims’s vintage, all of whom are now dead. This has given Mr. Nierenberg’s films a new importance for today’s young hoofers.

Already an acclaimed figure in tap at 23, Mr. Teicher recalls first seeing Mr. Slyde in “About Tap,” in 2008, as a pivotal experience in his life, provoking an epiphany about the link between tap and jazz. A few months later, Mr. Slyde died. “What I go back to most are not the clips of the dancing,” Mr. Teicher said, as he prepared for a busy summer that includes Tap City’s “Tap Ellington” concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center on July 14. “It’s hearing them talk. That’s what my generation is missing. The films are like home movies of relatives you never met.”

Ms. Reich, who will dance a duet with Mr. Teicher during “Tap Ellington” and will duel him in a free program in Union Square on July 14, is another rising star, at 28. Her videos with the retro band Postmodern Jukebox have attracted millions of views. She was around 10 when she found “About Tap” in a bag of tap videos given by a benefactor and started watching it over and over. Once, she stayed home sick and watched it all day long.

As Ms. Reich started meeting contemporaries at tap festivals, she discovered that many shared her obsession. They would test one another to see who had memorized the film best. “I’m the champion,” Ms. Reich said by phone, proving her claim by reciting much of the film verbatim.

These days, she quotes the documentary to all her students, and buys copies for her best ones. “Damn, these are old men!” she recalled thinking about Mr. Nierenberg’s films. “We have such a long way to go. But that’s what’s great. I can keep doing this the rest of my life.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: Making Tap Look Easy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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