Savion Glover's Bare Soundz taps everything from rock to rap to calypso
Savion Glover wasn’t yet a teenager when he started meeting and hanging with America’s masters of the hoofing arts. Though his Broadway debut came a couple of years earlier, with 1983’s The Tap Dance Kid, it was at the weekly tap-dance jams at New York’s La Cave jazz nightclub that Glover first knew he was destined to follow in their steps.
“La Cave was a great platform for me to learn and be able to listen in on conversations, and just get a lot of notes and teachings from those older guys,” says Glover, widely regarded as the greatest contemporary tap dancer, reached at his Newark, New Jersey, studio. “The place was designed for us by the great Jimmy Slyde, and he’d host the evenings. For me it was the first tap-dance jam place where we could come and learn and enjoy. I was there every week religiously, just to be around the likes of Lon Chaney, Chuck Green, Buster Brown, and Jimmy. Sometimes I had a chance to get up there and share what I knew with the audience.”
Born in Newark in 1973, Glover may be familiar to moviegoers as the motion-dancer for Mumble the penguin in the animated feature Happy Feet (2006). But he sees himself as an artist rather than an entertainer—a musician who uses his feet, not his fingers, for his dazzling flights of polyrhythmic improvisation. “I’ve never looked at what I do as show business, I guess, because of my connection to the art and how I was introduced to the dance.”
The jaw-dropping subtlety, speed, and finesse of the hoofer’s art will be on display at North Vancouver’s Centennial Theatre next Thursday and Friday (November 4 and 5), when Glover presents his current touring production Bare Soundz. All the music in the show will come from tap shoes.
“I want to give the audience or listener or viewer the chance to hear the dance as music, rather than hearing the dance on top of other instrumentations. There will be three of us—myself, Marshall Davis Jr., and either Maurice Chestnut or Keitaro Hosokawa—covering a lot of different genres. We go from rock to pop to rap to funk to jazz to calypso. A lot of the rhythms are very familiar.”
Glover thinks of the structure of his dance in terms of jazz—a genre he’s loved since his days at La Cave. “There’s a head to the song, which is most likely choreography, and then there’s the solo, which is improvisational. And there are some songs we may create on the spot, for that moment.”
It’s not as if Glover doesn’t like working with written compositions, however. In his 2007 production, Classical Savion, he danced to the music of Antonio Vivaldi and Johann Sebastian Bach, as well as Dmitri Shostakovich—his favourite composer for tapping. “Studying him, I was drawn to what inspired his movements. I understood that most of his music came from events in his hometown during the [Second World] War, and other momentous times. I like adding to that. I dig all of those classical cats. I look at them like the classical jazz musicians—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and so many others.”
Glover is constantly seeking to extend the range of his art. Early in 2011, for his next dance project, he will be turning to yet another genre of music—Spanish flamenco—and interpreting the songs for tap. “I feel it’s my duty, my job, now to allow people to hear the dance to different genres of music, to ensure audiences have the chance to listen to tap dancing up against all these other styles.”
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