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SCMP Reporter

WHEN the Jazz Tap Ensemble was giving a performance in the Dominican Republic a couple of years ago, they announced that the next piece in the programme was written by musical director Jerry Kalaf, whose birthday it happened to be that day.

  And suddenly, spontaneously, from the audience came a tuneful chorus of Happy Birthday.

  That kind of reaction, said dancer, choreographer and co-founder of the Ensemble, Lynn Dally, is one of the most exciting things about performing jazz tap in tours that take them all over the world.

  Beyond just tapping their feet to the rhythms - which they do anyway - the audiences tend to become completely involved with the performance, and with the performers.

  The five dancers and four musicians of the Los Angeles-based Jazz Tap Ensemble will be performing to packed audiences in Hong Kong this weekend, followed by shows in Singapore and Chiang Mai in Thailand, where tickets have also been much sought after.

  The demand is a strong indication that the renaissance of tap - a dance form which has appeared moribund for four decades - is supported by new fans in Asia as well as in the United States.

  'Tap grew up as part of the social history of the United States. It is a merging of African-American dance and music - and there are a lot of West African syncopations and stomping steps - and Irish-American quicksteps,' Dally explained.

  'But it was eclipsed in the 1950s by the arrival of rock and roll. At that time vaudeville and musical theatre of that kind began to fade in the United States,' Dally explained.

  However, in the past 10 or 15 years since Dally co-founded the Jazz Tap Ensemble - the first of its kind, designed for the concert hall rather than the music hall - in 1979, it has been followed by many other similar groups, and tap has gained a new following.

  'In the beginning the audience was older, or made up of people who had tap danced themselves. Now I think the audience comes from all generations and backgrounds.

  'We wanted to bring tap to the concert hall as a way of keeping it alive,' said Dally, who started in tap as a teenager, but later moved towards modern dance, at one point training with Martha Graham.

  But a chance meeting with a dancer whom she had known as a child when she was training in her father's dance school in Ohio highlighted their mutual fascination with tap.

  'We were doing modern dance, but finding ourselves tap dancing in the kitchen,' she laughed.

  The Jazz Tap Ensemble does not rely on nostalgia for its appeal. While the Hong Kong programme includes a medley of tributes to the veteran dancers - Top Hat, which was Fred Astaire's theme dance, and a piece dedicated to Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, another grand-daddy of tap - all the other pieces are original choreography.

  The music is a mix of contemporary original jazz, and old big band and swing numbers by jazz veterans including Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis, played live by a four-person band.

  When the Jazz Tap Ensemble started out, Dally said, they were able to learn from some of the big-name tap dance veterans, including the Nicholas Brothers, Eddie Brown and Charles 'Honi' Coles ('he's passed away now, which is, sadly, something you'll hear a lot during our interview,' said Dally, who has recently mourned the deaths of several of her most important mentors.)   Her stories of the lives of the old tap dancers are a slice of American social history.

  Paul Draper, who toured with Larry Adler, was blacklisted as a communist during the McCarthy era. The fame of the Nicholas Brothers in America died with the Vaudeville Theatres, and they spent decades in France, touring with small jazz groups.

  'Tap dance used to be very different then. Big bands would often hire a dancer as well as a singer. And he would just perform a seven-to-10-minute routine that he had honed for many, many years.

  'But he would be famous for that seven-to-10-minute routine,' said Dally, pointing out that today's concert hall performances, with up to two hours of tap, required a very different kind of programme.

  The role of women in tap dancing has also changed radically since the 40s. It is not only that women are often the ones founding the companies, but with the genders less stereotyped in the 90s than 50 years ago, it is possible for women to participate more equally and adventurously.

  'There are plenty of male tap dancers we can remember - but only two women, Ginger [Rodgers] and Eleanor Powell. The others were really chorus dancers.'   In the past, female tap dancers traditionally wore high heels. Today, more practically, they wear flatter Oxfords, Dally said.

  The company is multi-generational and multi-racial, said Dally. The two youngest dancers are Dormeshia Sumbry, 19, and Derick Grant, 21. They both started tap when they were three years old, and met when they were eight and 11, on a major tap theatre tour throughout Europe.

  'In the Ensemble we try to generate the energy and vitality of tap dancing. That's what we have done. But Derick and Dormeshia . . . they're the future of it,' Dally said.

The Jazz Tap Ensemble at the City Hall Theatre. Tonight until Sunday 



Tapping all over the world