FEATURING:
Savion Glover, tap
Jack DeJohnette, drums
Other musicians, TBA
"I think Savion is the greatest tap dancer that ever lived," Gregory Hines told National Public Radio (NPR). Actor-dancer Hines--himself one of the most esteemed modern tap masters--found in his young colleague, Savion Glover, the form's true genius. Glover, a Broadway star by his adolescence, has performed with--and by some accounts has eclipsed--some of the world's most famous hoofers. After a stint on television's Sesame Street, he helped assemble the hit Broadway show "Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk," helping to convey his insistence that tap is a vital, contemporary form, not a quaint relic of black-and-white movie musicals. "His tap dancing is a revelation of virtuosity, and more important, of expressiveness," ventured Aileen Jacobson in Newsday. "He telegraphs emotions, stories, and history with his feet."
USA Today pointed out that Glover "grew up performing on Broadway, but he never really was of Broadway." Born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, by his mother, Yvette--herself a performer--he found his direction at an early age. "I grew up playing football and basketball on the street, riding my bike, playing hide-and-go- seek," he recalled. His mother served as his manager when he made his first forays into show business and made certain that he was not deprived of a normal boyhood.
Glover began taking tap classes at the Broadway Dance Center in New York City when he was seven years old. Glover won plaudits as well for his work in the film "Taps," which saw him hoofing alongside legendary entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. Once again, his mother was along to make sure the right environment prevailed on the set.
Glover next wowed audiences in the stage production "Jelly's Last Jam," in which he portrayed jazz innovator Jelly Roll Morton and co-starred with Hines. Though the older dancer might have looked like a mentor to the younger, Hines confessed to NPR's Lewis that he had to stretch just to keep up with Glover. "I can remember a couple of times he came in, he said, 'Oh man, I'm just exhausted,'" Hines recalled. "And I thought to myself, 'I got him today.' And I go up on both my toes and I come down and everybody's roaring, 'Oh boy, Gregory nailed Savion today.' And his eyes opened up wide. Now he goes up on one toe--on one toe--stays up there for about a half hour, and everybody roared again because he comes back and nails me." Hines told People, meanwhile, "When I get together with some of the older tap dancers, we talk about two things: women and Savion." Hines pointed out that his young colleague "was doing things as a dancer at 10 that I couldn't do until I was 25. He has steps, speed, clarity and an invention that no one else ever had. He's redefined the art form."
What he next came to, however, was television's Sesame Street. While his Broadway fans were numerous, Glover would soon be the idol of a much larger and much younger set. "To die-hard fans of the series," wrote Michelle Healy in USA Today, "Savion is an instructor at Celina's Dance Studio, buddy to monsters and a 7- foot-tall yellow bird, and caring neighborhood resident." Glover himself told the magazine, "I like to do positive things, to be thought of as a positive model, someone kids can relate to, that grown-ups can relate to."
Glover's dancing, Wolfe told Hunter-Gault, "inspired some sort of little abstract intellectual concept of exploring the relationship between history and rhythm," and the result was a fantasia of the African American experience. "Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk" told in tap, poetry, and music of such historical African American traumas as slavery and lynchings while including modern indignities like trying to hail a cab in New York. Glover provided the choreography and took center stage. This time, rather than igniting memories of tap's past greats, he provided a focused vision of its future. The production exploded the tuxedoed cliche of tap and presented it as a virtually unlimited expressive medium.
Of course, "funk" was a relatively new concept not only for Broadway, but for the world of tap. Yet for Glover, the term captured the rhythmic intensity at the roots of the form. "It's going back to our basics," he ventured in USA Today, "not the watered down basics that are taught in tap-dance class, but the essence of the basics." His version of tap "can be done to hip-hop music or any kind of music. When I was doing jazz or swing style, I wanted to do it to my music, what I hear every day, which is hip- hop. So I developed this funk-like style, doing more rhythmic patterns than steps." In addition to a singer and narrator, Glover and his fellow dancers were accompanied by two percussionists he discovered on the streets, who play buckets, pans, and other household items in the show--just like little Savion Glover did as a child.
Glover told People that he approached each performance like a pilot. "My show mode is that the dressing room is like going into the cockpit. Going down the stairs is like going on the runway, and once we begin performing, it's flight time. I'm just floatin' on that stage." By the time "Noise/Funk" had filtered into the national consciousness, Glover was floating everywhere. He paid tribute to movie musical great Gene Kelly at the 1996 Academy Awards, retooling Kelly's beloved "Singin' in the Rain" number. "I did a couple of steps that were recognizable to the public, then I just added my own funk," he noted in Newsweek. He also became the youngest ever recipient of the Dance Magazine Award, and was honored with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. For his work in "Noise/Funk," he won a Best Choreographer trophy at the Tony Awards.
Glover's ambition more than matched his skills, as evidenced by his remarks in interviews. "Once I get my style out, and once I see that people all over the world are hip to tap and know it's alive and well, then I'll go on to something else." - Answers.com