Tap Dancing AmericaTap Dancing America
a Cultural History
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Book, 2010
Current format, Book, 2010, , Available .Book, 2010
Current format, Book, 2010, , Available . Offered in 0 more formatsTap Dancing America presents the first comprehensive, fully-documented history of tap dancing - the oldest American vernacular dance form -- in its three hundred-year evolution in America.In this meticulously researched story, Hill, herself a tap dancer, traces the early origins of tap dance as an Afro-Irish fusion, as the melding of West African and Irish musical and dance traditions. It was through this three-hundred-year musical and social exchange, with its steady pattern ofimitation, assimilation, and the transformation of such percussive step dances as the jig, gioube, buck-and-wing and juba, that tap dance evolved in America, and perpetuated such key features as the tap dance challenge -- any competition, contest, breakdown or showdown in which tap dancers competeagainst each other before an audience of spectators or judges. As such, the tap challenge is the rhythmically expressive "engine" and driving force in tap dance.Proceeding decade by decade through the twentieth century, Hill enumerates tap's musical styles and steps-- from buck and wing and ragtime stepping at the turn of the century, and jazz tapping in the twenties, thirties and forties, to hip-hop-inflected hitting and hoofing in heels from the 1990s tothe millennium. She shows how the Irish jig and clog tradition and black rhythm tap tradition evolved along parallel but intersecting paths that were distinguished not by race or ethnicity but by rhythmic sensibilities. And along the way, she presents the contributions of women in thisstereotypically "male " dance form, from the hundreds of chorus line dancers to the pioneering women composers of the tap renaissance and the hard-hitting rhythm-tapping women of the millennium.Groundbreaking in scope and detail, Tap Dancing America accounts traces how tap developed as people listening to and watching each other dance in the street, dance hall, or social club, as steps were shared, stolen and reinvented. Here is the story of a uniquely American dance form, a form in whichthe rhythms and steps of every dancer resounds the elders, ancestors, teachers and masters who came before.
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- New York, N.Y. : Oxford University Press, 2010.
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