Don’t be surprised when a tap dancer from Chicago Tap Theatre busts out a handpan drum solo or an a cappella song midshow.
Many great tap dancers are also great musicians, which makes sense, as they’re making music with their feet.
“To truly be a great tap dancer, one needs a strong degree of musical knowledge,” said Mark Yonally, founder and artistic director of Chicago Tap Theatre. “We consider ourselves equal part dancer and musician. We all study music to a degree, especially jazz, though a lot of us do love pop and funk and other genres. Many of our dancers are talented at other instruments.”
The eight-person company will perform Friday at Louisa Performing Arts Center at Colorado Springs School.
A live Chicago jazz quartet will accompany the show, providing a mix of funk, swing and ballads. One dancer will sing Janis Joplin’s famous “Mercedes Benz,” while another will do a handpan arrangement of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears.
Yonally, 51, also performs with the company, taking advantage of his age to inspire and educate.
“It’s important for the audience to see one doesn’t have to be in their 20s to be able to perform at a high concert level,” he said. “The more people can look at the stage and see someone who looks like them helps them get engaged and excited and realize tap dance is for everyone.”
Tap is singular, he says, in that it’s a style welcoming of older dancers, in part because it’s kinder to the body than other dance forms. There’s no going to the floor like in modern dance and no leaping into the air like in ballet.
“Other dance forms are beginning to integrate older dancers,” Yonally said. “But in tap we’ve had this idea of respecting our elders and learning from them. Part of it connects to the historical connection with jazz music. In jazz, there’s been this idea of a young lion learning from elder statespeople of the art. It’s more common to have a mentor apprentice relationship in the tap community.”
It’s hard to say exactly when tap began, Yonally says, but it evolved from people of West African ancestry in the enslaved population.
“What we recognize as tap could have started as early as 1700, the same time when ballet began,” he said. “Similar chronologically but vastly different stories.”
Why did people decide to make music with their feet? According to one theory, it’s due to laws imposed on slave people. At first slave owners and others who benefited from the slavery system allowed them to keep their cultural languages and instruments. But as they began to uprise and rebel against the system, and using those instruments as tools of communication with each other, stricter laws were imposed that took away their rights of expression, including their instruments.
“As a result, West African people began to find other ways to find expression and communication, including hitting their bodies with their hands or hitting the floor with their feet to make sounds and rhythms,” Yonally said. “It wasn’t called tap. We don’t know when the term tap was added. Using metal plates on shoes started in 1915. So there was a good 200 years when dancers were barefoot or wore leather-soled shoes or the occasional wooden shoes.”
Tap is having a moment right now, Yonally says, thanks to the virtuosity of the dancers and better access to great tap dancers. Dancers learn from other dancers, and when Yonally began his career three decades ago those performances were on VHS videos with obscure footage from New York City jazz clubs in the ’80s.
“We were like I’ll trade you my footage of Gregory Hines for your footage of Baby Laurence,” he said. “Thanks to YouTube we all have access to not just historical footage, but all the new work by new great artists. We make it a point that some of it ends up online and our colleagues can study it.”
