\n<\/p>\n
If Chicago, St. Louis and Rio de Janeiro all have annual festivals celebrating tap dancing, shouldn\u2019t New York City? That\u2019s the question Tony Waag asked in 2001, before he founded the New York City Tap Festival, or Tap City. And it\u2019s the question he is asking again after deciding to cancel this year\u2019s edition.<\/p>\n
For almost 25 years, Tap City has been an important gathering each summer, a hub on a circuit of festivals that combine performances with classes. These festivals have been pivotal to the passing on of a tradition, largely left behind in popular and commercial culture, that might otherwise have been lost. For a major art lacking major institutions, festivals have served as the next best thing.<\/p>\n
Tap City has been an incubator of talent, crucial to the early careers of now-prominent artists like Michelle Dorrance, Chloe Arnold and Caleb Teicher. It deserves some credit for the recent flourishing of tap in New York theaters like City Center and the Joyce, where Dorrance\u2019s company returns this month<\/a>. And it has maintained a footprint for the art in a town central enough to its history to warrant the title of Tap City.<\/p>\n Is Tap City dead? \u201cIt might be,\u201d Waag, 66, said recently at the American Tap Dance Center, a training and rehearsal space that he opened in the West Village in 2009 \u2014 and closed on June 30. Along with the cancellation of the festival, this is a worrisome downsizing of his American Tap Dance Foundation. While never robust, it is not just the biggest such institution in the city, but the only one.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The immediate problem, unsurprisingly, is financial. The effects of the pandemic hit hard. This year, relief funds ran out and, for the first time in the festival\u2019s history, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts was denied. Facing a six-figure deficit, Waag had few options, he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The center, at least, is changing hands. Its lease has been taken over by Susan Hebach, the director of the foundation\u2019s youth program, who will run the space independently as Tap Dance Central Inc<\/a>. In this way, tap dancers won\u2019t be deprived of one of the few places in New York where they are allowed to nick the floors. But the foundation\u2019s artist residency program and its festival are major losses.<\/p>\n For the present, the foundation is putting on a brave face. On July 11, a free event<\/a> at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts will feature performances by Dorrance, Bill Irwin and other tap luminaries. Waag, receiving a lifetime award, will dance with his mentor, Brenda Bufalino, doing the challengingly slow soft shoe that she created with her mentor, Honi Coles.<\/p>\n That lineage is the lineage of the festival. Coles, who died in 1992, was a figure from tap\u2019s heyday in the 1930s and \u201940s. He and his dance partner, Cholly Atkins, performed with the likes of the Count Basie Orchestra in a style largely developed by Black dancers and sometimes called rhythm tap. They lived through tap\u2019s downturn after World War II and survived long enough to participate in a tap revival in the \u201970s and \u201980s, more artistic than commercial, that was spearheaded by Bufalino, among others.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Waag was a member of the American Tap Dance Orchestra, a groundbreaking company that Bufalino founded in 1986. When it became a nonprofit organization, the forms asked for an executive director. \u201cI guess that\u2019s me,\u201d Waag recalled thinking. In 1989, the company opened Woodpecker\u2019s, a studio that served as home for the orchestra and for tap in New York City. The dream lasted only until 1995, when an employment insurance audit forced Woodpecker\u2019s to close. But Waag retained the nonprofit status, which allowed him to fund-raise for the first Tap City.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n With the participation of Gregory Hines, the era\u2019s only movie-star tap dancer, the festival was an immediate success. It was where you could see Hines trade tap phrases with his prot\u00e9g\u00e9, Savion Glover, but also witness some of the dancers Hines looked up to when he was a child. Generational transfer was the heart of the matter, onstage and off, and for students, the between-classes and after-hours socializing with elders might have been more significant than the formal instruction.<\/p>\n \u201cTap City had a remarkable impact on my young life as an artist,\u201d Dorrance said in an email while on tour in Europe. In 2005, Waag\u2019s foundation commissioned her first choreography for adults and presented it at the festival. Before that, she recalled seeing, in a single weekend, whiz kids who would become some of her closest friends and colleagues onstage with septuagenarian legends like Mable Lee<\/a> and Jimmy Slyde<\/a>.<\/p>\n Cross-generational exchange is what all the tap festivals were about, starting with \u201cBy Word of Foot,\u201d an event that Jane Goldberg organized a few times in New York in early 1980s. Over the next two decades enough festivals were founded to form a circuit, coast to coast, with teachers and students hopping from one festival to the next all summer long. Many dancers of Dorrance\u2019s generation matured in these gatherings.<\/p>\n \u201cOur elders charged us with the responsibility of growing deeper into our past while growing into our future,\u201d she said. \u201cIt felt like the future was bright and we each had a role.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The Chicago Human Rhythm Project<\/a> will start its 34th edition on July 12. Its founder, Lane Alexander, credited its longevity to early efforts to partner with other organizations, become a year-round presenter and \u201cget inside the institutional framework\u201d of the city \u2014 none of which Tap City ever quite achieved.<\/p>\n In 2021, he handed over the artistic director position to Jumaane Taylor, a tap dancer in his 30s who started at the festival as teenage scholarship student. But other prominent festivals have had trouble with succession, another kind of generational transfer. After Robert Reed died in 2015, his St. Louis Tap Festival (which Dorrance called \u201cunparalleled\u201d) fizzled out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n This is a problem Waag shares. Producing a tap festival has never been easy, balancing inconstant grants and fluctuating revenue with credit card debt and the occasional angel donor. Who wants that job, which is really several?<\/p>\n \u201cWe were always robbing Peter to pay Paul,\u201d Waag said. \u201cBy the time we got grant money, we had already spent it.\u201d Closing down required auctioning off equipment and memorabilia just to pay his debts.<\/p>\n A few years ago, the Howard Gilman Foundation funded the development of a strategic plan for Tap City\u2019s future and how to hand it off to the next generation. During an early session with the planners, Waag asked if it was even worth continuing the festival. Everyone absolutely agreed that it was. Who, then, should take over? No one stepped up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Outside New York, the situation is far from gloomy, though. There are more tap festivals than ever, on every continent but Antarctica. One of the most thriving is in Stockholm. Most of the newer festivals are smaller and shorter, two or three days instead of one or two weeks. Some are larger but closer to competition-dance conventions. To the old guard, not all these qualify as festivals in the original sense, but that original need for a mixture of instruction, inspiration and continuity remains. Tap\u2019s recent gains are fragile.<\/p>\n Some of the new leaders were raised in the old system. Chloe Arnold is a sought-after, Emmy Award-winning choreographer with a large social-media following. But she and her sister, Maud, run two successful festivals, on opposite coasts: Hollywood Tap Fest<\/a> and D.C. Tap Fest<\/a>, which in its 16th year draws around 500 dancers.<\/p>\n Chloe Arnold called Tap City \u201ca mainstay of her life,\u201d one of the principal sources of work in her early career and a place she felt free to test out ideas. She said that her festivals try to echo the generosity of Waag and the artists who took time to share, Hines above all. \u201cI want to transmit how those people made me feel,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n