by Henry Alford
Greg and I get tickets for Diane Paulus’s terrific production of Hair staged outdoors in Central Park. When it starts raining fifteen minutes into the show, the cast, mid–dance number, flees backstage. I notice one chorus member glare at the surrounding woodland as if one of the older and crankier maple trees had called the cops and shut down the party. An air of doom pervades the audience as we’re told to wait out the meteorology.
Greg and I trudge to the front of the theater, where we linger under the eaves and try to sublimate our disappointment by making up synonyms for “rainstorm.” When, fifteen or so minutes later, just as we’ve abandoned “torrentula” and moved on to “spittledammerung,” the squall slowly shifts to a palpable and granular mist, all us audience members cautiously trickle back to our seats. Back in the theater, we see stagehands mopping down the lawn that the cast has been dancing on; they’re using rolled-up towels that look like the world’s largest tampons.
When the show resumes, it’s as if both the audience and the cast and crew have surmounted some personal tragedy: we’re in this thing together now. This camaraderie is only deepened by the fact that Karole Armitage’s thrashy choreography will now be done on a lawn that may or may not have been tamponed to total dryness. Here is suspense. Here is possible injury. I imagine felled hippie dancers receiving shots of cortisone and then suddenly reanimating: Unbathed and Undead!
I watch the remainder of the show in a state of dazed exhilaration. My breathing is altered. When, after the curtain call, audience members are encouraged to get up onstage and dance with the cast, I long desperately to go, but am too shy to act on the impulse: the ice, she seems icy.
2010: For my forty-eighth birthday, I take Greg and two friends to the Paulus/Armitage production, which has now transferred to a Broadway theater. At the show’s conclusion, I bustle onto the stage and dance with the cast. I start center stage, but on realizing that the audience can see me, I move upstage center so that I can see everyone but no one can see me, the hallmark of the closet exhibitionist.
2014: Greg and I are in Chicago, visiting the two friends I took to the Broadway production four years earlier. Scanning the Chicago Reader one Saturday afternoon, I see a listing for a storefront production of Hair, and impulsively buy four tickets. As I rattle off my credit card number to a phone representative, I think, This is becoming a thing—if it is not already a thing.
* * *
When we think of nostalgia with respect to dance, we tend to think of the obvious—the glassy-eyed and beatific Nutcracker veteran who has never convincingly returned from the Land of Sweets; the nattily dressed dance enthusiast who applies to the human race the not unreasonable binary (1) People who are Fred Astaire, and (2) People who are not Fred Astaire. It’s easy to catch the bug: if you and a love interest have a great dance together, the memory of it can live on in your consciousness like a phantom limb.
Books and photographs have long provided inspiration for the sentimentalist, but the huge crop of dance film clips unearthed over the past thirty years or so have whipped these smoldering embers into a bonfire: the ability to spend one’s lunch hour excavating YouTube clips of Margot Fonteyn dramatically increases one’s desire to be Margot Fonteyn. Though the majority of them are admittedly not dance-related, four hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every single minute.
Depending on where you live, live performances of historical dance are often readily available, too. If you live in a major metropolitan area that does not annually offer a variation on a Jazz Age lawn party, then you need to write a strongly worded letter to your chamber of commerce, and sign it Daisy Buchanan.
The dance function that I’m calling Nostalgia is one of the hardest of the functions to define. With respect to other functions, it’s probably most similar to Emotion and Release, Intimacy and Socializing, and to Healing; it may be all of these things or some combination thereof. When we refer to people watching dance (as opposed to dancing themselves), the Nostalgia function usually works much as it does in the other arts—audience members, particularly at either end of the age spectrum, love the reassurance of the familiar, but an overabundance of this same reassurance can feel like kitsch. When it comes to dancing ourselves, the Nostalgia function may derive some of its power from an unexpected inquiry: if muscles have memory, are some of these memories more fondly remembered by our muscles than others?
What’s clearer is that, in a world in which “LOL” and emoji pass for communication if not banter, a blast of ye olde charm is decidedly a tonic. While the contemporary world’s allegiance to practicality and speed makes certain dance idioms seem ever more charming by the hour—hello tap, ballet, swing, and ballroom—this is not to say that other dance forms are without a nostalgic component. Hip-hop dancers love to get “old skool with it” from time to time; modern dance companies are forever resurrecting decades-old material from their repertory; ask a jazz dancer about Michael Bennett’s work on A Chorus Line, and prepare to have more of “The Music and the Mirror” performed than you were hoping for.
As the success of La La Land and the 2017 remake of Beauty and the Beast attests, it’s hard for many to resist nostalgia’s appeal. Whether, like me with my Hair obsession, you’re after beads, flowers, freedom, and happiness, or whether you gravitate to the swoopy elegance of the Viennese waltz and the many complicated, buttery baked goods such an allegiance conjures up for you, it’s pretty clear that pursuing these ends is as close to time travel as we’re likely to get in this lifetime.
Fortunately, nostalgia, as the saying goes, isn’t what it used to be. The Swiss doctor who coined the term “nostalgia” in the late seventeenth century defined it as a “neurological disease of essentially demonic cause.” The high incidence of this “disease” among Swiss mercenaries abroad was, bizarrely, thought by doctors to be the result of damage caused to eardrums by overexposure to clanging cowbells.
Today we know better, thanks largely to research done by a psychologist at the University of Southampton in England named Constantine Sedikides. In the same way that people in concentration camps during the Holocaust figured out that remembering meals they’d eaten could imbue them with a sense of optimism, so, too, Dr. Sedikides realized, do fond memories lift spirits for people who are not in crisis.
Studies have shown nostalgia both to foster inspiration and creativity and to make subjects more tolerant of outsiders. Subjects who’ve been made to feel nostalgic have shown decreased levels of anxiety, boredom, and loneliness.
In one experiment, subjects who’d been induced to a state of nostalgia were asked to set up a room for a meeting; they placed chairs much closer to one another than their non-nostalgic counterparts did. In another experiment, nostalgic subjects were asked to write essays; an impartial panel judged these essays to be more creative and imaginative than their counterparts’ were.
To be sure, there’s a dark side to nostalgia, too—this bittersweet emotion can cause some people to dwell on absence or regret in a way that becomes counterproductive, and that can even hurt them. I asked swing dancer Ryan Martin, the cofounder of the Hot Rhythm Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes jazz music and dance forms that originated in the early part of the twentieth century, what he thought about dancers who use slang from another era, and he said, “That’s usually a warning sign. No one really does that.”
Audiences can get trapped in a kind of nostalgia, too: Jennifer Grey has said that, after the success of Dirty Dancing, she didn’t dance for twenty-five years, even at weddings, because the pressure to meet onlookers’ expectations was too staggering.
But Dr. Sedikides’s research suggests that looking back on the past typically makes people less fearful of death and more optimistic about the future. Which may be related to my hunch that the more dire the era you live in, the more rose-colored the nostalgia you engage in. During the oil-poor, crime-infested 1970s, we all gravitated to a candy-colored gloss on the 1950s called Happy Days; in the throes of the 2000
s’ global banking crisis, we binged on the stylized cool of Mad Men; in the rocky early days of the Trump administration, many clung to the throwback-y charms of La La Land, a giddy, gee-whiz musical about a young actress rescued from obscurity by her jazz-snob guy pal.
2.
Early on in my tap dancing career—which is to say, before I had taken a single class—I got to dance on the stage of the Apollo. Admittedly, this is like putting a seven-month-old infant in charge of an oil rig. But let me explain. The American Tap Dance Foundation, a school located in Greenwich Village, was offering a tour of the illustrious Harlem theater, at the conclusion of which all tour-takers would get a chance to strut their stuff together. So I signed up.
Some seventy of us—mostly students in their twenties from the foundation—trickled into the theater at the appointed hour and took seats, marveling at the theater’s neoclassical splendor. “You’re all sitting so far back,” a friendly young tour guide named Sally said on beholding us, “like you’re afraid of the Apollo.”
Maybe we were. I mean: Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. James Brown. Aretha. Diana Ross and the Supremes. Michael Jackson. We were staring at eighty-two years of genius-making.
Sally encouraged us to move closer. We did so cautiously, as if walking in sand.
Sally launched into a brief history of the theater, and we started to relax. After her speech, she led us first to the Apollo’s smallish, dimly lit greenroom, where she asked us if we knew the origin of the name “greenroom.” Nervous chuckles, but no answers forthcoming. So I tried, “Is this where you got paid?”—using the past tense to acknowledge the demise of window envelopes and little deerskin bags filled with wampum. Sally smiled at me and said, “Boom!”
Then we climbed a bunch of stairs backstage to look at “the stacks,” four small, cinderblock dressing rooms the cramped charm of which landed midpoint on the college dormitory/prison continuum. Only about a third of the group could fit in at one time; trying to squeeze past one another without committing frottage felt like our first piece of choreography. Sally told us, “People like Paul McCartney and Rod Stewart and Maurice Hines ask for these dressing rooms instead of the newer ones because they’re so full of history.”
Then, downstairs in the stage right wings, we checked out the autograph wall, a black expanse twinkling with Sharpied flickerings of Alicia Keys and Janelle Monáe and Beyoncé. It would have held our attention for longer if the stage hadn’t been six feet behind us, dully throbbing with golden light.
The stage. Some of us edged onto it, others zagged like bugs from a jar. There was a big bolus of slightly yellow light center stage; to enter it was to lower yourself into a swimming pool filled with butterscotch pudding. It felt good in there. You’re up about three feet from the first row, which is comforting in the manner of piloting an elephant or an SUV—if anyone wanted to throw a punch at you, you’d have ample warning. But then looking out at a sea of 1,506 red seats—the house lights were on—was disorienting and kaleido-fabulous, like holding a zinnia a centimeter away from your face.
Sally told us that, before we danced, we would follow Apollo tradition by each touching the Tree of Hope for good luck. Hollowed-out and the size of a large watermelon, the Tree of Hope is the trunk of an elm tree that once stood near the theater. Black performers liked to stand under the tree for good luck. As I swiped my right hand against the tree’s smooth surface and thought of the thousands of people who’d done the same thing over the years, I thought, I bet this trunk used to be twice as big.
Then it was time for us all to perform the Coles Stroll. This is a simple circle dance devised for nonprofessional dancers by legendary tapper Charles “Honi” Coles who, prior to performing in the duo Coles & Atkins and playing Tito Suarez in Dirty Dancing and winning a Tony for My One and Only, was a stage manager and performance coach at the Apollo from 1960 to 1976.
Tony Waag, the head of the Tap Foundation, told us to form a large circle on the stage. Forty-eight of us moved into place. “You all know this, right?” he asked.
Uh, no. Later, of course, I would read all about the Stroll, and learn that it was an encapsulation of Coles’s famous saying, “If you can walk, you can tap,” because you simply walk or bop in a big group circle while adding a beat every eight bars. But I didn’t know that yet. Moreover, given that at least four people were filming us, and that another tour group of about seventy were sitting in the balcony watching us, I felt a little pressure not to look like an idiot. So I said to the well-dressed, forty-ish woman in front of me, “They’re going to teach us how to do this, yes?”
“They will.”
“I mean, I know Honi Coles devised it for non-dancers, but . . .”
“It’s easy. Just look like you know what you’re doing. Sell it.”
I nodded my head and gave her a tentative thumbs-up sign. At which point the irritatingly noisy twenty-something dude standing behind me asked, “What did she just tell you?”
I whispered, “She told me, ‘When you get to the other side of the stage, take off your pants.’ ”
He laughed nervously.
Tony Waag started us all off humming “Take the A Train,” and then we went into the Stroll, moving in a circle in big, slow steps. You put your heel down first, then lightly slap your toe down. Then on the other side. One after another.
Easy. Afraid no more.
3.
His friends call him Save.
Before he was born, his mother didn’t know what to call him. Then, while in the hospital to deliver him in 1973, Yvette Glover had a vision: she saw a blackboard with the word “Savior” written on it. But she knew that she couldn’t saddle a child with the weight of a name like that, so she switched the r to n.
Savion Glover, who some consider the finest tap dancer who ever lived, has done a lot to help keep the perpetually dying art of tap alive. This is no small thing. Tap’s heyday was in the 1920s and ’30s; when the greatest luminary of that period, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, died in 1949, a one-hundred-car funeral cortege drew more than a million onlookers along its route. But during the 1960s, tap all but vanished from the cultural landscape, probably because no one wanted to tap to rock and roll or soul or Motown. During the seventies, the historically black idiom saw a slight resurgence thanks largely to white women like Brenda Bufalino and Jane Goldberg, but by the late 1980s, the fervor was starting to diminish again.
Enter a certain cherubic, hip-hop-loving child prodigy and his surprisingly appropriate nickname.
* * *
Savion was one of three sons, each born to a different father. He grew up in a housing project in Newark, New Jersey. He was shy and skinny. He mumbled a lot.
Many tap dancers have played the drums (Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Harold Nicholas of the Nicholas brothers, Fred Astaire, Gregory Hines), and so, too, did Savion: in fact, he drummed before he could walk. He’d pull out all his mother’s pots and pans and start whacking on them. Or he’d whack on the walls, or on people. When single parent Yvette would come home from work as an administrative secretary, Savion would say, “Mommy, sit down and collapse yourself,” and then put on a show for her.
Yvette Glover put the four-year-old Savion into a Suzuki drumming class at the Newark School for Performing Arts. Soon, he was given a scholarship at the school, the youngest person ever so honored. Then in 1982, while he was playing drums in a benefit at the Broadway Dance Center one day, two auspicious things happened: Savion became enraptured by a performance given by the hoofers Chuck Green and Lon Chaney (not the actor Lon Chaney), and his mother enrolled him in the dance school. At the school, Savion wore cowboy boots for the first seven months because he couldn’t afford tap shoes.
In 1983, Savion successfully auditioned for a workshop that the producers of Broadway’s The Tap Dance Kid had started at Broadway Dance Center to foster a pool of talent. By the fall of 1984 Savion had taken over The Tap Dance Kid’s title role, doing eight shows a week for three hundred performances at
the age of eleven. A limo would pick him up in Newark to take him to the theater; his mother has said, “Even the neighborhood drug addicts were so proud of him.”
But it was his subsequent turn on Broadway, in the blues revue Black and Blue, that really laid the groundwork for Savion as a preservationist and respecter of elders. Not only was the show choreographed by a murderers’ row of hoofers and swingers (Henry LeTang, Frankie Manning, Charles “Honi” Coles’s former partner Cholly Atkins, and Fayard Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers), but the cast itself was studded with luminaries. During the show’s run, Savion pestered some of the old-time hoofers in the cast like Jimmy Slyde and Bunny Briggs with so many questions about tap and life that they started calling him “the Sponge.” He became so close to tapper Dianne Walker that he started to call her Aunt Dianne.
Savion also bonded with the Black and Blue cast member who would become his mentor, Gregory Hines. “Remember, I had no father image in my life,” Savion writes. “And these cats were accepting me, and I was just this little kid. . . . We went out. We went to clubs. You ask what they taught me? Everything. About life. About being a man. About how to be.”
Inspired and dazzled by Hines and the old-timers and what they were teaching him, Savion increasingly made a distinction between tap dancing and hoofing. The former was about entertainment, and came with graceful arms and a big smile. But Savion, like most of his Black and Blue colleagues, was more drawn to hoofing, in which personal expression is primary, and what a dancer looks like is much less important than the sounds he makes. Hoofing’s mandate is summed up in the expression “hitting”—for Savion, it’s high praise to be told “Yo, you hit last night!” because hitting means to express yourself fully, or to capture the rhythm of life. (Conversely, a tapper like Tommy Tune, according to Savion, doesn’t hit—Tune does “classroom stuff.”)