by Henry Alford
This orientation would seem to have affected Savion’s work both for good and bad. On the positive side, you’d be hard-pressed to find a dancer, let alone a tap dancer, whose footwork and sense of rhythm is more virtuosic: “whirlwind” does not begin to describe the sweet hell that Savion can rain down upon a stage. (He’s known in the trade for having a “heavy foot.” As Hines once put it, “He can tap dance faster and harder and cleaner than anyone I’ve ever seen or heard of. He hits the floor harder than anybody, and to do it, he lifts his foot up the least. It doesn’t make any sense.”)
On the negative side, Savion has been accused, particularly when he was younger, of neglecting his audiences. In wanting his work to be viewed as music more than dance, and in putting all his attention on the beat rather than on how that beat is produced, he has sometimes alienated audiences by refusing to look at them or by performing with his back to them. When Greg and I went to see Savion at the New York City jazz club the Blue Note in January 2017, he did something odd. The announcer said, “Ladies and gentleman, Savion Glover!” On walked three band members, who picked up their instruments, but did not start playing. No Savion. Forty-five seconds in: a fourth band member sauntered onto the stage. Still no Savion. Still no music. Audience members started looking at one another, coughing. One minute in: the bass player looked offstage awkwardly and said, “All right.” The audience grew increasingly restless, their sympathy skyrocketing for the band members, at whom we were all staring but who still weren’t playing. Two minutes in: still no Savion. The audience writhed in discomfort, sure that we’d been trapped in some weird example of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty.
When, some two and a half minutes in, Savion finally appeared, he did not talk to, look at, or apologize to the audience for the next forty-five minutes. But so fiery and innovative was his dancing—he can dance on the side of his feet! He walked en pointe across the stage! He can make at least three different sounds by scraping his toe!—and so contagious was the rhapsody he felt while doing it (he tends to beam his joy at the floor or at the musicians), that all the awkwardness of the show’s opening was dissipated. Thrillingly, Savion was simultaneously dancer, drummer, and bandleader—he was driving the beat, and changing it so the musicians all had to follow. What dancers do this?
* * *
By 1991, young Savion was appearing regularly on Sesame Street, as himself or someone just like him named Savion; he’d wear a baseball hat sideways, and teach tap to the likes of Big Bird and Shelly the Turtle. A year later, he was on Broadway with Hines again, in Jelly’s Last Jam.
In 1995, Savion and Jelly’s director George C. Wolfe opened their spectacular theatrical collaboration, Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk. The show—an informal history of the black struggle as chronicled through the progression of “da beat” from African drumming to Stepin Fetchit–style tap dancing in Hollywood to street drummers—made Savion a star and won him a Tony.
As Hamilton would continue to do years later, Bring in ’da Noise made Broadway safe for hip-hop. For us audience members, this paradigm shift first revealed itself with the slight smell of ganja that seeped into the Ambassador Theatre from backstage, but then solidified at the sight of Savion himself: by now he’d acquired his trademark Rasta-man dreadlocks, thus heightening the surprise to be found at the intersection of a dying profession and slangy, ghetto cool.
“When I was a kid,” Savion told the New Yorker just before Bring in ’da Noise transferred from the Public Theater to Broadway, “I looked up to Honi Coles, Sammy Davis, and Sandman Sims. A 15 year-old kid today is now trying to do Savion.” Or maybe the inspired kid was only nine: when one of today’s most esteemed young choreographers of ballet, Justin Peck, saw Bring in ’da Noise at that age, he was so gob-smacked that he started training.
To a certain degree, the trope of honoring one’s elders is built into the DNA of tap. A longtime element of tap dancing is something called the hoofer’s line. “That’s where everybody’s doing a paddle and roll and one dancer at a time takes a solo turn,” Savion explains in his book. “There are rules, but the rules are unspoken, almost secret. The main thing is you got to finish the phrase of the man before you, finish it and then add something of your own. And if you don’t, you’ll be cut by the next man, embarrassed, you’ll have your own step flipped back on you. You can spit on someone through the dance. You can murder someone through the dance.”
But Savion takes the practice of honoring your antecedents to a new level; as he told 60 Minutes in 2000, “I’m on a mission to brainwash an entire generation.” When he performs in his own shows, he often bedecks the stage with large photographs of the dead masters of tap. After Hines died in 2003, Savion would sometimes perform with a photograph of Hines hanging around his neck. Sometimes his desire to honor or resurrect is baked into the project’s DNA: in 2016, Savion collaborated with George C. Wolfe again to adapt for Broadway 1921’s Shuffle Along, the first Broadway musical to feature a romantic duet between a black man and a black woman.
He also pays it forward via teaching. During the national tour of Jelly’s, he taught in all sixty-five cities that the show visited. In 2009, he opened a school of tap in Newark called the HooFeRzCLuB (named after a small room in the back of a comedy club that was the informal headquarters of tap in Harlem during the 1920s and ’30s).
You can’t read an interview with Savion, it sometimes seems, without encountering him banging on about Jimmy Slyde or Honi Coles or some other overlooked legend of yesteryear. Take his experience with the 2006 animated hit Happy Feet, for instance. Savion was the inspiration for Mumble, the penguin protagonist who was voiced by Elijah Wood. Traveling to Australia several times to work with director George Miller of Mad Max fame, Savion devised the choreography for, and did the motion capture dancing for, Mumble. He wore a black body suit with forty reflective sensors attached, and was filmed on a small soundstage with some sixty light-sensitive cameras. When the film came out—it would take in more than $384 million at the box office, and win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature—USA Today interviewed Savion, who told the paper, “I see a lot of my mentors and tap pioneers like Jimmy Slyde in the steps and patterns. I do a special move that was given to me by Gregory Hines. Now this penguin is doing it.”
4.
There’s at least one dance community—that of swing dancing—wherein the attraction to nostalgia is so prevalent that it’s the dancers who don’t buy into the reminiscence machine altogether who make the strongest impression.
In January of 2017 I went to Austin, Texas, to attend Hot Rhythm Holiday, a weekend devoted to swing dancing and jazz. (I went alone, Greg having declared himself too antisocial for social dancing.) The festival is held in the gorgeous 1931 Georgian Revival mansion that is the headquarters for the Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs. USO dances were regularly held at “the Fed” during World War II; Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Benny Goodman all played its ballroom. With its period furniture and oil paintings of large-jawed bluestockings, the Fed feels like visiting the home of an impoverished noble and her slightly dusty dishes of Jordan almonds.
The day before the festival started, the organizers sent us all an e-mail stating “To help preserve that vintage vibe, we request that attendees not wear screen-printed t-shirts (a.k.a. “graphic t-shirts”) and/or jeans to the Friday and Saturday night dances. If you want to stay casual try a plain color or striped t-shirts with slacks for a vintage look.” So I was not surprised, on entering the mansion on a Thursday night, to find myself amid a lot of people in their twenties and thirties, many of them turned out in high-waisted pants, dresses with shoulder pads, spectator shoes, suspenders, snoods. Very fetching.
Over the course of the weekend, I took classes, attended panels, went to dances, listened to great music, and holed up in my hotel room watching clips of swing dancing in old movies. At a class in creating vintage hairstyles, I talked to a young woman who told me that at the first swing weekend she ever went to
, “I realized I was much more into vintage hair than I am vintage dancing.” I talked to a former punk rocker and skateboarder who told me that his adoption of the swing lifestyle was only natural, given that in both skateboarding and swing, “there’s tricks.”
One night, about 250 of us dancers, having declared ourselves either leaders or followers, lined the two long sides of the four-thousand-square-foot ballroom. Then, starting at one end, the two lines started snaking inward toward the middle of the hall, creating lots of pairs. I grabbed the hand of the jolly, twenty-something woman who was to be my partner. We couples moved rapidly down the length of the room together like fertilized eggs down a gigantic fallopian tube.
I wondered if there was a correlation between the dancers’ level of nattiness and the particular form of swing they were doing. Indeed there was, I was told by various people. Lindy Hop, the first kind of swing to be revitalized—this happened in the 1980s, with later boosts from the 1988 “Khakis Swing” GAP commercial and the movies Swing Kids (1993) and Swingers (1996)—is the most popular form, the gateway drug of swing if you will, and thus has the lowest percentage of people who wear vintage. The more smooth and elegant Balboa, the second of the weekend’s featured dances to be revitalized, has a lot of vintage going on, perhaps because its smooth, intricate moves are less sweat-producing than its two cousins’, and thus less likely to dissolve the armpits of your mint-green voile jumper. Finally, the weekend’s most recent revival, the collegiate shag, though bouncy and calisthenic, also draws a lot of dandies because it’s an outlier that appeals to the bold or eccentric of spirit.
Indeed, the most fun I had during Hot Rhythm Holiday was a class in collegiate shag. Fifteen of us assembled in the mansion’s library, which is lined on two sides with glassed-in bookshelves, some of them bearing one-foot-tall doll figurines of former presidents of the Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs. These eerie porcelain ladies stared down on us dancers as we hopped and shuffled around the library; you could almost hear them murmuring, “We never should have let these young people into our home.” Because shag, which is danced on a six-count, unlike the other two forms, which are usually on eight, is a bit of a nutshow. In one of its variations, the leader holds his left arm against the follower’s right arm up at eye level, resting the section from his wrist to his elbow against his partner’s; then he hops on his left foot (and the follower on her right), then hops on the other foot, and then runs in place. You look like a pair of spastic Statues of Liberty.
Moreover, the dance’s bounciness is, particularly for beginners, exhausting. “Shag is my happy dance!” Irina, one of my group’s instructors, yelled. Her partner Jeremy said, “It’s my workout dance!” My partner looked at me and said, “It’s my sweaty rabbit dance.”
But the two moments from the weekend that left the longest-lasting impression were both anti-nostalgia, or, rather, to the side of nostalgia. In the first instance, I interviewed one of the weekend’s Balboa instructors, a super-cheery young woman named Jenn Lee. “I don’t have a vintage lifestyle,” Jenn confessed to me. Then when I asked her what video clips of Balboa dancing she recommended to her students, she said, “I show them modern dancing rather than vintage clips because that’s more like what they’ll be able to do.”
Interesting. So, I wondered, if you’re not 100 percent invested in the Bygone Era of it all, then what’s the draw?
As it turns out, the Seattle-based Jenn—who is forty-two but looks fifteen years younger—is an ophthalmologist who owns her own practice. “When you’re a small business owner and a surgeon,” she told me, “a lot of your personality is not allowed to shine. You’re not allowed to be jokey. You’re not allowed to have blue hair. You’re not allowed to be silly and make faces. It makes you a bit one-dimensional. But when I’m swing dancing, it’s almost like I have a different personality.”
Indeed, when Jenn dances, she can often be seen beaming rhapsodically, if not actually laughing. Which I’m sure many licensed professionals would say is related to her success as a competitor: Jenn holds first place titles from Lindy Focus, the Snowball, California Balboa Classic, All Balboa Weekend, the Eastern Balboa Championships, Montreal Dance Festival, and Lindy Fest.
My second strong memory is of Norma Miller, aka the Queen of Swing, who, along with Frankie Manning, is one of swing’s probably most revered dancers (e.g., she and Manning are the only two dancers Ken Burns highlighted in his ten-part 2001 documentary, Jazz). The rubber-limbed Miller lights up two of the best video clips of swing dancing on YouTube—one from the Marx Brothers’ 1937 A Day at the Races, and an even more spectacular one from 1941’s Hellzapoppin’. In this latter clip, she’s part of a group called Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, and at one point she dives into a handstand between her partner’s feet; he grabs her thighs and hoists her over his head; she flips in the air, landing faceup, inches from the ground between his legs, her arms around his thighs; he hoists her up into the air again, causing her to frog-leg in the air before landing and then bouncing backward offscreen. Every time I watch it I lose five pounds.
But it’s a video clip from a 2016 interview that Miller gave at age ninety-six that I keep returning to. Miller was teaching at the time in Sweden, at the Herräng Dance Camp, an annual swing event. Seemingly anchored into her chair by her huge wig and her buggy, Jackie O–style sunglasses, the rail-thin Miller dutifully answers question after question from her interviewer, an earnest young dancer named LaTasha Barnes. An hour or so into the session, Miller starts to wax increasingly ambivalent and irritable, possibly hangry. Asked what she thinks about the modern resurgence of swing, Miller says, “It don’t matter. If you like it, wonderful. I don’t care. . . . That dance was thrown to the curb—we had to rezitate it! Nobody was talking about no jazz dancing! Frankie Manning spent thirty-two years working in the post office because he couldn’t get a job!”
Then, when Barnes asks Miller where she’d like the idiom to go in the future, the Queen of Swing huffs. “I don’t care what they do with it. If they can walk, that’s all right with me. . . . If I can participate and give you something, leave you with something, I’m very happy to do so. But if you don’t take it, I don’t care!”
When you care enough to not care.
5.
About a month after I’d missed the pas de deux performance at Peridance, I threw my back out for the third time in four months, on this occasion when I tried to lift someone at a contact improv jam. The injury was much more severe this time. I limped for a month. To sneeze or to cough was to set off a seismic occurrence around my spine, like a donut-shaped cloud of dust quickly rising in a mine shaft; twice when this happened I grabbed a wall for balance. I couldn’t tie my shoes for a week, or bend at the waist at more than a thirty-degree angle; one morning when Greg had gone off to the gym early, I couldn’t pull my boxer shorts up around my waist, so I used salad tongs.
When the pain subsided, it was replaced by a kind of blankness: on some days it felt like I had a two-inch-wide band around my waist that was nothing but air. I called this strange new anatomical feature my “band of uncertainty.”
I didn’t want to go see my doctor: two injuries prior, he had said, “I’ll give you one more injury,” intimating that contact improv was not a good fit for me. So instead of exposing myself to further dire warning, I visited two massage therapists, an acupuncturist, and a chiropractor. All provided temporary relief.
And then I remembered having read about Luigi.
* * *
When his steelworker father was killed in a car crash in 1930, five-year-old Eugene Faccuito (fuh-CHEW-toe), the eighth of eleven children, started singing on the street corners of Steubenville, Ohio, to bring in money for the family. In his teenage years he’d go on to sing and dance on the vaudeville circuit.
But in 1946, a few months after moving to Hollywood, he was thrown from a car that slammed into a telephone pole. He hit the curb headfirst. Doctors did not expect him to live; he emerged from a two month–long
coma with the left side of his face and the right side of his body paralyzed. But when his doctors told him he wouldn’t walk again, Luigi thought, I don’t want to walk, I want to dance. (In my mind, there’s always an exclamation point at the end of that sentence.)
It took him three years to achieve that dream. He did it by developing a regimen of stretching, standing at the barre, and careful bending. “I didn’t want people to see my face,” he would explain, “so I did things to make my body look good.”
Once rehabilitated, he started getting work in the chorus of musical films (his face would remain paralyzed for the rest of his life, so larger roles were tough for him to get), including 1949’s On the Town, where he befriended the movie’s codirector and costar, Gene Kelly, who became Luigi’s mentor. Kelly thought that having two Genes on the set was confusing, so he gave Faccuito the name Luigi. When Kelly noticed that Luigi tended to hide his face while dancing, Kelly told him, “Keep doing what you’re doing but lift your face. It’s beautiful.”
While Luigi continued to work on films—Annie Get Your Gun (1950), An American in Paris (1951), The Band Wagon (1953)—he would do his stretches on the set, and dancers started joining in. He opened his first school in Los Angeles, in 1950.
Then he moved to New York, where in 1957 he opened a school where his dedication and amazing roster of students—Alvin Ailey, Twyla Tharp, Susan Stroman, Michael Bennett, Ben Vereen, Ann Reinking, Donna McKechnie, Robert Morse, Barbra Streisand, John Travolta, Tony Roberts, Jane Fonda—would earn him another nickname, “the father of American jazz dancing.”
* * *
I started googling. One of the first things to come up was Luigi’s 2015 New York Times obituary, a fairly staid affair much enlivened by the sudden injection of Liza Minnelli. The fifth paragraph opens with a quote from her: “ ‘A lot of the people who came to his class had been injured—and damn it, he got all of us well,’ Ms. Minnelli, who worked with Mr. Faccuito for decades, said in a telephone interview on Friday. ‘I broke my back a few months ago. I’ve been doing “Luigi” every day, and I can walk and I can run because of that technique.’ ” The obit lists all of Luigi’s accomplishments, and then ends, “ ‘He was truly one of the great influences in my life,’ [Ms. Minnelli] said. ‘I made all my dancers that I worked with go to his class. Darling, if you watch Liza’s at the Palace’—her 2009 concert film—‘all those dancers are Luigi dancers.’ ”