DESPITE INTEREST IN TAP DANCE THERE IS AN INCOME BARRIER

Tap dancers, taught by Dianne Montgomery (bottom right), practice for the Toronto International Tap Dance Festival at Gotta Dance. pay for an MBA at Columbia. Instead, she moved to Toronto with her musician boyfriend to teach, choreograph and perform: “I haven’t looked back,” she says. “I genuinely have no regrets.”

Knights, meanwhile, grew up “in a household where I was told not to speak in slang, to pull up my pants and walk properly. I was taught to assimilate. And so I did my best, and I was accepted in a certain way, but dagnabbit, there’s this prevailing stereotype that I just adored — tap dance! Black people want little to do with Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, because he represents this minstrel era: this smile, and it’s demeaning.” But Knights wondered, “Why am I changing myself? It would be to assume that something that I’m doing is wrong.” He placated his parents by getting a business degree — and then used it to carve out a path as a tap entrepreneur.

Twenty-six-year-old Johnathan Morin, who along with Knights, Montgomery, and Cornell is presenting choreography at the festival, remembers being “a hyperactive kid” growing up in Edmonton, and adopting a thick skin to deal with racism — Morin is of mixed Cree, Metis, and Vietnamese heritage. His foster parents paid for dancing lessons to give him an outlet for his pent-up energy, and he would practice tap on a board on the family’s acreage, with no neighbours to complain about the noise. Tap dancing, he says, “has basically taught me everything from being on time to growing up and treating people properly.”

As for Cornell, she recalls being taken out of her dance programme when her family moved from Port Colborne, Ont., to Toronto in 1970: “I was left to my own devices in the Jane-Finch corridor at the age of 14. You became a street kid really fast, and you had to do all the things you had to do to survive. One of my best friends ended up in prison for 25 years, and he was a sweet, loving, kind, gentle person, but just was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it ruined his life. Two of my friends O.D.’d and died at 15. It was a very rough environment.” Being pulled back into dance, including tap, she says, nurtured her creativity: “It was a saviour for me.”

Later, she moved to New York and worked her way up in the world of modern dance to where she was offered a place with the legendary Merce Cunningham’s company. “I remember thinking, ‘I can’t do this because I don’t want to dance history.’ And because of that, I switched to tap.

“It’s odd to me that North America has almost dismissed tap dancing. ‘Tap dancing through life’ is considered doing nothing. Whenever I hear that phrase, I cringe, because I think, ‘You have no idea how powerful it is, how focused, and how integrative.’ I think it is the connector that we’ve lost — the ability to feel emotion through rhythm and time.”

Tap dance is unusual as an art form in that all of its dancers are musicians. Because of this, it’s difficult to get right: “With other dance styles,” says Morin, “there’s a lot more room for interpretation. If you have a dancer that might not be dancing in rhythm but they’re doing cool, entertaining things, it’s fine — but if they’re in tap, and it sounds bad, that’s bad.”

Tap works with many styles of music, too: American tap icon Savion Glover’s Broadway show Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk famously yanked tap into the hip-hop age, and it had a huge impact in revitalizing the field. Morin has crafted routines to hip-hop — he’s especially attracted to the work of the “old-school rappers with lots of rhythmical nuggets in their phrasing.”

For her part, Montgomery tap danced with Feist for a year on her Reminder tour, duetting with the indie singer-guitarist during the encore. “People would go bananas,” she recalls. “They would hoot and holler like they were at a revival. I was a little nervous at first about how a cool indie crowd might receive tap dance, but it was exceptionally well received every night.”

Ask any tap dancer how to make tap more popular again, and they’ll say it’s just a matter of exposure. After a full-length show that Montgomery choreographed this winter at Toronto’s Lula Lounge, accompanied by classically inflected jazz, she was mobbed by well-wishers, many of whom were new to tap and eager to find out where they could see more — or how to get lessons.

Montgomery’s work, and that of an emerging generation of passionate dancers and teachers, is breaking boundaries — her Toronto festival performance will be a multimedia work with animated projections and live music she wrote herself — and it’s creating a renewed enthusiasm among students. Her adult beginner classes are oversubscribed, as are those of other Toronto teachers. The film La La Land, too, has provided a bump in enrolment, just as Happy Feet did before it, for children.

These days, says Juliana Kelly, who teaches in Toronto’s suburbs, “I feel like it’s hitting a turning point. A lot of studios are starting to make tap more important.” Kelly encourages children as young as six to improvise. “I have students who immediately want to go take a bathroom break, because it’s scary, but I find introducing it to the kids younger makes a huge difference. My students coming up now love improvising; they want to do it all the time.”

But despite the burgeoning interest in tap dance, and its potential benefits, there remains an income barrier. Canada lacks the outreach tap programs for disadvantaged youth that exist in the U.S. “Dance classes are expensive,” acknowledges Morin. “We definitely need to open the discussion.”

For now, Toronto’s new festival is giving away tickets to lower-income families; the dancers know they need to build and expand their community — including spectators too. It’s one thing to find your voice, another for it to be heard. According to Knights, “There’s only one reason that I’ve seen the world, that I’ve been able to share myself with people, and that’s through tap dance. In the age of resurgence of protectionism, people are protecting their own communities and interests, and not venturing outside to communicate with the other. Tap dance is this meeting place where we can all agree on: 1, 2, dap-bap-ba-dee-dadum … It makes things simple.”