Welcome to Tap Dance Land
Andrew Nemr brings tap forward by embracing the form’s joyful, yet painful, history
Andrew Nemr, artistic and executive director of Vancouver Tap Dance
Society, is dedicated to conveying the joyful, yet painful, history of tap to the next generation. He believes a comprehensive understanding of the historical roots in slavery and minstrelsy, and the multiple identities within the community, is just as important as mastering the steps.
Andrew Nemr, artistic and executive director of the Vancouver Tap Dance Society, or VanTap as it’s popularly known, offers some sage advice: “Just dance from your heart.” He’s devoted to bringing people together, audiences and artists alike, to what he calls “tap dance land.”
Nemr says that being part of a place like VanTap, where “people work, with some stability, so you can witness the things that happen when lightbulbs come on,” has always been a dream. Only a handful of tap organizations globally do what VanTap does, he says. Its umbrella structure covers a lot of ground.
“You have education in the form of an academy, a performance ensemble (youth/professional), community gatherings during the festival and a space, so you’re not bouncing around from one place to another.” This year, the annual Vancouver International Tap Dance Festival is scheduled for August, with its slate of performances, classes and training. But because of the COVID-19 crisis, Nemr says the festival has been reimagined. “The key loss is the interactions,” he says, about the festival that likely won’t take place in person.
Despite this setback, Nemr is well placed to bring the practice forward. He embraces the need to convey history to future generations. “Everything about tap dance land is about people. That’s the cornerstone tenet of an oral tradition,” he says. He also explains that before he starts teaching any steps, he tries to generate an image of someone like Jimmy Slyde, the famous American tap dancer. He’ll convey the essence of the man’s personality, his physicality, and then get into the steps. “When someone attaches their imagination to a physical practice, they have a closed loop. So, every time they do this practice, they will think about this person, and then the step comes to life. All I’m looking for is that life,” he says.
As I heard Dianne “Lady Di” Walker once explain, the crop of tap dancers of Nemr’s generation isn’t so much “repaying the debt” to the old hoofers, but rather, “It’s more about sharing the joy and the rich history.” The comprehensive understanding of this history is part of Nemr’s lifeblood and is “not separate from the mechanics,” he indicates.
Many dance scholars note that tap has complex, varied traditions stemming back to the African slave trade, bringing experiences of people of African descent, and their means of survival, to the fore. Tap also reflects Afro-Irish fusions, including Irish jigs, step dancing and Appalachian clogging, that evolved in early American society. Nemr acknowledges that the tap dance community is a microcosm of “joy and pain,” with its historical roots in slavery and minstrelsy, and the multiple identities within the community. “I’ve learned that if there is anyone who has experienced pain, you have to honour the pain … and find a common salutation that is inclusive and not divisive,” says Nemr.
Vancouver is an interesting city to be thinking about these things, according to Nemr, especially with all that’s happening around Reconciliation with First Nations. “They’re modelling how we go forward based on the ways that we’ve been interacting,” he says. Nemr questions how striking that balance shows up in cultural forms, like tap, that advocate improvisation and individual voice but also have rich historical traditions that nobody wants to see vanish or be cut off from. “There are challenges when those gatekeepers can’t see past the pain of their experiences or the feeling that something has been stolen. There’s a loss of the possibility that comes from people who just fall in love with the craft and the expansion that their voice could give to the craft, benefiting the entire community,” he says. “Tap has the power to bring so many people together.”
Edmonton-born Nemr started tap dancing as a three-anda-half-year-old. The appeal was simple, although he perhaps didn’t articulate it so precisely as a preschooler. “It’s my way of expressing myself,” he says. His first gig in dinner theatre occurred when he was seven. Then, two years later, he saw the 1989 movie Tap and was enthralled by what he saw onscreen. He describes the climactic “challenge” scene, an homage to old-time dancers like Howard Sims, Bunny Briggs, Harold Nicholas and Arthur Duncan: “One by one, all the old cats come out to show Gregory Hines how it really works. Their styles are physically different, mechanically, physically, audibly. At the end of the scene, [Hines] goes one-on-one with Sammy [Davis Jr.]. There was something about their interaction that made me want to be part of relating in this way,” he says.
His sense of self at that early age was out of sync with his peers. “I was unathletic, pudgy, not the popular one, but intellectually astute.” While he loved dancing, he was not
“the fast, strong dancer,” he says. With arduous practice and devotion to the craft, he made the transition from dance school kid to youth tap ensemble to learning and working with some of the greats in tap and being welcomed into a long line of unforgettable tradition. Hooked on the style and the knowledge shared by a master of the old vanguard like Slyde, innovator
EVERYTHING ABOUT TAP DANCE LAND IS ABOUT PEOPLE. THAT’S THE CORNERSTONE TENET OF AN ORAL TRADITION
~Nemr
Savion Glover or mentor Hines, Nemr says that tap, and the people he met through it, was life changing.
Nemr’s parents were highly supportive of his dancing ambitions. When he was three years old, the family settled in Alexandria, Virginia. They would regularly drive five hours up and down the coast to New York, the tap mecca, clocking thousands of miles. When work took the family north to New Jersey, Nemr attended a science and technology high school and then studied computer animation for film special effects in college. “My parents allowed me to go to art school as a backup to an arts career,” he says, chuckling. Watching Nemr dance, you can see he’s a virtuosic percussionist. “The artistic journey is not easy. For a dancer, we’re putting our bodies on the line. Staying rooted to who you are meant to be and allowing your voice to do what it’s supposed to do in the world is really important,” he says.
Nemr’s artistic journey landed him a job dancing with
Glover. He was a core member of Glover’s dance posse, performing in his earliest pieces, and then became part of Glover’s first mixed-race company, Ti Dii. Later, Nemr broadened his artistry and founded his own New York-based tap dance company, Cats Paying Dues, in 2005. He also directs the Tap Dance Freedom education platform and co-founded the Tap Legacy Foundation, Inc., along with Hines.
A distinguishing aspect of his burgeoning career is that he has been a mainstay on the TED Talks circuit, with several of his highly accessible talks online. His onstage magnetism and intelligence demonstrate that he is a leader in revitalizing the domain of percussive tap dance. “TED is an amazing platform,” he states enthusiastically. Back in 2010, he found himself looking for possible fellowships that might suit his interests and came upon the TED Fellowship. He knew little about the TED universe but decided to submit the necessary paperwork. Two months later, after a series of interviews, he was accepted. “The TED community is one that is quite unique in its breadth and scope,” he says. “If you’re in, you’re in, and they trust you implicitly.”
Nemr has spent a lot of time around tap dancers who have felt misunderstood. During one of his TED Talks, he speaks, like the educator he is, about his outsider status with relation to tap and tells his audience that none of his history pointed to tap nor did he have the cultural disposition to tap. Nemr, now forty, comes from an immigrant Lebanese family. His parents speak Arabic, though his first language is English. “As an immigrant, you’re always attempting to navigate and translate experiences,” he says. He found that tap audiences were not really understanding the artist’s process, or dancers were not effectively communicating their passion for the form. So, he’s compelled to be an inveterate translator. “I spent a lot of time thinking about the value of words and language. I think of my dancing as just another language,” he says. If he first can’t say it with his feet, he then says it with words: “Whatever gets the point across.”
Sommaire
Andrew Nemr, directeur artistique et général de la Vancouver Tap Dance Society, communément appelé VanTap, offre un conseil très sage: « Danser simplement du coeur ». Il se consacre à rassembler les gens, artistes autant que publics, à ce qu’il nomme « le pays de la claquette ». Après avoir dansé dans les premières oeuvres de Savion Glover, et ensuite s’être joint à sa première compagnie de race mixte, Ti Dii, Nemr met sur pied sa propre compagnie de claquette à New York, Cats Paying Dues. Il a aussi été à la direction de la plateforme d’enseignement Tap Dance Freedom, et cofondateur de la Tap Legacy Foundation, Inc. avec Gregory Hines. C’est avec dévotion que Nemr partage l’histoire joyeuse et aussi douloureuse de la claquette aux nouvelles générations. Selon lui, il est tout aussi important de comprendre l’histoire de la forme dans l’esclavage et le minstrelsy que de maitriser la technique. Malheureusement, la prochaine édition du Vancouver International Tap Dance Festival, présenté par VanTap et prévu pour le mois d’aout, sera probablement annulée en raison de la crise de la COVID-19.