Festival is hoping to tap into new energy
Three-day event is trying to put the dance form on the mainstream’s radar
If smooth-as-silk tap dance superstar Gregory Hines were alive today there’s a good chance, even at age 71, he’d be gracing the stage of Harbourfront Centre’s Fleck Dance Theatre on Saturday night, performing on the custom-made touring floor Hines insisted on using because it generated the best sound.
After all, Canada had a special place in Hines’ heart. He was engaged to a Canadian, now also deceased, and the couple rest beside each other in an Oakville cemetery. Now, the honour of dancing on that same portable floor, fortuitously preserved and specially lent for the occasion, goes to another tap great, Hines’ friend and colleague Ted Louis Levy.
“If I mess up, I won’t be able to blame it on the floor,” says the 57year-old Emmy Award-winning tapper.
Levy’s performance Singin’ and Swingin’, with trumpeter Josh Grossman’s 18-piece Toronto Jazz Orchestra providing the classic tunes, is one of the headline attractions of the first Toronto International Tap Dance Festival. It’s a three-day event that includes performances, workshops and, on Sunday evening, an all-are-welcome jam session in the Brigantine Room.
The festival is a dream come true for local tap artist Allison Toffan, whose company, Toffan Rhythm Projects, is co-producing it with Harbourfront Centre.
There’s no shortage of tap dance talent in Canada and abroad, or of tap festivals and competitions. Such events have served as a means for tap to survive, but they’re generally off the mainstream dance world’s radar.
Toffan’s goal, then, is ambitious. She hopes to trigger a revival of broad public interest in tap by showing that it’s a constantly evolving form with a bright future. That’s why Toffan has commissioned work from a new generation of tappers to be featured alongside Levy and another tap luminary, New York-based Canadian Heather Cornell. As Toffan explains, Levy and Cornell, whose program is featured Friday night, represent opposite ends of the spectrum of tap dance in style and use of music.
“You’ll see things you never dreamed possible in tap,” Toffan says. “Tap is not just one thing. There’s such richness in the form that people don’t know about. My goal is to change that.”
Travis Knights, 33, is among the younger generation of Canadian tap artists performing in the festival. He says that just as jazz music, which historically has a symbiotic relationship with tap, has evolved into new, progressive styles, so too has tap.
“Forget the popular stereotypes. There’s so much diversity within the tap-dance community,” Knights says. “Some people say tap is a dying art form. They couldn’t be further from the truth. This festival is all about exposing and celebrating where tap has been and where it’s going.”
As American author and critic Brian Seibert describes in his exhaustively researched What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing, the form, with roots in the late 19th century, experienced a golden age from the 1920s into the ’50s. It was not until the ’70s that tap enjoyed a modest revival.
In Toronto, the pioneering National Tap Dance Company, co-founded in1977 by Steve Dymond and master tapper, the late William Orlowski, enjoyed considerable success but gradually slipped from view.
Part of the challenge for the standard-bearers of today, such as Toffan, is the lack of presenters and the difficulty of attracting the kind of public funding available to other theatrical dance forms. Toffan admits that her original plans for what she hopes will become a biennial festival had to be scaled back a bit.
“Tap is a truly Indigenous North American art form,” Toffan says. “It deserves to be celebrated.”
“Allison is a phenomenal powerhouse,” Knights says. “She got the funding. She’s made it happen.”
Toffan didn’t come to the task cold turkey. In November 2015, she teamed up with the Toronto Jazz Orchestra for the Big Band Tap Revue and scored a coup by getting Levy to direct it. He was so impressed it took little persuading to get him to return.
Says Levy: “We need people like Allison, with her imagination, dedication and vision. I’m so proud of what these young people are doing and am just grateful to be a part of it.” The Toronto International Tap Dance Festival is at Harbourfront Centre’s Fleck Dance Theatre and Brigantine Room, 235 Queens Quay W., Friday to Sunday. See harbourfrontcentre.com/nextsteps or call 416-973-4000.