Bring in the tap.

The roots of tap dancing are as subtle as spoon-banging, foot-stomping food fights with accompanying din. To recapture the spontaneous irreverence of that primal form, contemporary choreographers in Australia, England, and the United States have dodged the sophisticated blandishments of mirror-bright patent leather shoes and satin lapels to get down to the loud, funny, innocent, and roughhousing spirit of the founders.

Tap dance, like all folk dancing, just happens among folks who like to express themselves by dancing without the benefit of instruction or rules--they make it up as they go along. Its originators are among that glorious but unknown elite collectively identified as "Anon."

One thing is known: Today's synthesizers of jazz tap can arouse those unruly impulses we regularly suppress in the name of civilized behavior. We recognize, sympathize with, and take pleasure in the insouciant attitudes--earthy, funny, improvisatory, disdainful of convention. The energy and high spirits inherited from those unknown originators are available to contemporary audiences at Broadway's Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk; off-Broadway's Tap Dogs; and Stomp (now on tour in Los Angeles).

Bring in 'da Noise started below Fourteenth Street, moved uptown to Broadway, and won every major award the theater community has to bestow on a successful show, including an unprecedented Astaire Award for both best choreographer and best male dancer for its star, Savion Glover. The main force behind the show is his passion and admiration for those hard-driving buck dancers who worked close to the floor, flat-footed, with exclusive emphasis on the legs, before the modern use of the upper body.

Part and parcel of the down-to-earth tapping are the back-to-basics work-clothes costuming and improvised musical instruments. Empty plastic compound containers replace the usual elaborate set of traps. A particularly inventive use of household kitchen pots and pans, including a wok on the butt in one number, supplies a wonderfuly varied array of sounding surfaces for raucous drumming. The improvised look of the instruments underlines the witty energy of the two virtuoso percussionists, Jared "J.R." Crawford and Raymond King, who make music with whatever comes to hand.

Unlike the other productions, Bring in 'da Noise has an agenda: It suggests that Hollywood had plotted to suppress the origins of jazz tap. To imagine that the schlockmeisters who headed the major movie studios had any goal other than profits is a real stretch; they thought that the public wanted escape in spectacle, flash, and romance, and they gave it to them. As much as I liked the flexed-knee-forward, tipped-torso dancing of the show, I didn't respond to its dismissive send-ups of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson or the Nicholas Brothers, among others. Let's face it: National Tap Dance Day is celebrated on Robinson's birthday; he's not a disposable dead end but an important part of the evolution of the form.

Dein Perry's Tap Dogs is hard-hat tap with an amplified vengeance. The set looks like a construction site and is almost as noisy. At one point it even creates a fireworks display of sparks when grinding wheels are applied to metal plates. Again the materials at hand become the tools of the tap trade with a belligerent elegance of their own. The shoes look as if they could endure all-weather exposure and come back for more. The clothing has the rough-textured finish appropriate to hard work, as do the performers themselves. They slam through routines, sweating prodigiously and giving signs of satisfaction that one might see on a sports field after a team scores. Good theatrical manners have no place in this presentation, but unadorned technique is in abundance.

Once the audience has become accustomed to the slam-bang approach of Tap Dogs, the dancers smilingly bring on buckets of water. Water plays such a significant part in the proceedings that the first three rows are provided with hooded yellow slickers to ward off the overflow. For the anticipated big splash, the dancers don knee-high boots. Starting slowly and carefully, they accelerate in enthusiastic trough splashing, and eventually everyone gets as happily soaked as Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain. Kid stuff, yes, but such delightful wallowing in forbidden pleasures evokes audience envy.

Stomp, created by Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas, started on street corners and evolved out of the buskers' open-air entertainments familiar to English theatergoers. Its instrument-props are raw, stiff-bristled wooden push brooms, various lengths of rubber tubing, boxes of wooden matches, and garbage cans. The can lids become the largest cymbals ever seen, especially enjoyable when used in pat-a-cake sequences. The cans themselves are hammered on, stroked, and bumped to produce an ear-assaulting din. The broom handles and brushheads hammer out a variety of rhythms. Amazingly, some are quite delicate. Costuming is East Village chic; the decor street signs, automobile hubcaps, and household appliances. The fascination comes from the ingenious use of everyday objects in a variety of unanticipated ways and the obvious good humor of involving the audience in rhythmic responses.

What saves all of this activity from mere frivolousness is the galumphing enjoyment of sophisticated skills in raw settings. This type of activity is obviously the root of theatrical tap dancing, much as everyday conversation provides the materials that feed into poetry. One really wouldn't want to substitute the everyday poetry of slang for Shakespeare, but they are related, and we enjoy and need both. We enjoy being reminded of tap's humble beginnings as much as we enjoy the early pages in the family photograph album. K

Don McDonagh is a contributing editor of Dance Magazine.