HANK SMITH.

HANK SMITH DIXON PLACE OCTOBER 16-31, 1998

Tapping isn't about musical expression only. It's also about ideas made physical. Which ideas? Protest, for one. For another, faith. As David Pleasant, the body percussionist, explained on program three of tapper and teacher Hank Smith's The Story of Tap, an imaginative six-part series of interviews and performances with tap dancers, African Americans took up stamping, clapping, and stepping, often accompanied by singing, in the mid-1800s after whites had banned their drums. Their Caribbean rhythms would make the church floors shake; the ground had replaced the drum. As had the body. For when Pleasant began slapping out rhythms with his hands against his chest and legs, not only the hands but also the body rebounded, as if surging semaphorically with strength. And anger is, or can be, a kind of strength.

Smith's series took shape as a resolutely informal talkathon, pausing for live tapping and film footage, with dancers of different traditions, from Irish step dancer Josephine McNamara, gamine and nervy, to amiably improper Bostonian Dianne Walker. Unlike the darling spectacle of twenty-five cued gains hitting the stage, or even the lone soloist paltering hopefully in an engulfing proscenium theater, Smith's version of tap instead insisted that the art be intimate (and improvisational). That came as a relief. Dixon Place--dark, low-ceilinged, and lush with bric-a-brac (only on the very last night did I notice a bulbous, furry black toy spider perched on a nearby rafter)--evokes a basement rec room crossed with the subway. This downtown venue playfully squeezes audience and artist together into a temporary friendship.

It was easy to wish for longer programs. For, like real-life conversations, Smith's interviews of the dancers tended to ramble, sometimes charmingly. For instance, when he was showing us vintage home movies of Harlem's legendary dance halls and theaters of the forties, while also hosting guests Buster Brown and Marion Coles, Smith mentioned a local landmark known as the Tree of Hope, where dancers in Harlem would linger, seeking good luck in getting gigs. And, in an unexpected aside on another night, Smith's guest, Tina Pratt, confessed that in her youth as a dancer in New York City, she much preferred stripping to tapping. Why? Because the stripper's hair remained unmussed and her makeup fresh. (Tap's ordinary acrobatics were rough on a lady.)

Pleasant's evening was outstanding, a mixture of bravado, American history, musicology, greased vocal noodling, and virtuoso flagellation of the man and the floor. Walker, an indescribably sophisticated soloist, turned out to favor talking and the shim-sham over solo sporting on her program. Her stories of the path to "woo-woo, wow-wow" stardom (after a childhood bout with polio led her to dance mainly as a therapy) were enthralling. Still, it was hard not to want to see--and hear--more talking and thinking by the feet alone.

I walked away from the series with a rare sense of having eavesdropped on something real, rather than having stored at something staged. And Smith was largely responsible. For the gangly, affable, wide-eyed master of ceremonies (and frequent dance partner of his invitees) never stood on ceremony with us.