If tap dancing conjures up visions of Fred and Ginger, or even Junior Showtime, think again.
Because Savion Glover’s syncopated, hard-hitting brand of tap has nothing in common with showbiz razzmatazz.
To Glover, who is considered to be the greatest tap dancer of his generation, tap is far more than mere entertainment; it is a percussive art form with unlimited scope for expression.
“I suppose you would describe my style as more musical versus show tap,” he says when we meet in New York, a couple of blocks from where he lives with his wife and son.
“I deal with more complex rhythmical patterns than a regular tap dancer. I even think in rhythms.”
Tap couldn’t have a better emissary. A charismatic man with dreadlocks, Glover, 35, has a warm, beatific smile befitting someone who would have been called Savior if his mother Yvette, a gospel and jazz singer, hadn’t decided it might not go down too well in New Jersey and settled for changing the last letter.
Glover was banging out rhythms on pots and pans as soon as he was big enough to drag them out of the kitchen cupboards.
Yvette whisked him off to music lessons, where he learnt the drums. By 7 he was in a band.
It was when the band played at a benefit concert at the Broadway Dance Centre that Glover first saw Lon Chaney — the tap dancer, not the actor — perform.
“I had no idea who he was,” Glover says, “but I was very turned on by what he was doing. I’d seen Fred Astaire, of course, but I’d never seen anything like this.
He had more rhythms going than I’d ever heard before — and that was with his feet!
“So I followed him into the dressing room. He’d heard me playing the drums and he said: ‘You ought to translate that to your feet and do dancing.’
The strange thing is that I didn’t know that my mum had already signed me and my two older brothers up for tap lessons.”
Glover made his Broadway debut when he was 11 in The Tap Dance Kid and went on to perform in the musical revue Black and Blue with Chaney and other veteran hoofers.
When dancer and choreographer Gregory Hines came to see the show, he was so impressed by Glover he gave him a role in his 1989 film Tap, which also featured Sammy Davis Jnr.
Hines became a father figure to Glover and they appeared in Jelly’s Last Jam, a Broadway musical about jazz legend Jelly Roll Morton.
By the time Jelly’s Last Jam closed, Glover was beginning to feel restless; he realised that musically, tap was stuck in a time warp.
“I was listening to hip hop, stuff with a funky bass line but I wasn’t dancing to it.
"And the generation before me, they weren’t dancing to the music they partied to either, stuff from the 1960s and 1970s.”
He took the opportunity to redress this in 1995 when he choreographed Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk. The dancing was loud and furious and blew away any preconceptions that tap had to revolve around spangles and smiley faces.
Glover, who also starred in the show, was immediately hailed as an extraordinary new talent and won a Tony Award for his choreography.
But if Glover is credited with redefining the art form, he is quick to acknowledge his debt to his predecessors, referring to them constantly throughout our conversation.
“I grew up watching Gregory Hines banging out rhythms like drum beats and Jimmy Slyde dancing these melodies, you know, bop-bah-be-do-bap, not just tap-tap-tap.
Everyone else was dancing in monotone but I could hear the hoofers in stereo and they influenced me to have this musical approach towards tap,” he says.
Glover is dedicated to raising the profile of tap and to that end has undertaken an eclectic range of projects, from the Spike Lee film Bamboozled to pop videos with P Diddy, and a five-year stint in Sesame Street.
He also, thanks to the wonders of motion capture, provided the exuberant footwork for Mumble, the toe-tapping penguin in the hit film Happy Feet.
“There’s a new generation that knows about tap dancing thanks to Happy Feet,” he says.
“Years ago, everybody knew about tap because of Shirley Temple. Now they know about it because of Mumble.”
By contrast, his recent stage performances, although inventive — he has danced to Bartok and Shostakovich and accompanied a gospel singer, for instance — are becoming increasingly pared down.
