They DID that!!!
It took me about 15 seconds in to realize what was happening in this vid, but the second I did, I legit came. This is⊠I got chills and got so much validation for my theories about tap and pretty much any genre of music hereâŠ
Tap is probably one of the dance styles that gets the least amount of credit four how badass it is
Holy hell-
Sorry I donât get it?
Theyâre tap dancing, a kind of dancing typically associated with being old-fashioned and kind of silly. Personally, even tap dancing to old music is awesome in my eyes, but this is on a totally new and exciting level
The thing about tap is that itâs so often seen as a fancy, old-fashioned dainty dance that only posh (and generally white) people do in tuxedos but it didnât used to be the case.
Way back in the early days, it was where black performers in Vaudeville were legendary for it in Jazz and Jive routines. At about 1:37, this is where the Nicholas brothers go off.
Itâs such an expressive and joyful kind of dance and matches so well with hip hop beats and rhythm, which is why the modern reworking of it is so awesome.
Im sure a lot of people also watch the op video and they assume that âclapâ sound is part of the music just because a LOT of modern music samples that sound and in some music it is just the sound of hands clapping, but no that is a sound being made by all their shoes at once.
one of my favorite syncopated ladies routines
Has the world forgotten Gregory Hines?
I am gritting my teeth at the mere suggestion that tap is primarily associated with dainty white people.
Tap is a distinctive American art form that comes from a blending of African dance traditions with Irish dance traditions. It was developed by Black and white dancers and came up alongside and deeply entwined with jazz.
Certainly the tap that ends up in musical theater often seems old-fashioned and white but thatâs a musical theater issue, not a tap issue. That is only one small part of tap, which continues to have a strong African-American tradition.
The Nicholas Brothers, above, are in a clip from the film Stormy Weather, which has an almost entirely African-American cast. Some of the other scenes in the film include Bill âBojanglesâ Robinson, one of the greatest tap artists of all time. He was very well-known generally and was in quite a few Shirley Temple movies in his day. (Shirley Temple, herself, was a tap dancer â which Iâll be real is probably contributing to people thinking itâs old-fashioned and white, because itâs easy to forget the Black man dancing alongside her, I guess.)
Hereâs Bill Robinson with Cab Calloway in Stormy Weather â heâs performing a variation of his famous âstair danceâ in parts of this clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY3fbvBRiaM
Hereâs probably the most widely famous version of the âstair danceâ, from The Little Colonel:
Thereâve been a lot of white tap dancers through the years â see, for example, everyoneâs favorite clip of two men torturing a speech therapist:
⊠but a lot of its most famous practitioners have been Black and itâs weird to me that people donât know that.
Have a scene from Tap (1989).
A lot of talent happening here! Plus I always have to stop everything and watch the Nicholas Brothers near defy gravity in the stormy weather routine because itâs just as fantastic every single time! đ
This is such a fun thread. Particularly with the Syncopated Ladies, to me there's an obvious aesthetic relationship to Stepping, a dance/performance form that I associate mostly with the Divine Nine Black Greek organizations at US universities. (For the non-USAmericans: that's Greek as in greek letter sororities/fraternities at US universities, not as in, you know, Greece.) I sort of assume the Syncopated Ladies took some inspiration from Stepping, but then I also assume Stepping must take some of its influence from historic Black percussive dance forms, including tap. But I don't know much about this stuff. I saw a step show once and it gave me chills. It was just. So freaking cool.
