• Performing Arts Databases Home

Tap Happenings 1969 / Charles "Chuck" Green [challenge dance]

Title

Tap Happenings 1969 [Challenge Dance]

Performers

Green, Charles "Chuck"

Chaney, Lon

Big Rhythm Red

Sims, Howard "Sandman"

Kaalund, Raymond

Bert and Sandra Gibso

Published/Created

1969-04-07

Genre

Challenge Dance

Abstract

March 16, 1969, Leticia Jay sent out mimeographed letters to leading dance figures in New York announcing her Tap Happening on the four Mondays in April at the Bert Wheeler Theatre in the Hotel Dixie on West 43rd Street off Broadway. She invited everyone to participate in a second-half tap challenge, a traditional ad lib tap jam session in which all comers could show their steps and vie for stature with the assembled group of masters.

These performances at the Bert Wheeler Theatre in midtown Manhattan, West 43rd Street, in the basement of the Hotel Dixie, showcased the Hoofers--also called New York Hoofers and Original Hoofers--a tap fraternity organized around 1966.

Organized by Chuck Green and Leticia Jay, an East Indian dancer specializing in so-called primitive dance, a friend of Green's who had the resources, funds, and producing skills to organize the Tap Happenings as a preservation of rhythm tap dancing.

Jerry Ames (the only white tap dancer invited to be a member of the "company") states the following original members of Tap Happening: Jerry Ames, Lon Chaney, Chuck Green, Raymond Kaalund, Rhythm Red, Sandman Sims, Jimmy Slyde, Tony White, and Derby Wilson.

Other performers included Bert and Sandra Gibson, and Letitia Jay (who is the show's "coordinator").

The dates of the Tap Happenings were approximately April 14, 21, 28, May 5, 12

"Tap dancing isn't the art of walking raised to baroque magnificence (wrote the New York Times, April 15), any more that a cathedral is a glorified rock, but it is jazz music exhilaratingly translated from the abstract into concrete form. The offspring of the marriage of jazz and the old clog dances, tap-dancing has long been hounded by irony. When it was a staple in vaudeville, it was taken for granted as just another example of those picturesque gifts Negroes are born into. It was fun to watch, and taking lessons at the age of eight was the thing to do. Then, twenty years ago, it went underground, and almost automatically it became an art whose proponents were celebrated by being offered jobs as bellhops and elevator men. But this art survives, and every so often it surfaces. For the past four or five Monday nights, ten or so dancers have been gathering at the Bert Wheeler Theatre in the Hotel Dixie on West Forty-third Street. Present tonight were Chuck Green (around whom the evening is loosely built), Lon Chaney, Big Rhythm Red, Sandman Sims, Raymond Kaalund, Bert and Sandra Gibson, Letitia Jay (who is the show's "coordinator"), and two younger dancers, Jimmy Slyde and Jerry Ames. It was a funny and jumbled evening. Miss Jay and Sandra Gibson lumbered on and off the stage, Derby Wilson (a retired dancer) told vaudeville jokes ("I just saw a cross-eyed woman tell a knock-kneed man to go straight home"), Green reminisced, and the accompanists--a pianist and drummer, augmented midway by the trombonist Matthew Gee--often operated on their own rhythmic frequency.

In the first half of the evening, Kaalund, wearing a rumpled felt hat pulled down over his ears, did a drunken, barely audible soft-shoe. His shoulders, his stomach, and his feet all went in different directions, and he looked as if he were dancing against a high wind. Sandman Sims placed a low, circular platform on the stage and, sprinkling sand on it, did the Sand, his body bent and his feet scraping slowly around and around and producing sounds that fell somewhere between wire brushes and a steam engine starting up on wet tracks. The second half of the program was a simulated "cutting contest" in which Chaney, Sims, Rhythm Red, Ames, Green, Slyde, Gibson, and Kaalund each took several solo choruses, some accompanied and some not. Chaney began with paddle and roll, which was full of heavy Baby Laurence steps, terrific kicks, and two-ton slides. He was followed by Kaalund, simultaneously dancing and skipping rope. Ames, who is a Donald O'Connor-Gene Kelly type of dancer, floated back and forth across the stage, throwing in flamencan steps and ballroom-dancing spins. Rhythm Red, an enormous, graceful man, was followed by Gibson, who did complex "wing" steps, and by Sims, whose legs at one point resembled calipers being quickly opened and closed. Jimmy Slyde has learned from Bunny Briggs and Baby Laurence, and he whipped around the stage like lightning, demonstrating great speed but no real style. Then Chuck Green, a tall, Lincoln-like man, pulled the rug deftly and simply out from under his colleagues with two slow, staccato choruses of blues; each step was crystal clear, his rhythms were locked perfectly in place, and his movements were effortless as air. Baby Laurence, who is probably the best living tap dancer, considers Green the best dancer he has ever seen. Go and see for yourself.

Source

Balliett, Whitney: Collected Works : A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000. St. MartinÕs Press (2000).

Ames, Jerry, and Jim Siegelman: The Book of Tap: Recovering America's Long Lost Dance. New York: D. McKay Co. (1977).

Last Updated: 12-16-2015