{
download_links:[
{
label:'MODS Bibliographic Record',
link: 'mods.xml',
meta: 'XML'
},
{
label:'METS Object Description',
link: 'mets.xml',
meta: 'XML'
}
]
}
Acia Gray [biography]
Dates: 1960-
Birth Date: Oct 18, 1960
Place of Birth: Meridian, Mississippi
Acia Gray, tap soloist, choreographer, and master teacher, was born into a musical family. Her father, a drummer, instilled early in her a deep sense of rhythm. After graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City, Gray deepened her studies in tap dance with veteran masters.
Her first membership in a company was Deborah Bray's company, Austin on Tap, founded in 1981. While the company gave Gray the opportunity to serve as dancer and company manager, it also stereotyped her dancing (from which she sought liberation that summer of 1989 in that class with Honi Coles.) "When I was with Austin on Tap, it was very much about how many tricks you could do or how long you could stand on your toes," said Gray. "Ninety percent of the time I was not only in men's clothes, I was in drag. I had a pencil mustache, and everything. For nine years I danced like that-- I had to look like that to do what I did [dancing as a hard hitter] but . . . a lot of it was trying too hard."
In the summer of 1989, Gray was chosen among twelve dancers to work with Charles Honi Coles in America's first creative residency for tap at the Colorado Dance Festival. This residency for Gray, who was a young modern dancer intent on finding a new approach to tap, was life-changing. While she remained a challenging tap hard-hitter, Coles instilled in her a concern for tone, texture, and a fluid body presentation that influenced her future choreography and performance. That same year, Gray and ballet-modern-jazz dancer Deirdre Strand founded the Austin, Texas-based company Tapestry, with the express purpose of presenting various dance forms by using and multiplying the genres of jazz, ballet, postmodern dance, and tap within a company. "Multi-formed" was Gray's term for describing the company that purposely mixed costumes, arm positions, and other signature elements. By doing so, they questioned the stereotypes that each genre presupposed, as well as the assumptions about how a given dance genre should look. Their Rhythmic Influences (ca. 1996) used three jazz dancers and three tap dancers in the same space, playing off each other in a way that would influence the other dancer. Staged so that the individual dancers were unaware of each other, the structure of the interplay made the influence of the rhythms subliminal. In My Funny Valentine, Tapestry dancers wore vintage bras and girdles or briefs, dyed red, and no shoes, jazz shoes, or tap shoes, depending on the choreography. "A company can't help reflect who you are," said Gray. "What is coming through my body, living through my body, is living through my company . . . and [yet] they don't dance like me."
Remaining true to teaching the history and technique of tap, Gray published The Souls of Our Feet: A Tap Dance Guide to Rhythm Explorers (1998). On film, she can be seen in the tap documentary The Class Act: The Magic of Honi Coles (1994), and the Lynn Dally-directed documentary Gotta Move: Women in Tap (2010). Since 2001, Gray has served as the Executive Artistic Director of The Soul to Sole Tap Festival in Austin, Texas, a yearly festival of tap master classes, workshops, tap jams, and performances. In 2002, Gray was inducted as a premiere member of the Austin Arts Hall of Fame and was nominated for a prestigious Alpert Award in the Arts, as well as being a choreographer chosen for the 2003 National Endowment for the Arts' National College Choreography Initiative. That initiative led to the touring work The Soles of Our Feet – A Celebration of American Tap Dance, funded by the NEA's American Masterpieces: Dance Initiative. In 2009, Gray became the Board President of the International Tap Association, prior to that, serving as a member of its Steering Committee. Gray has been honored with the "Legacy Award" by The Third Coast Rhythm Project'; the "Tapologist Award" by Tapology Tap Festival in Flint, Michigan; the 2008 "Texas Tap Legend Award" by the Dallas Dance Council, and the 2010 "Hoofer's Award" by The American Tap Dance Foundation.
The first time the avant-garde tap pioneer Brenda Bufalino saw Gray dance was in 1989, in a class with Honi Coles at the Colorado Dance Festival, and later wrote this impression of seeing the dancer was "Athletic, with short spiky hair; as determined as a prize fighter; and as hot as a fire cracker, who was as nonchalant as a crown prince, and as cool as a water fall." Gray's demonstrative, dramatic and emphatic hot and cool style continues to make her a much sought after performer, master teacher, and choreographer at tap festivals worldwide.
(Sources: Acia Gray, The Souls of Your Feet: A Tap Dance Guide to Rhythm Explorers (1998); Brenda Bufalino, "Brenda Bufalino Talks with Acia Gray and Debbie Mitchell," On Tap!, a publication of the International Tap Association (vol. 11, no. 4, November/December 2000, 13); Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]