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Lane Alexander [biography]
Dates: 1960-
Birth Date: Mar 24, 1960
Place of Birth: Fort Worth, TX
Lane Alexander, tap dancer, choreographer, teacher, and founder of one of the longest-running tap organizations in the country, was born in Fort Worth, Texas, his mother a jazz vocalist, father a trumpet player, and step-father a jazz drummer. He remembers his mother "threw me into a tap class when I was eight years old for eight months." Moving from El Paso to Atlanta, Georgia, and not wanting to be the only boy in a dance class, he took up drumming and continued with his study of percussion through high school in San Antonio, Texas. Not until he was enrolled in the University of Austin as a pre-law major, working at the law library but every night going out dancing, did he quit school and return to dance. In San Antonio, he studied with Susan Beale Connolly, who had studied with Tommy Tune and had performed at Radio City Music Hall as a Rockette and with the Boston Ballet. Her tap instructors gave Alexander a solid foundation in the basics. Connolly also told Alexander that he could have a career, at age twenty-three, as a dancer. So, in 1983, after working in Toronto with Bill Orlowski, a protégé of Paul Draper who directed the National Tap Dance Company of Canada, Alexander moved to Chicago to study jazz dance with master teacher Gus Giordano, and he never left. His first tap festival "eye opener" was Jan Corbett's Portland Tap Festival (9-22 July 1989, Portland, Oregon) where he studied with Eddie Brown, Honi Coles, and Dianne Walker, and that is when he decided to return to Chicago and start a festival His decision led to the dance workshop in Evanstown, the performance at Northwestern, and some new possibilities.
By 1991, Alexander's synergistic human rhythm/social activism project was brought to fruition with Tap Exchange (23 February 1991), another gathering of Chicago dance artists. By 1993, the Chicago Human Rhythm Project was produced in collaboration with Northeastern University's Dance Program and featured Chicago dancers Bobby Rubenstein, the Time Steppers, Leela Petronio, the Najwa Dance Corps, and the Trinity Irish Dancers. By 1994, Chicago's 4th Annual Human Rhythm Project featured Chicago artists am/FM, the Especially Tap Company, Stepping Out, Gus Giordano Jazz Dance, and Idella Reed, withy special guests Lynn Dally, Dean Diggans, Ted Levy, Lloyd Storie, Robert Reed, Donna Peckett, Jan Feager, and Tapsichore.
The Chicago Human Rhythm Project has also been one of the first organizations to focus on international tap dancers, thus continuing to build bridges between diverse communities of dancers and audience members by preserving traditional tap choreography and by creating new work through local, national, and international collaborations.
[Sources: Interview, Lane Alexander with Constance Valis Hill, 4 August 2006, Chicago; telephone interview with author, 30 June 2009; Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]