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Margaret Morrison [biography]
Dates: 1961-
Birth Date: Dec 24, 1961
Place of Birth: Los Angeles, California
Margaret Morrison, tap dancer, choreographer, teacher, and scholar, who has been singled out as a feather-footed and musically astute dancer, was born into in a secular Jewish middle-class family of doctors, professors, psychoanalysts, and businessmen. She discovered dance in Vienna, Austria at age ten, when she saw a televised telecast of the Saddlers Wells Royal Ballet, with Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fontaine. She returned to California, to Golden's School of Dance in Van Nuys, for a class of twenty minutes each of ballet, tap, and tumbling, which led to serious study with Natalia Claire at the Ballet La Jeuness in Taluca Lake. After seeing the Broadway production of A Chorus Line in 1976, she returned home to study jazz and tap dance. She returned to New York to attend Barnard College, where she majored in English Literature while studying modern dance, discovering that "the only time I was truly happy was when I was in a dance class."
In 1981, Morrison walked into Brenda Bufalino's tap class at Fazil's dance studio and announced her intentions to buy high-heeled Capezio t-straped tap shoes, and was promptly ordered to buy the low-heeled K360s. Morrison progressed in Bufalino's Advanced tap class and in 1986 found herself as one of the original members of Bufalino's American Tap Dance Orchestra. From 1981, when she first studied with Bufalino, to the mid 1990s, with the slow dissolution of the company, says Morrison, "I was an instrument of Brenda's artistic vision. I was the material in her hands." Her solo to Hoagy Carmichael's "How Little We Know," in Bufalino's mastork American Landscape, was cited as "a tour de force for a quietly exciting virtuoso dancer"; and her duet with Robin Tribble, to Carmichael's "New Orleans," in that production, was "full of casual . . . and sly exchanges of looks and conversational commentary by chattering feet."
It was only after the dissolution of ATDO, and Woodpeckers, ATDO's home and teaching base, closed in 1995, that Morrison began to distinguish herself as a rhythm-tap soloist. She began a collaboration with the Haitian dancer Tandu Lett, who played shekere and taught her stepping as body percussion. In 1997, her first one-woman show, Solo Tap Adventures, at the Gowanus Arts Exchange in Brooklyn was a full-evening's outpouring in which she danced to Thelonious Monk's "Eronel" and "Round Midnight," arranged in 6/8 time. Also on the program was Fives and Sixes, to a score by the percussionist Robin Burdulis playing the African udu drum, a round clay pot with a narrow opening to the side, resembling, said Morrison, a womb: "I tapped in shoes with no taps on them, so it was leather against wood, which gave it a very soft and watery percussive sound."
Morrison has continued her solo career, as well as a stellar career as a teacher that has expanded into scholarly research into the history of women in tap, fully acknowledging the complexities of this American vernacular dance form. "At a very early point I had this awareness of tap dance as an art form that was simple and very happy," Morrison reflected, "but it is also at the intersection of race and sexuality in America. So this very simple, happy-go-lucky art form is actually in this hotbed of conflicts that represent our nation-- and that fascinates me, that it is much deeper than it appears."
[Source: Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]