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• Cartier Williams

From:

• Performing Arts Encyclopedia
• Tap Dance America

Dates: 1989-
Birth Date: Sep 1, 1989

Place of Birth: Washington, D.C.

Cartier Williams, tap dance prodigy who became one of the virtuoso dancers of his generation, was born Cartier Anthony Williams in Washington, D.C., raised by his mother Aleicia Williams and grandmother Audrey Williams, a tap dancer who helped her grandson master basic tap steps. Growing up in Southwest Washington's Highlands, he began dancing street style at the age of four during family gatherings. He was first inspired by tap dance after watching Gregory Hines in the Broadway musical Jelly's Last Jam (1992) and was intuitively attracted to a style he would assimilate as his own. "When his feet hit the floor in the morning, he would tap to the bathroom," his grandmother recalled; his mother remembered that she could not get her son's tap shoes off his feet until he was asleep. He began his formal dance training with the Tap America Project and Washington School of Ballet, where he spent four years sharpening his technique. By age six, as a first grader, he competed in the Kids' Amateur Night competition at New York's Apollo Theatre, and won.

At the age of eight, Williams saw the tap virtuoso Savion Glover perform; he became so enthralled he would not leave the auditorium at intermission. He soon found himself in a master class taught by Glover, who told Aleicia Williams that her son did not need to be in a tap dance school; he invited Williams to go to New York to jam and rehearse with him-- and that he did. Williams traveled to New York City twice a month to dance with Glover, who nicknamed him "Big Coop," meaning hot shot who, in the most confining of spaces, could lay out a tantalizing array of rhythms. Glover subsequently engaged Williams in a number of high-profile performances-- An Evening of Dance at the White House (1998) with Glover and veteran master Jimmy Slyde; performances with Glover's tap company NYOTs (Not Your Ordinary Tappers); and appearances at Jacob's Pillow with Glover, Slyde, Buster Brown, and Dianne Walker, which led to a thirty-one city tour of Savion Glover's Footnotes: The Concert. By the end of 1999, after appearing in the ENCORES! Production of Babes in Arms at New York's City Center (a restaging of the 1937 Broadway musical staged by George Balanchine and starring the Nicholas Brothers, Fayard and Harold), Washingtonian Magazine named Williams as one of the "100 People To Watch" who have the brains, talent, and drive to make a difference.

The millennium brought success and notoriety to Williams. In 2000 he appeared as "Lil Nigger Jim" in Bamboozled, a satirical film written and directed by Spike Lee (starring Savion Glover and Tommy Davison) about a modern televised minstrel show featuring black actors donning blackface makeup and the violent fallout from the show's success. In 2001 he was featured dancer in 21 Below! The World's Best Tap Dancers Aged 21 & Under, produced by the New York Committee to Celebrate National Tap Dance Day and presented at New York City's Town Hall. In 2002, at age thirteen, Williams joined the touring production of the Broadway musical Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk, directed by George C. Wolfe and choreographed by and starring Savion Glover; Williams took on the roll of ‘Da Kid in the roll that was originated by Dule Hill. Writing for The Washington Post about the production, Lisa Traeger called Williams "a tap prodigy with an inborn sense of the complexity and generative power of rhythm."

In 2003 Williams was recruited into Savion Glover's new tap-dance troupe Ti Dii, which made its premiere at New York's Joyce Theater in Glover's Improvography; the troupe of young-and-talented dancers included Alexandria Bradley, Marshall Davis, Jr., Michelle Dorrance, Hannah Heller, Andrew Nemr, and Maya Jenkins. In 2004 Dance Spirit magazine did a shout-out to Williams: "Watch out for Cartier," wrote Jessica Cassity, calling the fourteen year-old a tap sensation who was winding up everywhere." The year 2005 saw a reuniting of Williams with Savion Glover, Jimmy Slyde, and Dianne Walker at Jacob's Pillow in Glover's Tap Legends. That same year, Dance Spirit named Williams one of the "20 Hot Tappers 20 & Under." In that time period Williams described his style as funky (as in bringing a strong rhythmic groove of bass and drums to his tap dancing), clear, and smooth. He had also made up his new step called the "Penguin," in which dancers get on the back of the heels and alternately spank the toes, which veteran dancers Dianne Walker and Buster Brown thought to be a step that was original and never before seen. In 2009 Williams performed at R&B star Usher's 26th Birthday Party at the Rainbow Room in New York; organized by Naomi Campbell, selected guests included Sean Combs, Jay-Z, Mariah Carey, and Denzel Washington, with Patti LaBelle singing happy birthday.

At the 2nd annual D.C. Tap Festival in 2010, Williams' style was imprinted: hunkering down over the floor, his meditation on the paddle-and-roll, with each riff adding a new tap sound to the bar, was a mesmerizing reference to the style of Gregory Hines and his adventurous rhythmic forays. It was Rhythm Refix, directed and choreographed by Williams and performed at New York's Joe's Pub (May 22, 2011) that prefaced the future of Williams' maturing style of rhythm tap. Presented in a cabaret setting featuring D.J. Chu Fu (remix artist), rapper A-Clay, hip-hop dancer John Dantzler, and hoofers Frances Bradley, Michela Marino Lerman, and Caleb Teicher, Fu's "refixes" and Williams' complicated rhythms created a cacophony of sound that signaled new musical collaboration between rhythm tap and hip-hop. A brilliant illustration of that style was seen in the performance Tap Stars' Bad Boys of Dance, with young blood tap dancers Michael Keefe, Christopher Erk, Anthony Russo, Jumaane Taylor, and Jason Janas; and in Williams' first instructional DVD Cartier Williams' Hoofing with the Basics Vol. 1 (2011).

[Sources: Christian Toto, The Washington Times (March 23, 2000); Quincy Jones, note to Cartier Williams (March 31, 2000); Dance Spirit May/June 2004; Dance Spirit May/June 2005)]