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• Constance Valis Hill

From:

• Performing Arts Encyclopedia
• Tap Dance America

Dates: 1947-
Birth Date: Jul 9, 1947

Place of Birth: Astoria, Long Island City, New York

Constance Valis Hill, tap dancer, choreographer, and jazz tap historian, was born in Astoria, Long Island City, where she was raised in the house of her grandparents. She first learned to dance at age three when her parents, both first-generation Greek Americans, enrolled her in ballet and tap classes at the Wally Wanger Dance Studio in mid-town Manhattan. Their reason for sending her to dancing school was less to learn dance than to learn to speak English. Her paternal grandparents were Turko-Limino, coming from Constantinople/Smyrna in the northern part of Greece (now Turkey); her maternal grandparents were from Cyprus and Corinth, Greece; and everyone spoke Greek. "Worrying that I would not be able to speak English when it was time to be enrolled in kindergarten," Hill recalled, "my parents sent me to dancing school. So my second language was English via the language of dance."

After graduating from the State University of Albany (B.A.) and University of Massachusetts, Amherst (M.A.), she moved to New York City and returned to dance when she found herself on a dance scholarship at the Alvin Ailey School of American Dance; she later taught modern jazz dance at the school under the tutelage of Nat Horne, and established the dance history program under the direction of Denise Jefferson.

While her musical influences were enhanced by her husband's Caribbean roots (Trinidad and Granada) and his training as a jazz drummer and congero, it was after studying rhythm tap with various members of the Copasetics (particularly Charles "Cookie" Cook in the late 1970s) and with Gregory Hines at the first By Word of Foot tap festival in 1980 that she was transformed into a jazz tap dancer. In 1981, she and dance partner Sarah Safford conceived, choreographed and performed the tap dance memoir The Doilie Sisters, which premiered at La Mama, E.T.C. and toured France; later teaching jazz tap (claquette et musicale comedie) at the Conservatoire d'arts Dramatique Superiore in Paris. In 1985 and 1986 Hill directed Jane Goldberg's Changing Times Tap Dance Company's Sole Sisters, an all-woman, intergenerational tap musical which opened at downtown New York's Greenwich House and moved and to La Mama. The success of that show, which foregrounded women in tap, led Hill to devote herself to the historiography of tap dance. She worked as a dance critic for the Schenectady Gazette and Albany Times Union and as a contributing editor of Attitude: A Dancers' Magazine. Upon earning a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University, she began publishing dozens of tap dance articles and biographies in such publications as Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History; American National Biography, Studies in Dance History, Dance Research Journal, American Musicological Society, Village Voice, Dance Magazine, International Tap Association Journal, and Huffington Post. In 2003 she became a board member of the American Tap Dance Foundation, and with Tony Waag established the Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance, the largest collection of tap dance materials, housed in the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts.

Her essays on jazz tap have appeared in such books as Moving Words: Re-Writing Dance, ed. Gay Morris (1996); and Taken By Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader, ed. by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere. Her book Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers (2000) won the Deems Taylor Award for excellence in jazz history. Her book Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010) was supported by grants from the Rockefeller and John Simon Guggenheim Foundations and won the 2010 Bueno de la Torre prize for excellence in dance scholarship.

On film, Hill appears in the tap documentary Gotta Move: Women in Tap (2010), directed by Lynn Dally; Tap World (2013) dir. Dean Hargrove; and Jazz Jam (2013) dir. Mark Wilkinson. She was awarded the 2010 Tap Preservation Award from the American Tap Dance Foundation; and 2011 Bill "Bojangles" Robinson/Flushing Town Hall Award for scholarly writings on tap dance.

In 2013 Hill donated Tap Dancing America: A Twentieth-Century Chronology of Tap Performance on Stage, Film, and Media to the Library of Congress, a 3000-record record database of twentieth-century tap history.