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Class Act [biography]
Class Act
"Coles and Atkins move in to their celebrated softshoe, [and] the music seems to stop. The orchestra is playing "Taking a Chance on Love," as if it will never reach the second note of the melody. The dancers walk, wheel and tap with leisurely elegance, as the tune gradually emerges; their dancing holds it together and at the same time makes it flow . . . . One graceless motion could shatter the poise and hover, but it never occurs. Relaxed and smiling, they toss off gliding turns, leaning pull-ups, casual slides and crystal-clear taps. The suspense is continuous, the execution flawless." (Stearns, Jazz Dance, 305)
So wrote Marshall Stearns about Charles Honi Coles and Cholly Atkins, whose tap dancing was the quintessential class act, the cream of tap dancing.
At the turn of the century, concurrent with the musical comedy dance teams working in the blackface tradition, there was an elite group of black performers who rejected the minstrel-show stereotypes of the grinning-and-dancing clowns, the Fool and the Dandy. Clean-faced and well-dressed, these performers insisted on the absolute perfection of sound, step, and manner. While they eschewed the stereotype of the lazy, ignorant, incompetent fool and instead imitated and embellished the formal elegance and sophistication of certain white acts, they ran headlong into the stereotype of the high-strutting Dandy who "thought only of flashy clothes, flirtatious courting, new dances, and good looks." They aspired to a purely artistic expression that was driven by their desire for respectability and equality on the American concert stage.
When Bob Cole and John Rosamond Johnson began their partnership at the turn of the century, the so-called coon songs were the rage on the musical stage. Minstrel parodies had also reinforced what whites wanted to believe about Northern Negroes, and became permanent stereotypes of the urban black they illustrated. Cole and Johnson decided not to write and perform songs that presented repellent portraits of black life—there would be no shuffling, no songs in syncopated Negro dialect, no condescension to black folk traditions. Instead, they presented themselves in a quiet and finished manner that was "artistic" to the minutest detail. Handsomely dressed in evening clothes, the two entered and talked about the party they were about to attend; they played Ignacy Jan Paderewski's "Minuet in G," they sang classical songs in German, as well as songs of their own composition, and they fast became a success with white theatergoers.
The pioneering class act of Charles Johnson and Dora Babbidge Dean billed themselves as "Johnson and Dean, The King and Queen of Colored Aristocracy," thus announcing and establishing the roles of the genteel Negro couple on the American stage. Dean "talked" her songs and "posed" in fancy dresses; Johnson—in full evening dress--top hat, tailcoat, monocle, gloves, and a cane—"strutted" in the cakewalk tradition. Together they appealed to audiences through well-dressed elegance and impressive personalities.
Rufus Greenlee and Thaddeus Drayton returned to New York and, in 1914, formed an act that matched formal dress with an elegant style of dancing, thus combining strutting, ballroom dance, and cakewalking with percussive stepping. In 1923, at the height of their career, Greenlee and Drayton opened at uptown Harlem's Cotton Club. Their graceful act was described as "Picture Dancing," every move making a beautiful picture. Strolling onstage, they sang "You Great Big Beautiful Doll," doffing their hats and making sweeping bows. In "Virginia Essence," a soft-shoe danced to stop-time, they filled in the breaks of the music with conversation in various foreign languages.
Johnson and Dean, Greenlee and Drayton, and the spectacular cakewalking couple George Walker and Ada Overton Walker were the forerunners of what in tap dance has been called the "class act." Graceful and impeccably dressed, moving together across the stage to make every move a beautiful picture, these dancers insisted on absolute perfection in sound and step.
"You're probably talking about straight up-and-down dancers, flat-footed dancers with no acrobatics . . . well-dressed, well-mannered, good music, good deportment-- all those things," said Honi Coles about the "class act" dancers, naming the immaculate soft-shoe Irish dancer George Primrose; precision dancer Jack Wiggans, who performed refined translations of the Argentine tango; and Eddie Rector, whose "stage dancing" dovetailed one step into another to create a seamless flow of sound and movement.
The Nicholas Brothers followed in the class act tradition. Performing at the Cotton Club in the 1930s, they looked smartly streamlined in black tailcoats, and dancing with such swirling speed that their tails were flying out behind them. Turning and tapping, brushing and patting the floor with the tip of his patent-leather shoe, Harold waved the dance to his brother, Fayard, who stroked the floor with velvet-smooth glides; together, they traversed the stage with slides and traveling crossover steps. Moving side by side and in perfect step with each other, their kicks and struts etched double-image designs in space. Whether leaping onto the platform, step-clapping down the stairs, or leaning into smooth-tapping reverse turns, the brothers exuded cosmopolitan cool, right through to their exit—which had Fayard walking closely behind Harold, the two of them looking like one man with four legs.
Dancing at the Cotton Club in the 1930s and often on the same bill as the Nicholas Brothers were Pete, Peaches, and Duke—Pete Nugent, Irving Beamon, and Duke Miller—who further defined the class act through their precision-dancing. They opened their act with a precision-line military drill, tapping as if glued together. During each man's solo, the other two joined in to establish a new kind of continuity that was interwoven rather than episodic. They closed with a One Man exit, facing the audience, one behind the other, in single file, disappearing into the wings like a man with three pairs of legs.
Descending from the great tradition of soft-shoe dancers, from Primrose and Jack Wiggans to Eddie Rector, Pete Nugent made full use of the stage. He insisted on the absolute perfection of sound and step, but his own style of strutting was like a swagger--he walked with a bounce and there was a nonchalant hunch to his shoulders. That attitude held up his virtuosic dancing as the unrivaled model of the class dancer: "I'm a tap dancer first, last, and always," said Nugent, "but if you have to make a choice, I prefer all body motion and no tap to all tap and no body motion. Any hoofer can execute all the steps, but the way a man handles his body and travels is what gives it class," Nugent told Marshall Stearns.
Other class-acts included Wells, Mordecai and Taylor, the Hillman Brothers, Three Little Words, The Three Dukes, the Dunhills, Rutledge and Taylor, The Lucky Seven Trio, the Rockets, the Five Hots Shots, and the white act of Virginia Lee and the Lathrop Brothers: all of these fine dancing acts had an opening number that was generally a flash number, a competitive dance, a soft-shoe; and a closer, usually a big flash number. The class act of Miller Brothers and Lois (George, Danny, and Lois Bright) is said to have one-upped all the other acts with high-speed rhythm tap dancing on a set of four-foot-high pedestals, each one shaped to spell their name: M I L L E R. They began with rhythm-style soft-shoe, followed by Danny and Lois performing precision tap and acrobatics, then climaxed with the trio dancing on and quickly across the pedestals, executing wings, barrel turns, and trenches.
No one, however, surpassed the class-act dancing of Charles Honi Coles and Charles Cholly Atkins. In 1940, Honi was working as a dance soloist with Cab Calloway and his jive-Swing orchestra when he met Cholly who, with his wife Dorothy Saulters, did a song-and-dance act with Calloway. Coles had a polished style that melded high-speed tapping with an elegant yet close-to-the-floor style where the legs and feet did the work; his specialty was precision. Atkins, who had danced with and choreographed acts for the renowned Cotton Club Boys, had a highly refined sense of rhythm; he was an expert wing dancer. In 1946, after the war, they combined their talents by forming the class act of Coles and Atkins, and were immediately hired to perform at Harlem's Apollo Theatre. The dance act they created was six-to-seven minutes long. Wearing handsomely tailored suits, they opened with a fast attention-getting tap dance that included a crosscurrent of patter; then they moved into a precision Swing dance in unison, and followed it with what became their classic soft-shoe, to the tune "Taking a Chance on Love," played at an extremely slow tempo. Their soft shoe was followed by a challenge dance, in which each dancer showcased his specialty, working exclusively with the drummer to achieve a swinging percussive complexity. Coles performed speedy, swinging, and rhythmically complex combinations in his solos; Atkins was more light-footed and physically sculptural in his moves, blending tap with modern dance and ballet. They ended with tight precision steps and a walk offstage together.
As Honi once explained to me: "Cholly and I were two straight, stand-up dancers, clean-cut, did wings—the extent of any kind of acrobatic stuff were wings, and wings were very popular—and we did the slowest soft-shoe ever in show business and it was all neat and composed and we had good music and we had good costumes. We dressed well, we presented ourselves well and we didn't resort to any kind of trickery as far as our act was concerned."
As Coles and Atkins reached the pinnacle of perfection in their class act, audiences in the late 1940s were becoming less and less interested in "pure" tap. The Big-Band era was swiftly drawing to a close, vaudeville had vanished, television was in its infancy, a new style of ballet Broadway dance that integrated choreography into the musical plot became the popular stage form over tap dance, and night spots became small spaces with piano-bars or small cool-jazz groups. Some argue that "tap dance died" during the period from the late forties through the fifties—and the class act with it; some say that tap dance never died (it was only neglected). While that debate continues into the new century, the performance aesthetic of class act—with its elegant dress, aural precision, detached coolness, and flawless execution—has never died, and will forever continue to be the standard for the highest octave of tap-dancing perfection.