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• Brenda Bufalino

From:

• Performing Arts Encyclopedia
• Tap Dance America

Dates: 1937-
Birth Date: Sep 7, 1937

Place of Birth: Swampscott, MA

Brenda Bufalino, jazz and tap dancer, singer, poetess and composer who is considered a trailblazer in the renaissance of tap dance in the 1970s and 1980s, was born of English, American Indian, Scottish, and Italian descent. Her mother, Marjorie Strickland, was a singer and musician who worked at a fruit stand; her father, Al Bufalino, had made a career in the Air Force. At age six she was enrolled by her mother in Professor O'Brien's Normal School of Dancing in Lynn, Massachusetts, where she learned basic tap steps that included flaps, shuffles, cramp rolls, and wings, and time steps with breaks. She used these steps when she became a member, at age seven, of the the Strickland Sisters, her mother and aunt singing and she dancing Dutch medleys (in wooden shoes), Spanish medleys (in tap shoes), and Hawaiian medleys in musical shows for the Masons, Rotary Club, and Eastern Stars. At age eleven, she was enrolled in Alice Duffy's School of Dance in Salem, Massachusetts, where she learned dances with jump ropes, top hats, and canes. The day after her thirteenth birthday, she began a commute to Boston to study under the renowned dance teacher Stanley Brown, a black West Indian who had made a successful career in vaudeville and worked with John Sublett Bubbles. Brown became her first tap teacher.

In 1955 at age eighteen, Bufalino moved to New York City to further her dance studies. She found her way to Dance Craft, a new studio on 52nd Street directed by Charles Honi Coles and Pete Nugent. Coles, who was forty-three years old but with speed and stylish arm and legwork that was unsurpassed in rhythm tap dancing, became her most influential teacher. She also studied modern and jazz dance, Afro-Cuban and modern-primitive, and Calypso, while finding jobs singing and dancing at The Calypso Room, African Room, Café Society, and the Palladium. By 1960, even these popular venues were closing; tap dance seems to have disappeared and rhythm tap seemed out of date. She married in 1959, gave birth to two sons, and spent most of the 1960s writing plays and poetry. When Bufalino returned to tap dancing in the early 1970s, she was to integrate interests in the new free jazz into avant-garde performance art. At New York's South Street Seaport in 1973, she "broadcast" the sound of her tap shoes into a synthesizer, being one of the first to experiment with modulating and reverberating the taps electronically. In 1974 she had established The Dancing Theatre in La Grangeville, in upstate New York, where she taught a blend of Afro-Cuban, modern, and jazz dance, and began teaching at the State University at New Paltz. Around this time, she reconnected with her teacher Honi Coles and began to bring some of the Copasetics to New Paltz for some of their earliest lecture-demonstrations, which she made sure to videotape. Bufalino's documentation of this fraternity of black rhythm tap dancers that had been founded in 1949 in honor of Bill Robinson led in 1977 to the making of the documentary film Great Feats of Feet. Subtitled "A Portrait of the Jazz and Tap Dancer," this two hour intimate portrait of these veterans dancers was the first of its kind to memorialize the achievements of rhythm dancers who had performed in the golden age of tap during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1978, Bufalino presented Singing, Swinging, and Winging at the Pilgrim Theatre on the Bowery; this the first major showing of her tap choreography in New York included Performed three members of her Dancing Theatre Company, a jazz trio, and Charles Honi Coles as guest artist. Bufalino continued to work with Coles. In 1979 they collaborated on the creation of tap choreography for The Morton Gould Tap Concerto, performed with the Brooklyn Academy Philharmonic Orchestra. She would continue to forge deeply creative ties with Coles for the next fifteen years while continuing to build her own career as a tap soloist, performance artist, and choreographer.

Bufalino shot through the decade of the eighties like a comet, igniting dancers who flocked to her classes, conceiving new structures of choreography, and forming new tap companies while working as a jazz-tap soloist. She began to work with the idea of extending the traditional ten-to-twelve-minute tap routine into an extended choreography that would challenge the audience to sustain its attention on prolonged rhythmic composition, and in 1979 presented Tapestry, a 45-minute-long a cappella duet for herself and dancer Pat Giordano. She next Bufalino formed Bufalino & Company with eight of her best dancers from her classes, performing in Boston and New York festivals. At the Blue Note jazz club in New York's West Village, where she worked as a soloist every fifth Monday night, she collaborated with pianist Amy Duncan on a performance work that intermingled jazz music, vocals, rhythm tap, and autobiographical text, creating Cantata and the Blues (1983, which opened in 1983 at The Ballroom in New York City. In a review of Cantata and the Blues, performed in Washington, D.C., Alan M. Kriegsman in The Washington Post wrote: "Bufalino's dancing is hot, hard and heavy, but underneath it is a substratum of real ‘soul.' Of the younger white dancers I've seen who've latched onto tap, it seems to me Buffalino [sic] comes closest-- in the way she rides her weight and gets into the floor, in her improvisatory daring, her jazz sense and nervous urgency-- to the true hoofer feeling of the great black masters." Bufalino next turned her attention to re-envisioning the tap chorus as a tap-dancing orchestra-- an ensemble dressed in black ties and tails, placed onstage like a symphony, only dancing, and founded the American Tap Dance Orchestra (ATDO), which had its first major booking on July 4, 1986, at the Statue of Liberty Festival in Battery Park, New York City. The troupe for this occasion had nine dancers, two vocalists who also danced, a trio of piano, bass, and drums, with all materials arranged and choreographed by Bufalino.

From 1986 to 1995, the Woodpeckers Tap Dance Center & Inter Arts Space at 170 Mercer Street in New York, which Bufalino established with the most with the most acoustically refined tap dance floor in New York, would become the home of ATDO. It was also the space in which Bufalino would create The American Landscape, a complete evening's work celebrating the music of Hoagy Carmichael.a tribute to mountains, rivers and creatures ("Old Buttermilk Sky" "Riverboatr Shuffle" "Baltimore Oriole" "Memphis in June" "Blue Orchid" "Georgia"). By the 1990s, Bufalino's ATDO performed worldwide, with premiere of such works as Buff Loves Basie Blues, an homage to Honi Coles and his love for the swing dance music of Count Basie, at the Joyce Theatre in New York. Touch, Turn, Return, created in collaboration with the composer Carmen Moore and performed by his Skymusic Ensemble, was perhaps Bufalino's most critically acclaimed avant-garde work. Twenty-minutes long, it opened with dancers moving indeterminately across the space, and segued from a shuffle rhythm to an almost classical Spanish form, ending with a fugue. While Moore conducted his Sky Orchestra from a podium stage, the dancers were not always dancing to the music but instead executed patterns that intentionally did not link up with the music. In 1996 for its tenth anniversary season, Bufalino created her most ambitious work to date, Gertrude's Nose, A Tap Opera. The forty-minute work, a rapturous and kinetic mix of tap and vocals, (Jill Clayton) was conceived as a soundscape for rhythm tap and vocalese, and aimed to illustrate a woman's journey into the heart and rhythmic pulse of the earth. Matt Snyder in 5/4 Magazine described the work as a "passionate and intense performance in which tthere wasn't a single wasted step or vocal in this meeting of master artists, bridging the sensory gap between motion and sound." In the late 1990s, Bufalino began collaborating with bass player Joe Fonda, performing as a member of the band of vibes, guitar, bass, concertina, vocals, and taps. She recorded the CD, Dancing My Dance…in another person's dream; wrote the Forward and Afterword for the reissue of Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance, and authored the autobiography, Beyond Shuffle Ball Change: Tap Dance Stories, Theory and Practice. Her legacy continues with members of her company who have moved the tradition forward with the founding in 2000 of The American Tap Dance foundation, directed by Tony Waag, an original member of ATDO.

Recognized throughout the world as a leading exponent and innovator of jazz tap dance, a trailblazer in the renaissance of jazz tap dance, and a major force in moving the concept of tap dance composition and performance forward, Bufalino continues to be a guiding force as a choreographer and master teacher, stressing the technique of identifying your sound, articulating flaps, swinging in the groove, mastering the shuffle scale, playing eighth notes on seven-beat phrases, creating manipulations for small foot work exercises, and developing patterns for phrasing and double time, and structures for improvisation.

[Sources: Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010); Brenda Bufalino, "Memories of ‘The Great Feats of Feet' of Leslie ‘Bubba' Gaines," ITA Newsletter Vol 8, No. 4, Nov.-Dec. 1997, p. 23]