Nicholas Brothers Inducted into National Museum of Dance Hall of Fame Nicholas, Fayard performer Nicholas, Harold performer Social Event 2001-08-05 Nicholas Brothers inducted into the Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Hall of Fame, National Museum of Dance, Saratoga Springs, NY. Representative speakers include Constance Valis Hill, Donald Bogle, Katherine Hopkins Nicholas, Bruce Goldstein, with homages written by Leonard Reed and Maurice Hines and a special performance by Savion Glover. Test Panel written by Constance Valis Hill: When the Nicholas Brothers danced, audiences uptown at the Cotton Club, downtown at the Roxy, in segregated movie theatres in the South, and dance halls across the country cheered, clapped, stomped their feet, and shouted out uncontrollably. Their exuberant style of American theatrical dance-- a melding of jazz, tap, acrobatics, black vernacular dance, and witty repartee-- was dazzling. Though daredevil flips, slides and hair-raising splits made them show-stoppers, the Nicholas Brothers were also highly sophisticated dancers who refined a centuries-old tradition of percussive dance into the rhythmic brilliance of jazz tap. Fayard Antonio (1914- ) and Harold Lloyd (1921-2000) were born into the jazz age. They grew up listening to the syncopated rhythms, ragtime, and show tunes that their parents, professional jazz musicians Viola and Ulysses Nicholas, played in pit orchestra bands in black vaudeville theatres up and down the eastern seaboard. At the Standard Theatre in Philadelphia, Fayard watched hundreds of tap specialty acts and musical comedy revues that featured tap dancing, and then rushed home to copy what he saw. He practiced the time step on both sides, inserted rhythm steps into the Charleston, squeezed down-and-up splits into the last four beats of a measure, and then coaxed little brother Harold into learning them. Harold, eager to imitate his older brother, was a quick study. Once he learned the steps, he never forgot them. "The only influence I ever had was Fayard" said Harold. "Nobody impressed me except him." Blending comic quips and acrobatic feats with virtuoso rhythm tapping, the Nicholas Brothers created a style of jazz dancing that simultaneously titillated and impressed. Precocious yet sophisticated. "We were kids, but we danced like men" said Fayard. They worked on Broadway with George Balanchine and Rouben Mamoulian, and on the London stage with Clarence "Buddy" Bradley. They performed in theatres and clubs at home and abroad with the orchestras of Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Jimmie Lunceford, Count Basie, and Tommy Dorsey. In Hollywood, their collaboration with Nick Castle for Twentieth Century-Fox produced their most memorable work, "Jumpin' Jive" in "Stormy Weather" (1943).This giant dance sequence showcased the brothers leapfrogging over each other down a flight of stairs to land in split-and-recovers. Though they shared the stage with Josephine Baker, Dorothy Dandridge and Carmen Miranda, they were hardly ever allowed, due to racism and sexism, to appear with females. "And so their dancing became a fraternal rather than a romantic metaphor" Arlene Croce wrote in The New Yorker, "full of shared secrets and also a certain friendly, slam-dunking competitiveness. Their progeny seems to include not just Michael Jackson but Michael Jordan." Dancing together for more than sixty years, the Nicholas Brothers' eloquent footwork, musicality, rhythmic brilliance and full-bodied expressiveness remain unsurpassed. Their dancing represents the most sophisticated refinement of jazz tap dancing in the 20th century-- a brotherhood in rhythm that helped evolve tap dance into a classical American jazz dance form. Performing Arts Encyclopedia http://www.loc.gov/performingarts Tap Dance America http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/tda/tda-home.html tda IHAS 151216 loc.music.tda.877