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Germaine Ingram [biography]
Place of Birth: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Germaine Ingram, tap dancer, attorney, educator, and choreographer who has combined a multitude of talents into expanding the expressive possibilities of tap, was a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her interests in tap dance did not materialize until after she earned a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and did postgraduate studies at Harvard University as a Fellow in Law and Humanities, after which time she worked as a law professor, a litigation attorney, a civil rights lawyer, the head of a governmental law department, and Chief of Staff of the 209,000-student school district of Philadelphia.
At the age of thirty-three Ingram took up tap dancing under the tutelage and mentorship of Philadelphia tap master LaVaughan Robinson. By 1985 she was performing both with Robinson and as a soloist, sharing bills with tap greats spanning at least three generations, including Honi Coles, Jimmy Slyde, Buster Brown, Nicholas Brothers, Gregory Hines, Dianne Walker, Brenda Bufalino, Savion Glover, and Baakari Wilder. She was a featured performer with Robinson in the 1989 PBS television special Tap Dance in America, hosted by Gregory Hines, and continued to perform in tap festivals across the country. Her choreographic credits include commissions from Manhattan Tap and the Washington, D.C.-based company, Tappers With Attitude.
In the early 1990s Ingram began working with the Philadelphia Folklore Project on an oral history project documenting the lives and artistic styles of veteran African-American tap dancers in Philadelphia. That endeavor resulted in her coproducing "Stepping in Time," a stage production featuring tap dancers, singers, comics, and other artists whose careers date back to the 1920-1940s. An outgrowth of that oral history project was the PFP documentary film, Plenty of Good Women Dancers, which Ingram codirected with Deborah Kodish.
With these projects, and her life's work as a social activist, Ingram became an outspoken feminist about women in tap. In an article about the plentitude of black female tap dancers but the paucity of information about them, Ingram speculated on the problem that she too was facing in not being recognized as a hoofer, and that perhaps "women who assumed a male attitude toward hoofing, as Louise Madison did, or challenged gender conventions by dancing in male attire and low-heeled shoes, suffered a stigma arising from suspicions about their sexual preference."
After LeVaughan Robinson's death in 2008, Ingram honed in on her unique voice/sound in tap, subsequently became a leading figure in contemporary jazz tap, and following in the tradition of her forebearers while breaking new ground in the art form through oral history, film making, and stage production, in addition to performance and choreography. Her work addresses social justice and historical narratives, as well as various aspects of the African-American experience, through such projects as Parallel Destinies, which ruminates on the recent discovery of George Washington's slave quarters near the site of the Liberty Bell where nine enslaved African-Americans were held.
"I aim to exploit tap's capacity to tell stories and illuminate cultural roots and connections," Ingram stated about her work after receiving the prestigious Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 2010. "My chief motivation as a tap dancer . . . is to use jazz tap form to pique people's imagination, curiosity, emotions and intellect through exploration of themes that are literary, historical, and social."
[Njeri, Itabari. "Shadowed Feats: The Forgotten Mothers of Tap-- and Their New Crop of Daughters" (Hoofing It: The Hidden History of Black Women in Tap") The Village Voice (July 28, 1998, vol. XLIII, No. 30), 38-41; Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]