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Chloe Arnold [biography]
Dates: 1980-
Birth Date: Aug 5, 1980
Place of Birth: Washington, DC
Chloe Arnold, tap dancer, choreographer, and director, noted for representing the new generation of high-heeled and low-heeled women in tap, was born in Washington, D.C., of interracial parentage. Her white French mother was a modern dancer and educator; her father, an African-American jazz enthusiast who played serious jazz and bebop. Her mother enrolled her at the age of six, as the only student of color, in the Wheaton Studio of Dance in Silver Spring, Maryland. At age nine, she auditioned for the National Tap Ensemble's junior company, Flying Feet (directed by Chris Baker) and was soon taken into the company, where she learned the rudiments and took master classes with Eddie Brown, Harriet Brown, LaVaughan Robinson, and Dorothy Wassermann. In 1990, Savion Glover auditioned and accepted the ten-year-old Arnold into his resident program at NTE, with Barbara Duffy as rehearsal director. She was accepted into Glover's workshop three years in a row and in 1991 was taken to New York City to perform in "The Real Deal" in Frank Hatchet's Olympic Fever Showcase; and saw the Broadway production of Jelly's Last Jam, starring Gregory Hines and Glover. Upon returning to Washington, D.C., she began study with Toni Lombre, her first black female teacher who was the artistic director of Taps & Company. Lombre, who had performed on Broadway in Maurice Hines's Uptown…It's Hot!, and with Mercedes Ellington's company DancEllington, demanded that her dancers study ballet, jazz, and modern dance, as well as tap. Arnold joined Lombre's all-black female tap company and recalled, "It was one of my most important developmental periods. Toni took me from a young girl to a young woman. She turned me into a well-versed dancer. I progressed as a performer and developed self-confidence."
In 1998, on another visit to New York City, Arnold found herself backstage at Broadway's Ambassador Theatre, participating in a pre-show tap jam with the all-black male cast of Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk, directed by George C. Wolfe and choreographed by Savion Glover. "They were extremely supportive," Arnold recalled, "and it put my eyes up as to where my training needed to go." She returned to New York later that year, enrolled as an undergraduate film major at Columbia University, but continuing to jam with the Noise/Funk dancers. In 1999, while enrolled at Columbia, Arnold's musical-theatre career opened when Debbie Allen, director of the musical Soul Possessed, starring Patti LaBelle cast Arnold as one of the dancers performing jazz and African dance as well as tap dance choreographed by the nineteen-year-old Noise/Funk star Jason Samuels Smith. That connection led Arnold into a professional relationship with Smith, marked by creativity, collaboration, and camaraderie. Arnold would dance Smith's choreography in the Emmy-award-winning Jerry Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon Lewis Telethon (2003); co-direct the Los Angeles Tap Festival (2003); join his company A.C.G.I. (Anybody Can Get It), and become one of his dancing muses in Charlie's Angels: A Tribute to Charlie Parker (2006). But Arnold was also fast becoming a singular figure as tap dancer, choreographer, and director, becoming the managing producer for Los Angeles-based Debbie Allen Dance Academy; directing her own tap ensemble, Syncopated Ladies, billed as "The Next Generation of Tap"; performing in the tap spectacular Imagine Tap! (2006), choreographed by Derick K. Grant; acting as the dance double for Beyonce in her music video Upgrade U and the body double in Diva; making her film debut in Dean Hargrove's award winning Tap Heat (2004); appearing in the HBO/Universal Pictures release of Outkast's feature film Idlewild (2006); choreographing and starring in the 2008 live television opening number of the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon; and co-founding, with sister Maude, the Washington D.C. Tap Festival (2009) In 2008, at the historic Women in Tap Conference at the University of California, Los Angeles, Arnold's feisty tap adaptation to the Maya Angelou poem, Phenomenal Woman, woke the house and told the people: "Pretty women wonder where my secret lies / I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size," recited Arnold. Changing from low-heeled to high-heeled shoes to hit the floor with sass and fury, she demonstrated where her powers lay-- in "the span of my hips, the stride of my step. . .the swing in my waist, the joy in my feet. . . the click in my heels . . . I'm a woman. Phenomenal woman. That's me." Arnold is known for her full-bodied rhythm-tap dancing in high-heeled and low. "In high school I was very athletic," she recalled. "I loved being aggressive, and that transferred into my tap dancing. At the same time, I feminine like to feel sexy. I like to be able to express different moves, to be hard core with a touch."
[Sources: Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010); "Challenges Facing Women in Tap," Women in Tap Conference, 9 February 2008, University of California Los Angeles]