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Lynn Dally [biography]
Dates: 1941-
Birth Date: Dec 3, 1941
Place of Birth: Columbus, OH
Lynn Dally, dancer, teacher, and choreographer was born into a dancing family. Her father, Jimmy Rawlins, and mother, Hazel Capretta Rawlins, ran the Rawlins Dance Studio, founded in 1933 in Columbus, Ohio. "They were like my Fred and Ginger," Dally remembers of her parents. "My first teacher in tap dancing was my father. I started at five and didn't have private lessons until I was eight, so I had to practice a lot to get those private lessons. I had a beautiful training as a kid because my father was a very good tap dancer. The sound quality of his tap dancing was excellent. And in our lessons, we got to close our eyes, listen to the taps, and try to recreate what we heard. We were always dealing with rhythm. He [Rawlins] played the piano in class, which was a common thing, particularly among the older generation, so love music was always a part of it too. And then he choreographed a curriculum of routines that were graded, and got harder and harder. Those routines had a lot to do with my early training because they were good choreography. The steps all had names. And his ability as a musician made a big difference-- I was one of those kids who would sit under the piano when someone was practicing for hours, and that was a pleasure. When I was growing up, I studied tap, ballet, baton, and acrobatics."
In 1973, after graduating from Ohio State University as a modern dance major, performing abroad, teaching at Smith College in Massachusetts, and teaching modern dance and improvisation at Ohio State University, she moved to San Francisco to study with the modern dancer Margie Jenkins. In 1974 she began her first efforts in choreography with her first all-woman company, Lynn Dally & Dancers. The company performed in New York City at the American Theater Laboratory in August of 1979. When Dally returned to New York in December of that year to perform at the American Theater Lab, it was with a new company-- the Jazz Tap Percussion Ensemble, later the Jazz Tap Ensemble. The newly organized West Coast collective of jazz percussionists were venturing into the fairly uncommon territory of a simultaneous exploration of jazz music and modern dance traditions in a new approach to tap dance. The musicians were Paul Arslanian, Tom Dannenberg, and Keith Terry; the dancers were Dally, Camden Richman, a modern and jazz tap dancer who had studied with Charles "Honi" Coles and Eddie Brown; and Fred Strickler, who had studied modern dance at Ohio State University and had formed his own modern dance company. The Ensemble established itself in the seemingly disparate worlds of modern dance and tap. Dally's interests in improvisation and concepts of structure and form in dance composition joining with Strickler's interests, not only in jazz but in Mozart and other Western classical music. In January 1979, the Ensemble presented Riffs, a concert of dance at the Pacific Motion Dance Studio in Venice, California. It was then that the core features and focus of their percussive collective was conceptualized-- making pieces that had musical structures, unusual time signatures, or no music; tap dances that had no music; pieces that rejected the role of dancer and accompanist and instead featured dancer and musician in interplay and on equal footing; and compositions that tested boundaries of the form for the concert stage. In a concert in April 1979 at the University of California Berkeley, jazz critic Derk Richardson in Down Beat magazine wrote: "Tap dancing as jazz percussion, a tradition that had been carried from the heel-dropping rhythms of John Bubbles through the bebop of Baby Laurence, may not have been a new idea, but . . . the Jazz Tap Percussion Ensemble demonstrated the vitality and the potential for growth of that nearly lost American art form."
In its first four years of existence, JTE grew from small studio performances to sold-out houses in such far-flung places as Honolulu, Hawaii, and Paris, France, with enthusiastic responses to work. They toured the country, were awarded grants from the California Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, and in April of 1982 were invited to perform in a tribute to Honi Coles at the Smithsonian. In 1984, Richman and the group's three jazz musicians, gave notice, due to the company's intense touring schedule, leaving Dally and Strickler to reform the Ensemble (Linda Sohl-Donnell was hired to replace Richman, later Heather Cornell and Terry Brock; Sam Weber replaced Stricker, who left the company in 1987, leaving Dally as JTE's sole director and prime choreographer). Even with two-third's of the original company gone, JTE stayed true to its original intent-- a respect for the heritage of black rhythm tap, but with a style more eclectic than the early American prototype. It continued to hone the vocabulary of the vernacular, taking the lexicon of tap out of the stage tradition of unison dancing and flashy performance style and into a subtle, concert style art form. From her earliest tap works, Dally's penchant for full-bodied movement and a luscious exploration of space distinguished her choreographic style. Writing about Dally's "I Mean You," part of a suite of dances choreographed to jazz composer Thelonious Monk, Llewellyn Crain wrote, "The expression of the entire body is as important as the movement of the feet. Dally twists and arcs through space, gliding, turning, tapping, and scraping her metal taps on the floor. Unconcerned with virtuosity or besting . . . she dances about feelings, about style, about the myriad complexities of dance."
A superb example of visual and aural dimensions in Dally's choreography is All Blues, to the jazz music of Miles Davis. First performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. in 1986 as a duet for Dally and Linda Sohl, it evolved into a trio and was subsequently enlarged for the Ensemble. In its 1993 performance at the Joyce Theater, Dally, Weber, Dormeshia Sumbry, Derick Grant, and Lainie Manning formed a semi-circle in front of the musical ensemble, tip-toeing and brushing out counter-rhythms to the melody. Then they traveled across the floor in two horizontal lines, weaving through each other and spacing out in a design that allowed the viewer to see the full-bodied movement of each dancer; they completed the phrase by moving in unison on a long diagonal line that cut across the space. Visually and rhythmically engaging, the pleasure of All Blues was its movement and musical design. There was something very satisfyingly cool and chic about those ensemble dancers-- in the way the patterns made by the dancers related to the musical structures.
The Jazz Tap Ensemble continued to perform nationally and internationally, with annual performances at New York's Joyce Theater, where is celebrated its twentieth jubilee in 1998. Dally is recognized as one of the leaders in the tap revival in the late 1970s who evolved the art of tap choreography and composition, moving it from a solo and duet form to a group choreography. Dally has also emerged as a feminist tap historian. In 2008 at University of California Los Angeles, she produced the First Annual Conference of Women in Tap, in which she invited four generations of women to participate in performances, historical overviews, and panel discussions on the contributions of women in tap, addressing the challenges that female tap dancers have had to face in a historically male-dominated form. This historic conference was made into a film documentary, Gotta Move: Women in Tap (2010), which Dally produced and directed.
[Sources: Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]