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Jane Goldberg [biography]
Dates: 1948-
Birth Date: Feb 2, 1948
Place of Birth: Washington, D.C.
Jane Goldberg, tap dancer, teacher, director, and pioneer of the so-called tap renaissance of the 1970s, was born in Washington, D.C. Her mother, Molly, was a former apache dancer; her father, Jack, a lawyer. One of her earliest dance teachers was a Miss Maxine, who first dazzled the four-year-old girl with the intoned phrases of "slap, shuffle, ball-change." The memories of those tap dance recitals, in which she wore red-spangled capes and sparkling shoes, were long gone by the 1960s, when she enrolled as an undergraduate in Boston University with a major in Political Science and became engaged in anti-war protests, anti-establishment attitudes, and muckraking journalism for the BU News. In that period, the most profound influence on her life was her professor, the renowned populist historian Howard Zinn, who told her: "If you can't liberate the world, you must liberate the ground upon which you stand." Goldberg literally embodied Zinn's command. In 1973, she looked up "tap dance" in the Boston yellow pages, figuring she could liberate the ground upon which she stood with her feet. She found her way to the black dance studio of Stanley Brown and began to study tap dance. One year later, she moved to New York City where she studied dance with the Judson Dance Theatre experimentalist Simone Forti, all the while looking for Charles Honi Coles, whose name Brown had given her when she left Boston. Walking past St. John the Apostle Church on Columbus Avenue one day, she heard some hoofers working out in the basement-- Rhythm Red, L.D. Jackson, Chuck Green, and Howard Sandman Sims, led by Leticia "Mama" Jay (Leticia Jay), who were rehearsing for a revival of Tap Happenings-- and set out to learn their art. A two month telephone campaign to Charles Honi Coles led to private classes with the master at Jerry LeRoy's Dance Studio. In November of 1976 she attended the Copasetics Ball, where she met Charles Cookie Cook and got the phone number for Sandman Sims, who taught her a great paddle-and-roll. Lessons with Cook, Bert Gibson, Leon Collins, and Leslie Bubba Gaines followed. After about six months of studying with a number of men, including Henry LeTang, she felt neither willing nor ready to woodshed, so she decided instead to write about tap dance. She traveled to Pittsburgh to interview Paul Draper and published her first article, "It's All in the Feet" in Boston's Patriot Ledger (24 April 1974).
Teaching the rhythm tap tradition also became part of Goldberg's charge, as she well knew that for the form to survive, it needed to be passed on by the masters. She made arrangements for the veterans to teach workshops and small group classes. In 1977, she and Cook applied for a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Fellowship in Choreography and were awarded $1,800 to produce a lecture-demonstration with veteran dancers and, by then, their students. The result was It's About Time (24-26 February 1978), presented in the fifth-floor walkup loft of Judson Dance Theater experimentalist Elaine Summers. The loose, informal downtown event turned out to be a packed-to-the-walls sold-out show that was attended by jazz critics, downtown dancers, musicians, visual and performance artists, garnering a preview listing and dance review in the New York Times, which called it "one of the happiest of get-togethers of many a season." With the critical success of It's About Time, club owners and the producers of old established modern dance festivals were calling up for Cook and Goldberg. They were next invited, along with Bubba Gaines and Andrea Levine, to perform at the American Dance Festival (22 June 1978, Page Auditorium, Duke University, North Carolina) as part of its Archival Project. That show led to an invitation to perform at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, a training and performing complex in Becket, Massachusetts, and the first to produce a concert of tap dance there since Paul Draper's in 1941. Dance Theater Workshop next presented Goldberg and company at its American Theater Laboratory in New York City, in Shoot Me While I'm Happy (1979) with Goldberg and Cook, Ernest Brown, Leroy Meyers, Phace Roberts, Honi Coles, Louis Simms, Bubba Gaines and Marion Coles. Goldberg's penchant for presentation quickly made an impression on critics, who began to cement her into the role of mistress of ceremonies. Shoot Me marked the formal founding of Goldberg's The Changing Times Tap Dance Company, dedicated to preserving, promoting, and creating new tap performances-- also to the mixing of dancers who were young and old, black and white, male and female. Within the auspices of that company, Goldberg generated many more ideas that would help bring a more enthusiastic critical and public response to tap dance, thus fueling the flames of its renaissance.
In 1980, Goldberg's Changing Times Tap Company produced By Word of Foot: Tap Masters Pass on Their Tradition at the Village Gate in New York City-- it was a rare gathering of tap's leading dancers talking about the tradition and teaching their own evolved styles that was hailed at the first tap festival. By Word of Foot II was subsequently produced. In 1985, Goldberg continued her By Word of Foot series at the Greenwhich House in New York City with Sole Sisters, an all-female, cross-cultural, inter-generational tap dance show conceived and written by Goldberg and Sarah Safford and directed by Constance Valis Hill: and featuring Goldberg, Safford, Brenda Bufalino, Harriet Brown, Marion Coles, Dorothy Wasserman, Jo McNamara, Mabel Lee, and Beverly Wasser. This was followed in 1986 with New Sole Sisters: A Celebration Featuring Tap's Grande Dames and Prima Tapperinas at New York's La Mama Club. This all-female tap dance show brought together high-heeled steppers and low-heeled hoofers and celebrating "tap's grande dames and prima tapperinas," proving that a woman didn't have to "dance like a man" to be a hoofer. The show featured Goldberg, Miriam Greaves-Ali, Bufalino, McNamara, Safford, Browne, Frances Nealy, and Wasserman, under the musical direction of Joyce Brown.
In the 1990s, Goldberg continued her exploration of comedy, tapping, and talking, such as Tapping and Talking Dirty, Rhythm & Schmooze, and The Rhythm Method. Though she is respectfully considered one of the pioneering women of the tap renaissance of the 1980s, she was affectionately described by the Washington Post as a "funny, frizzy-haired lady with rapid-fire feet who mixes words and steps to hilarious effect."
[Sources: Jane Goldberg, Shoot Me While I'm Happy: Memories of The Tap Goddess of the Lower East Side (2008); Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, a Cultural History (2010)]