Interview: 'Tap Talk' Provides Lively, Informative Survey of Tap Choreographers and Companies
By: Ryan Casey Jan. 27, 2014
The American Tap Dance Foundation launched its newest program, "Tap Talks/Tap Films," on Friday night at the American Tap Dance Center in NYC's West Village with an engaging discussion and presentation on the past, present and future of tap dance choreography, led by renowned performer, educator and choreographer Brenda Bufalino.
Admitting herself that the topic could very well be the subject of a five-hour symposium, the unfailingly insightful and loquacious tap maven led her audience on a condensed history of tap choreography and tap companies - a project she has been working on since 2005, entitled Tap Composers of the Tap Renaissance. The mission, she said, is to provide historical context to all of the great work that has been done, so that today's choreographers know what came before them, and to keep the conversation about choreography going. "If we can't talk about it, we can't expect critics - or anybody else - to talk about it," she said. From the resurgence of tap dance and the rise of ensembles in the 1970s and '80s to its marginalization by critics as a solo art form, its return to Broadway in the '90s, and its fleeting focus on improvisation, Bufalino gave a masterful survey of the art form and its peaks and valleys as the audience, comprised of many professional tap dancers, as well as students and aficionados, called out names she had overlooked.
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