Reviewing the year 2003 - a look at trends and forecasts in dance world - appreciation of tap dancer Gregory Hines

Dance Magazine, Dec, 2003 by Jane Goldberg

I ALREADY knew from an interview I'd read that he missed talking about his old mentors, men like Sandman Sims, Bunny Briggs, and Honi Coles. I was a disciple of those veterans too, just years later. In my last interview with Gregory (which turned out to be his last interview with anyone) we talked about lap as if his cancer didn't exist. Neither of us knew how long he had, but he was one hopeful hoofer. He even got up, and showed me how much better he walked this year.

"I was always impressed by feet," he said. "Always.... Time is in the feet. It's all there--in the feet. I play drums and I play okay, but I drag the time when I play drums. There were times when I've been playing that I could feel myself dragging the time and [that] I'm trying to get back. The bass player has got it and I'm dragging it. I just love watching a person who's got great feet, and the time is impeccable. One of the great things that separates tap dancing from everything else is that you see the body move and you hear the body move. If I'm watching somebody and their movements have a beautiful grace to them, but their feet are not happening--I'm not saying that they're not a good dancer [but] it's feet that really impress me the most."

OVER THE years we argued about recognition and credit, tap's natural succession, women and wardrobe, He was "so sick of loose and comfortable"; I didn't want to see tapping women in unitards; I reminded him thai he was a guy and what right did he have to be so obsessed with what women wore anyway. When the future of tap came around, it was inevitably about Savion Glover. He adored Savion, and was a real father figure to him. In this conversation he compared Glover to Bill Russell of the 1960s Boston Celtics, who revolutionized the game of basketball.

"Savion took tap dancing and he changed it ... changed how people saw it, changed how people wanted to learn it, changed how people wanted to perform it and put it to the degree that if you want to see the progression, you have to see Savion last ... You want to see Riverdance? Cool. You want to see Lord of the Dance? You want to see Tap Dogs, Stomp? See them first. Don't see Noise/Funk and then go to Tap Dogs. You have to see Tap Dogs, enjoy it for what it is--hunky guys dancing in various forms of undress, dancing on water. Then you go see what tap dancing is, where it is, where Savion continues to take it."

I've always regretted that I wasn't a Hines tapomane, watching him improvise every night in Sophisticated Ladies on Broadway the way balletomanes watched Suzanne Farrell's or Darci Kistler's growth nightly during the ballet seasons. No one I know ever followed Gregory's dancing except possibly Barry Saperstein, who worked with him ever since the family act of Hines, Hines, and Dad played the Catskills at the tail end of vaudeville and the beginning of television. Saperstein was his drummer and musical director continuously on the road where he made a living for his family doing his nightclub act on concert, college, and Las Vegas stages (he carried his own floors in later years) when he wasn't doing movies, television, and always, always appearing in tap benefits, on everyone's boards of directors, giving advice. K. C. Patrick remembers Gregory at a press conference being introduced as the first celebrity spokesperson for National Dance Week in 19xx when she was the only journalist there. With no formal agenda, he nonetheless spread the word for dance in every class and performance he gave that year.