Carry your shoes: tap dancer-comedian Jane Goldberg recalls her personal passage to India

Tap dancing in India! Hoofing at the Taj Mahal! Spinning in Madras! Bombing in Bombay! It all happened to me because I applied for a Fulbright Indo-American fellowship to "research the relationship between jazz tap and Indian classical dance, primarily kathakali." Actually, there was none. I meant kathak, where at least the feet move rhythmically (the term means "storyteller"). I was fascinated with the "foot cultures of the world," I wrote.

Applying had been the idea of my friend Betty Bernhard. She is a feminist theater professor who gets grants to go everywhere, but she had really fallen for India - its theater, dance, and food; also a man named Kailash. One night, when she was projecting slides of elephants, textiles, and Indian theater productions onto my bedroom wall, she said, "You've got to go to India." On a dare I filled out the Fulbright applications, thinking nothing would happen. Naturally I went into a major panic attack when my acceptance letter came a year and a half after I applied. I burned incense and prayed for inspiration.

I met Badal Roy, an Indian tabla player who lived in New Jersey and played for modern dance choreographer Jonathan Hollander. His drumming sounded just like tap. In fact, he had played with Miles Davis and had a jazz feel himself. He came to my apartment, and we played "tabla tap" and sat on the floor drinking tea; he told me to travel with my boyfriend, that it was hard for a woman traveling alone in India. More panic. I also met India's jazz impresario, Niranjan Jhaveri, at his son's Lower East Side apartment. Niranjan saw a video I'd made and got me my first booking: tap dancing in Bombay's renowned Oberoi Towers on New Year's Eve. He warned me to wear lots of glitter.

After this breakthrough, Betty and Kailash began preparing a hit list of people to contact (among them a feminist collective in Madras). I reached by phone Kumudini Lakhia, a renowned kathak dancer and innovator in the form, who lived in Ahmedebad. "Sounds interesting," she had said over a cracklingly bad connection. "Come." Ahmedebad would be my sponsor city. Eagerly, I looked it up in a Lonely Planet guidebook; it was known as the "city of dust."

I broke out in hives just before the departure, but I left anyway. I landed with my hit list, two pairs of tap shoes, a backpack filled with every medicine I could think of, and a ton of glitter.

Well, as I admitted right off, I bombed in Bombay. Georgy, the Oberoi Towers emcee, had to beg the audience of seven hundred drunken businessmen to welcome me, but they had not come to look at or listen to any tap dancer on New Year's Eve. There were three different rooms in this Disney-like complex, and I was asked to scurry around to all of them. I did manage to thrive with the Take Three jazz trio in one lounge. They couldn't believe I lived in the same building as Sonny Rollins.

This mad gig was not a total loss, for through my lighting designer, Sam Kerawalla, I met Colonel S. Y. Rege of the National Center for Performing Arts. One huge, articulate fan of kathak, Colonel Rege told me about the temples, courts, and Mogul empire where the "storytellers" danced and were married to God. When the kathaks weren't telling a story through their abhinayas ("expressions"), the dancers slapped their bare feet on hard marble floors to create unimaginable rhythms. I grabbed my notebook and wrote down everything the colonel said as we drank tea together and he reminisced about the Astaire and Rogers movies shown in India and about his own ballroom years during British rule.

Colonel Rege wanted to hear me dance. I told him I didn't have my tap shoes, so he pulled off his loafers and handed them to me. Though they were three sizes too big, I tapped in them as he snapped his fingers to the beat of my feet. Rege gave me my first real lesson of the journey: Always carry your tap shoes. You never know when you are going to dance. He also helped me chart an itinerary, taught me the difference between tourist and regular taxis, and charted the fine points of etiquette.

It was essential, for instance, to present a single rose to Bombay's kathak maven, Sutari Devi, when I met her. My meeting with this grande dame reminded me of how I had chased after the old vaudeville hoofers to hear their stories and learn their steps. Sutari Devi wore lots of makeup, and her bright red lipstick complemented her large red bindi (the dot painted on the forehead). As she held her puppy, she sang rhythms to her student. I tapped for her in my silver glitter shoes, the tap answer to Dorothy's ruby slippers. She said she loved the Nicholas Brothers and Eleanor Powell.

In Poona I stayed with Niranjan's daughter Neesha Jhaveri, eating authentic Indian food that I saw prepared every night. Neesha was a modern dancer, and we talked shop for two weeks. There I phoned my two kathak contacts, Rhohini Bhate and Prabha Mharate, and began teaching tap to their students. Although they were barefoot, they could easily "get the feet," i.e., learn the tap steps. I also met a caterer, Dilip Borowake, who insisted that I see his gardens. I didn't realize that he was one of Poona's leading citizens. When I expressed my admiration for his gorgeous green mosaic floor after I began tapping on it, he presented me with a complete sound system, microphone and all. One hundred of Poona's finest feasted on my "feet" and his food. I told myself this was how Isadora Duncan started out, dancing for the well-heeled in European salons. I tapped to the renowned tabla of Zakir Hussein, and though I didn't get all the rhythms, the Indian audience appreciated my stab at their music.