The unmissable Diary of a Tap Dancer – a world premiere at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and surely its life is only beginning there – triumphs on several levels at once: as entertainment, as history, as personal profile and as sociology. It’s sure to be, or ought to be, of interest to every appreciator or student of the performing arts in American life.
True to the workaday title, it chronicles the personal and professional odyssey of a lifelong practitioner, the tireless, inventive author/choreographer Ayodele Casel. This Manhattan-raised daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and an African American dad narrates a youth obsessed with classic Hollywood musicals until she discovers a talent for tap. She’s irresistibly drawn to a craft so marginal and unappreciated that (as is wryly pointed out early on) there isn’t even a distinct name for someone who taps for a living.
Sent away to her mother’s island to escape an abusive stepfather, young Casel becomes aware of multiple cultural strains that she will learn to incorporate into her dance. This is wordlessly illustrated when she and her troupe of seven dramatize the historical transition from Yoruba-inspired movement, through the regimentation of the old minstrel shows, into the splashy energy of a Cotton Club chorus line. Any spectator careless enough to dismiss tap as a lot of noise and fast footwork is quickly brought to the truth of Casel’s creed: It’s a movement language as expressive and individualistic as any other, one admitting of vast variety and deserving of respect.
If this Diary told only one performer’s story, a variation on A Star Is Born, it would be compelling enough. But Casel goes on to present a detailed celebration of the art of tap as practiced by hundreds of women of color, on stage, in nightclubs and in Hollywood throughout the twentieth century. Often as not they were rated superior to their male colleagues, yet were always underpaid and underused, and remain today ignored by history. Casel reclaims them, names them, shows clips of their work and defies us to forget them ever again. (An account of meeting the nonagenarian Jeni Le Gon, one-time partner of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, brought tears to the eyes of more than one spectator at a recent performance.)
Unsurprisingly, Casel goes on to a measured indictment of the rampant misogyny of the fraternity of tap virtuosos, strutting their stuff with a big Men Only sign on the door. She describes a fruitless effort to gain traction with the cast of an off-Broadway hit that goes unnamed, but is clearly Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring In ‘Da Funk, and you can’t help thinking: That was a pageant of African-American history, told through tap from slavery days to the present. How much more vivid would it have been had the likes of Casel been admitted?
Well, today’s Jeni Le Gons are admitted at A.R.T., no lie. Casel has surrounded herself with seven superb female and nonbinary tappers with utterly distinct personalities: this one a pixie, that one gravely dignified; now playful, now angry. Each is given moments to stand out along the way; each is mentioned by name; together they drive home the message that tap is a domain in which women do thrive, and that there are as many styles of tapping as there are women (and men) who attempt it.
Director Torya Beard – who previously collaborated with Casel on a sensational Cook’s tour of tap called Chasing Magic at A.R.T. three years ago – deftly weaves together the various strains of this expansive story, supported by a hot trio of musicians under the direction of Nick Wilders (particular kudos to the searing rhythms of Keisel Jiménez Leyva on drums). It’s all backed up by an eye-popping collage of images and text in Katherine Freer’s projections. There aren’t many shows one wishes would go on longer, but this is one of them.
At the end of act one, we see a clip of no less an eminence than Gregory Hines opining that tap is a guy’s thing. His crisp assertion is belied by every sequence in Diary of a Tap Dancer, and quietly pushed aside by Casel herself: “It’s a man’s world,” she notes, “but I don’t care. I just want to dance.” And along with her troupe, does she ever.
