Word: tap
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...injecting realism in Hollywood films by "dancing over table tops and down garden paths into the real world." Kracauer was totally wrong - Astaire didn't bring realism but rather a nonchalant nobility to movies - but it's touching that the nutty professor bent his theory to accommodate a tap dancer he loved...
...Anyone with eyes can tell why Astaire was considered the great American dancer. He was the first with the most - the pioneer who was also the supreme refiner. Tap dancing had traditionally been all legwork, with the upper body stationary (think Gene Kelly). Astaire, as his teacher Ned Wayburn noted, "was the first American tap dancer to consciously employ the full resources of his arms, hands and torso for visual ornamentation." Then he integrated ballet and ballroom dance into his style. He wasn't grounded, in the old tap fashion; he floated, soared like Nijinsky. The mood of his dances...
...might have said, you had to be there. What's beguiling about these early sides is Fred's attempt to find a style. The voice never grew, but his knowledge of lyric reading eventually did. (A few of the songs also have a chorus or two of Fred's tap dancing, which doesn't record well; to the great public outside New York, it sounded cold and clangorous, like late-night mischief in the back alley...
...they move upstage she throws in a cute little step that the music doesn't allow him to duplicate - a cheap little triumph that he acknowledges by wheeling on one foot and raising his hand to his mouth. For 12 bars they do some snazzy vaudeville tap figures in synch and turn in toward each other. This is the moment when dancers would normally embrace and spin off together, but these two stop just short of touching. This tactic continues through most of the number: every time the music, or their steps, seem ready to force them into a clutch...
...daring: okay, what'll you try now? The music persuades them to sway in syncopation, then to enlarge the movement, describing a circle as their arms swinging wider (right, left, four times each). They stop, twirl, clap hands simultaneously and (on "Oh what a break") do a ten-tap strut to the front of the gazebo, landing in synch on the right foot. The first time, Ginger had to undercut Fred's flourish; this time she's with...