Word: tappings
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...Tap dancing, like jazz, is part of deep-rooted black culture. Slaves hoofed on bare dirt to silent rhythms; eventually stuck metal plates to the toe and heel of flat shoes. Tap's heyday came during the Harlem Renaissance of the 20s and 30s. Later, popularity spread when tap giants John Bubbles and Bill Robinson starred in Hollywood movies...
...Tap never left Harlem for good, however. Green Sims and Briggs all learned to tap on the streets, to street rhythms, spurred by intense competition to keep pace, to create new steps, to establish an identity. The greatest old timers came from the streets, but they don't dance anymore. John Bubbles, the original Sportin' Life in Porgy and Bess, lives it out in California, where he used to advise Fred Astaire. Bill Robinson, the old pro who tapped up and down stairs with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel, died a while ago. But No Maps has spectacular...
...boxing fans cheered his pre-fight dancing on the resin in the corner of the ring more than his boxing, he took up dancing seriously, incorporating into his act the sand dance that gave him his nickname. Sims steals Nierenberg's film. He loves the attention, claiming to be tap's Muhammed Ali, and in a "weighing-in" ceremony on a city street before the big night, he taunts Green and Briggs, daring them to tap it out "here...
Sims also displays an honesty, an awkwardness that is much more appealing than his clowning. Nierenberg beautifully captures Sims' afternoon visit with his ten-year-old son to the old Apollo Theater, where Sims had performed for 16 years before it went rock. Sandman remembers the nights he would tap himself off stage into a tall, wide brick alley where the night's dancing was just beginning. Passing on each step to his son, Sandman dances as Nierenberg backs his camera down the alley until we see the boy and his father dancing in a huge, austere cage...
...white tap dancer's got to say a black man taught me or I watched a black man," says Bunny Briggs. In the film's finale--the freestyle event in the competition at Small's Paradise--he, Green and Sims prove his point. These are not blonde chorus girls spinning their heels on Broadway. These are not even Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly hoofing it with lampposts on Hollywood back lots...