Thursday, January 27, 2005

Caught Perrididdling

"i need a step," I tell Annette one night in the kitchen. "If someone says, 'You tap? Show me a little step,' I can't."

"You know lots of steps," Annette says, rinsing off a dinner plate. "Flap, Heel, Shuffle, Truck, Chug --"

"But I can't put them together. I need something, I dunno, self-contained. Like a riff."

"You mean like a time step?"

"Yeah!" Pioneers of tap used the time step as a two-bar intro to show their live accompaniment what tempo to play. The time step has endless variations. I have the tap dance dictionary to prove it. "Uh … is a time step too hard for me?"

Annette gives me her assessing look. She shoves a stray curl behind her ear, and ventures, "I could show you a Perrididdle."

"Cool!" All I know is that drummers do them, too. "What's that?"

Annette tosses her dish towel onto the counter and turns so we face the same direction. She lifts her left foot slightly, then straightens her knee so that her heel strikes the floor, but her toes do not. The rubber sole makes a dull thud. "That's called a Dig," she says. Then she whaps her toes down while jerking her foot back and up, as if the floor were red hot. "Spank," she explains. Then she touches just the toes back to the floor. "Step." She drops her heel with a nice solid thud. "Heel." Her brown eyes check to see if I get it.

"Okay," I say.

She shifts her weight to free up her right foot. "Then you do it on the other side, like this. Dig. Spank. Step. Heel. Then you just alternate." She shows me. Even without her taps on, each foot fires off its four beats evenly and rapidly, the other foot picking up the beat so it all sounds like one continuous tattoo.

"Got it," I say. I mean conceptually. I try a solitary Dig. Mugs hanging from a decorative stand clink together. On the Spank, the toe of my hiking boot sticks to the ground. I pick it up and do a retarded Step, looking like Jerry Lewis learning to tip-toe. On the Heel, spatulas and spoons hanging on the wall tremble.

Irrationally shy about practicing in front of Annette, I say brightly, "I'll work on it! Thanks!"

She shrugs and resumes cleaning the kitchen.

The next night, while she is out teaching classes too advanced for me, I have the house to myself. With my tap shoes on, I blap into the kitchen. Out the sliding glass door, I see the house behind ours with its lit bedroom, kitchen, and TV room glowing golden in the black night. My neighbor to the rear has a TV measuring at least 50 inches, and from my kitchen I can easily recognize what video game he or his son is playing. And if I can see them, they can see me. I seriously consider practicing with the kitchen lights off. Finally, I decide that my lunging and hopping and staggering in the dark would look creepier to the neighbors than just dancing badly in the light.

I warm up with the Shucking Fuffles, and don't totally suck. I hit a few Air Shuffles partway through, but at least I don't scramble for balance like I used to. When Ella finishes singing, I sigh. No more putting it off. Time to Perrididdle.

On the counter next to the Kaboom Box, I find a CD labeled Dirty Vegas. This name evokes slinky grindy lounge music, but when I put it on, it is the kind of cool Brit electronica that sells Mitsubishi Eclipses. I find a mid-tempo song and launch into the Perrididdles.

I watch the ghostly reflection of myself in the sliding glass door. Perhaps when I get good, the ghost dancer will become solid. As I watch my feet cycle through the Perrididdles, for the first time ever, I look like a tap dancer. The faded linoleum yields a satisfying snap even though I am working little. I sound like a tap dancer, too.

Suddenly I love Perrididdles. Like, I can do them! And they go with the music! And they look kinda cool, not like dork tap. I must Make Them My Own.

The song ends and a slightly faster one begins. When I hear the tempo, I catch my breath in dismay. Then I dig in. Hey! I can keep up! Dig Spank Step Heel, Dig Spank Step Heel.

I get rid of Dirty Vegas and throw in another CD at random. It turns out to be James Taylor's October Sky. Song after song, I can Perrididdle to anything in 4/4 time. I test my control by emphasizing different beats: dig Spank Step Heel, dig Spank Step Heel, Dig spank Step Heel, Dig spank Step Heel...

Your average adult contemporary song (think Clapton, Sting, Bonnie Raitt) puts the snare on the third beat of each measure. When I try Dig Spank step Heel, Dig Spank step Heel, the snap! of my Step locks in with the ka! of the snare. I am merely faking my way along, but suddenly it sounds choreographed and professional. A thrill shoots through me. I am da tap dancin' man! Just listen to me!

I discover I can travel the Perrididdles in tiny steps. I groove my way down our long skinny kitchen, tapping a victory lap toward the refrigerator while J. T. lays on the bluesy sax. As I draw near, the refrigerator and the stove jostle together, as if trying to keep straight faces while elbowing one another. Unfazed, I turn and groove my way back to the kitchen table in funky abandon.

That's when I notice the guy in the house behind mine staring out his second-story bedroom window, across my black lawn, to where my kitchen spotlights me. He has the same first name I do, and for a moment he seems like the old me, peering at the dancing me, mystified. I feel so exhilarated, I don't care. Mere mortal concerns fade now that I can dance like the wind. OK, actually, I dance more like Extreme Slow-Motion Hail, but now is not the time to get picky. Now is the time to celebrate. Live to Perrididdle! Perrididdle to live! For tonight, I have my first toe-hold on Tap. ##

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

B. S. Chorus

It turns out that Annette has a tap dance dictionary. This amuses me endlessly, since describing a tap step in words alone seems like it wouldn't work any better than the reverse -- say, explaining the definition of a chemistry term through interpretive dance alone.

I find I can't stop paging through the thing, even though I don't yet understand the notation defining each step.

First, it seems authoritative. It was written by a guy named Mark Knowles, who learned the steps from his teacher Louis DaPron, who learned the steps from Fred Astaire and Bill Robinson (familiar to more people under his stage name, Mr. Bojangles). Wow!

Second, it gives the oddest glimpses into a time and culture that seems wholly separate from our own, yet still exerts a startling amount of cultural influence. When I tap dance each week with a room full of white-collar professionals, it never occurs to me that we are struggling to learn an art form invented by plantation slaves.

From here forward, I'll occasionally drop a random entry from The Tap Dance Dictionary, by Mark Knowles, into this blog. Here are a couple to get us started. Mr. Knowles authored all the remaining text in this entry.

B.S. Chorus: A traditional vaudeville routine performed by a chorus which combined tap and non-tap and was generally used as a background for tap soloists. The dance earned its name from the relative simplicity of the steps, although naive chorines were told the letters B.S. stood for Boy Scout. Created for a very specific purpose -- to facilitate the use of local talent when vaudeville headliners wanted to add dancers to their acts -- the B.S. Chorus was learned by dancers all over the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. It was kept fairly simple so that chorines could at least fake it, even if they were not terribly accomplished as tap dancers. The dance was made up of the standard thirty-two bars and divided into four sections with eight bars apiece. These four sections generally consisted of:
  1. Eight bars of the Time-Step.
  2. Eight bars of the Crossover.
  3. Eight bars of the Buck and Wing.
  4. Four bars of Over the Top and four of Through the Trenches, and a finish.

Cut His Mouth Out: In a dance competition, to "best" someone so completely that he or she is left speechless in defeat.

Jim Crow: The stage name of Thomas Dartmouth Rice, also known as Daddy "Jim Crow" Rice. A minstrel performer, Rice gained enormous popularity by introducing a parody dance into his act in Louisville, Kentucky, in the early 1800s. Performing in black-face, and dancing to an African-American work song, he mimicked the movements of a crippled slave named Jim Crow whom he had seen working in the livery stable behind the theater. The dance, which consisted of limping, shuffling and jigging movements, ended with a little jump at the end of each refrain. When Rice first introduced the dance, it was wildly received and brought him twenty curtain calls. The dance and accompanying song turned Rice into the highest paid minstrel performer around, and soon he was presenting the dance internationally with similar success. The song that accompanied the dance was even translated into Hindu. The dance became known as the Jumping Jim Crow, and grew into a popular social dance and a national dance craze of the early 1800s. One particular movement in the dance, which consisted of swaying the hips with one arm waving and wagging the finger, is thought to have later developed into the social dance Truckin'.

The mimicking of African-American dances and the use of African-American music as source material not only had a profound influence on the development of minstrel entertainment and tap dancing, but also had a lasting influence on the development of music and theater in general. Stephen Foster saw Rice perform this dance and was said to have been greatly influenced by it in the writing of his songs "Camptown Races" and "Old Folks at Home." The dance's popularity also meant that Rice's particular caricature was also extremely influential in establishing the way that African-Americans were subsequently presented in theater pieces. The cliche of the "dancing darkey" grinning from ear to ear became a fixture of both nineteenth century literature and popular entertainments, creating powerful negative stereotypes that were not challenged until the advent of such dancers as Bill Robinson and John Bubbles. ##


Thursday, January 20, 2005

Shucking Fuffles

Because I began tap dancing as a joke, I felt no obligation to practice between classes. Now, with poetic justice, I'm caught in my own prank: I care about getting good. After ten lessons, it vexes me that I still can't get through that opening Shuffle exercise without stopping to catch my balance. And I'm intrigued to see if working little will solve the problem. In my fourth month of taking tap dance lessons, I finally break down and do the previously unthinkable: I practice on my Own Time.

One Thursday night, with Annette at the studio teaching advanced tappers, I find myself alone at home. I push the unwashed dinner dishes out of the way and haul the Kaboom Box to the kitchen counter. I sit at a table spilling over with junk mail, and change into my tap shoes. Expecting this will not be pretty, I steel myself to the task, even if it means I will murder Tap. I possess both the motive and the opportunity, like a rejected suspect from Clue: Colonel Fat Man, in the kitchen, with a pair of shoes.

In the big glass sliding door leading to the night-shrouded backyard, I can see a ghostly reflection of myself. I throw "Hard Hearted Hannah" into the Kaboom Box and ready myself: toes turned out, knees bent slightly, shoulders leaning forward, eyes fastened on the ghost feet in the reflection. There's the cue, and I launch into the seven opening Shuffles with ease. On the eighth beat comes the Step and the shift of weight, so I can repeat the Shuffles with my other foot, and -- dammit! My ever-retarded left foot taps the floor on the way out but misses on the way back. Annette calls these "Air Shuffles." I can't believe I messed up this early in the exercise. I stop the music. I start over.

As the intro plays out, I coach myself by recalling the night I danced better by being mad at the floor. I remind myself to work little. Shrink those Shuffles! Go! I make it through the seven opening Shuffles, as I usually do; Step on the eighth beat, shift weight, and perform the seven left-foot Shuffles flawlessly. I make it through all the forward Shuffles and halfway through the side Shuffles before I teeter and have to miss a couple of beats while I catch my balance. OK, this is an improvement. I have all night. I can do this. Keep going.

In the middle of the song, I hear Ella wail, "...Is like travelin' through Alaska in your BVDs." Hey, what is this song about, anyway? Every time it comes on, I get busy throwing my weight around -- literally. I've heard the songs a dozen times now, but I haven't absorbed a single lyric. I finish the Shuffle exercise. Then I sit on a kitchen stool and play the song again, just listening to the words. Minutes later I snap out of it, realizing I'm indulging in classic avoidance behavior. C'mon, no distractions! We are going to master those Shuffles!

I start the song again, and immediately misfire three Air Shuffles. Stop. Focus. It's the landlord's floor, scuff it all you want. As Annette says so dramatically, lay down some steel!

Begin again. This time I make it through all the forward Shuffles, all the side Shuffles, and the first seven back Shuffles before I get lost. Cool! Working little really helps!

I make it through "Hard Hearted Hannah" a third time. I might have all night, but my legs don't. When I stand on either foot, the weight-bearing leg trembles. My outside thigh muscles burn, right under my hip bones, presumably from the effort of keeping my bouncing baby belly in check. By the end of the third run-through, I am sweating, panting, and quivering. I collapse onto the stool and gulp water.

"Hard Hearted Hannah" is a short song. I have been dancing less than ten minutes. Cor blimey, all this just from those shucking Fuffles?

All right. So I won't master the Shuffles tonight. I made good progress. Now that I know about this wizardly secret called "practicing," it's just a matter of time. You win this round, Shuffles, but you haven't seen the last of me!

I start chuckling. My empty threat aimed at Shuffles reminds me of a crude moment from Sealab 2021. In Episode 7, "Little Orphan Angry," a cute orphan boy feigns a terminal illness so he can visit Sealab's underwater base as his "dying wish." He relentlessly guilts Sealab's crew into serving his every selfish whim, because he's "dying." When Captain Murphy discovers that it's all a scam, he jumps into a golf cart and chases the fleeing orphan down Sealab's steel corridors. Murphy finally runs over the orphan. Stops. Backs the golf cart over the orphan. Stops. Runs over the orphan. Stops. Backs over the orphan. Stops. Runs over ... This repeats endlessly while gratuitous gallons of cartoon blood splash up from the bottom of the screen. Eventually, in his Oliver Twist accent, the mangled orphan begins (from under the golf cart wheels), "All right, you win this round, old man--" Murphy interrupts, "Well duh!"

Somehow, I don't think the Shuffles are afraid of me. Swearing vengeance on an enemy who doesn't know you exist is certainly quixotic. But then again, so is taking up a ridiculous hobby and moving from ironic detachment to personal investment.

The bad news: I am an existential joke. The other news: At least I write my own material. ##

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

The Shuffle Exercise

(In video game terminology: a mini-boss)

Hard Hearted Hannah

(Bates - Bigelow - Yellen - Ager)
As sung by Ella Fitzgerald

In old Savannah, I said Savannah,
The weather there is nice and warm!
The climate's of a Southern brand,
But here's what I don't understand:
They got a gal there, a pretty gal there,
Who's colder than an Arctic storm,
Got a heart just like a stone,
Even ice men leave her alone!

They call her Hard Hearted Hannah,
The vamp of Savannah,
The meanest gal in town;
Leather is tough, but Hannah's heart is tougher,
She's a gal who loves to see men suffer!
To tease 'em, and thrill 'em, to torture and kill 'em,
Is her delight, they say,
I saw her at the seashore with a great big pan,
There was Hannah pouring water on a drowndin' man!
She's Hard Hearted Hannah, the vamp of Savannah, GA!

They call her Hard Hearted Hannah,
The vamp of Savannah,
The meanest gal in town;
Talk of your cold, refrigeratin' mamas,
Brother, she's a polar bear's pajamas!
To tease 'em and thrill 'em, to torture and kill 'em,
Is her delight, they say,
An evening spent with Hannah sittin' on your knees,
Is like travelin' through Alaska in your BVDs.
She's Hard Hearted Hannah, the vamp of Savannah, GA!

Can you imagine a woman as cold as Hannah
She's got the right name, The vamp of Savannah
Any time a woman can take a great big pan
And start pouring water on a drowndin' man
She's hard hearted Hannah
The Vamp of Savannah GA

[spoken] Ooh, she's sweet as sour milk

The Steps:

Right

7 Shuffles, Step
Even beats On 8


Left
7 Shuffles, Step
Even beats On 8


Right
Shuffle Shuffle Shuffle Step
+ 1 + 2 + 3 4


Left
Shuffle Shuffle Shuffle Step
+ 1 + 2 + 3 4


Right Left
Shuffle Step Shuffle Step
+ 1 2 + 3 4


Right Left
Shuffle Step Shuffle Stamp
+ 1 2 + 3 4


All steps above are Forward Shuffles
Repeat all as Side Shuffles
Repeat all as Back Shuffles
Begin again and proceed until music ends

Sunday, January 09, 2005

Lesson 9: Working Little

In the strange way of adult night classes, we had a large class last week, but tonight, only two of us show up: myself, and Faith, a teacher of gifted fifth- and sixth-graders. At first I wonder where everyone else is, but as soon as Annette begins the lesson, I don't care. I quickly notice the advantages of having a semi-private lesson.

For one thing, I can hear the music much better. The studio owns some powerful audio gear, but the technophobic ballet teacher refuses to let it be installed in this room. That means when Annette teaches in this room, she's stuck with a pair of piddly speakers you can hear only when you're right in front of them. But tonight, with only two students rather than nine, I can hear the beat no matter where we wander.

Second, I can hear my own tapping much better. As Faith and I perform Annette's assignments, I'm surprised to find I have not actually mastered some of what I thought I had. You would think someone who has been ambulatory for over four decades could find the floor without looking. You would be wrong. I shoot my foot out for a Shuffle that should produce two sharp taps, but instead I get a smeary shhh. My shoe and the floor are shushing me. I try not to let this dim my enthusiasm.

Third, with fewer students, Annette can focus more on our specific problems. As we Shuffle to "Hard-Hearted Hannah," Annette offers small suggestions that improve our ungainly movements: "See how you pull your foot back there? You don't need to cock it before a Shuffle; just strike." "Don't be afraid to use your ankle muscles; that's how your foot knows what to do!" "You'll balance better if you lean forward slightly."

These little tips quickly accumulate into big improvement in our dancing. Spurred by our progress, Annette plays faster-tempo music, "I Like That" by Houston. The faster pace loses me within seconds. My steps stop resembling dancing. My feet flail at the floor as if I bear it a grudge. Faith similarly paws the ground.

Annette stops the music. "I haven't talked to you about working little," she says. "When the music speeds up, in order to get the taps out in time, you have to use smaller motions. You can do a lot of work, like this" -- she fires off four Shuffles, jerking her whole leg back and forth in exaggerated swings -- "or you can do it like this." She repeats the four Shuffles, this time barely moving from the knee down. The tapping sounds identical. "Unless a choreographer is having you move big in order to communicate something stylistically, work little. Overall, you should see how little motion you can make while still getting the sound. Let's try it."

I had been so worried about keeping my balance and getting the sounds out on the beat, I had never thought of trying to be efficient about it. She gives us a combination to do, and I try making the sounds economically. It feels like a miracle. I thought I had to flap my whole leg in order to get a satisfying whap! out of the floor. I find I can lift my foot a half inch and spank the ground with my toes, using my ankle muscles, and get just as loud and crisp a sound. The man in the wall mirror is grinning. He also looks far more like a dancer than ever before.

"Working little" seems like a breakthrough. All the way home, I feel exhilarated at the potential of trying all the steps again while working little. Simultaneously, I feel like an idiot for having to be told about it. I'm trying to learn an art form that is supposed to look elegant, but I hadn't thought of trying to move efficiently. Duh.

For the next few days, all I can think of is working little. As I relax with a DVD at home, I begin to see that I'm not the only one who has failed to seek efficiency.

In the fascinating 2003 documentary, The Fog of War, former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara describes a problem the U.S. military faced during World War II. After the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan transformed itself into a foe that had to be confronted. But U.S. military strategists, their minds mired in the challenges of defeating Hitler in Europe, could not think of a way to reach Japan and strike back.

A huge new cargo plane had just been invented, and China also wanted to see Japan defeated. So the U.S. persuaded China to build an air strip for the gigantic cargo plane. We intended to fly the cargo plane from India to China, bringing enough fuel to leave a tanker of fuel on the Chinese air strip, then fly back to India. After weeks of doing this, there should be enough fuel in China to launch air attacks against Japan.

Building the Chinese air strip on rocky land took weeks. The Chinese government had convict laborers break the boulders into shale, by hand. Eventually the landing strip, looking more like a gravel quarry than an airport, was deemed ready. The cargo planes started the long flight from India to China.

On paper, the plan worked. In practice, it stunk. By the time the cargo planes landed in China, they didn't have any extra fuel. Sometimes if the winds were right, a cargo plane might deliver some fuel. But soon another flight would need that fuel simply to return home. After months of work, the plan was a bust.

Only then did some genius realize we could hop our planes to Japan the same way the Japanese had gotten theirs to Hawaii: by stopping at Pacific islands along the way. By "thinking little," we soon defeated Japan. McNamara's point was that we had gotten so caught up in Might, we hadn't even thought about efficiency.

The more I thought about working little, the more ways I could apply it. Anyone who has saved up a big jar of change and discovered they could buy something important with all those pennies, nickels, and dimes knows what I'm talking about. But I live in America, the land where only the biggest, the most, the loudest, the "mega," makes news. Our business leaders keep encouraging us to "Focus on the big picture!" That's oxymoronic. That's saying, "Emphasize everything!" Or, as the T-shirt I saw at Defcon 12 put it, "Everything louder than everything else!" Working little isn't flashy. It's counter-intuitive. But when the grand big picture isn't working out, little is what you need.

At work, one of the reporters complained it was impossible to fit what he wanted to say into his allotted 400 words. When I asked him what point he was trying to make, he gave me four points. Working little was the answer. That word count allowed room to develop only one point convincingly. He stripped his article down to its most important point and had it done later that same hour. It was stronger because of its narrow focus, and customers wrote in both arguing with it and praising it.

Ann Lamott, from Bird by Bird: "All I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being.... E. L. Doctorow once said that 'writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard."

Sometimes little is good. "Practice yourself, for heaven's sake, in little things;" wrote Epictetus, a first-century philosopher, "and thence proceed to greater." ##