Conjuring Spirits at the Tap Family Reunion

NEW YORK — A line of people spilled off the sidewalk in front of the Schomburg Center in Harlem early Friday evening, waiting to get inside. As more people arrived, they were greeted with waves, hugs and murmurings of “It’s been a long time.” If you had guessed it was a gathering of friends and relatives, you would have been mostly right. It was the opening event of the Tap Family Reunion.

May 25 is National Tap Dance Day, so designated by Congress in 1989. Every year since then, around that date — the birthday of Bill Robinson, the most famous African-American tap dancer of the first half of the 20th century — tap dancers have celebrated their art with performances and get-togethers around the country and the world.

Recently, though, the New York City celebration has been diminishing. Last year, there wasn’t one at all. Tap Family Reunion was an attempt at resurrection by three of the form’s current leaders: Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, Derick K. Grant and Jason Samuels Smith. It was a full weekend affair with a day of classes, a game of tap trivia, a dance contest, a scavenger hunt involving historical tap sites (many of which no longer exist) and a five-hour jam session.

Much of this was participant-only stuff, but the event Friday night was a show, “Raising the Bar,” choreographed and directed by the three organizers to convey, in Sumbry-Edwards’ words, “how we feel about the dance.” The dominant feeling was a love of tradition, expressed even in the format, with a jazz band and a singer (the ebullient Antoinette Montague, who also played kazoo) accompanying a series of hotshot improvisers (Maurice Chestnut, Nico Rubio) and octogenarian masters (Skip Cunningham, Brenda Bufalino).

Traditional, too, was the grass-roots atmosphere. The show most resembled National Tap Dance Day events of the past in its frustrating, endearing blend of amateurish and top-of-the-line, its rough-edged and under-rehearsed presentation of awe-inspiring talent and skill.

One notable divergence was the use of a dancing chorus, an ensemble of nine young hoofers that got its own numbers, each a mix of choreography and spots for individual improvisation. This choreography was intricate and sophisticated, at once old-fashioned and up-to-date. It was just beyond the comfort zone of these gifted youth, but the aspiration was moving. You could sense them trying to fill the shoes of the choreographers, who did not perform. And this next generation was catching up fast.

Tap events like this are always about generations, about continuity and change. At the Sunday jam session, Cunningham, who is 82, was asked to give advice. What he gave instead was reminiscence and regret that young tap dancers don’t have what he did when he was young, abundant chances to dance for “paying audiences, not for ourselves.”

He was referring to an old and persistent problem. One more resemblance between “Raising the Bar” and previous Tap Day events was an audience that appeared to be mostly other tap dancers — an enthusiastic crowd who recognized with whoops the quotation of a Bill Robinson step. But if the insular nature of the event might have prompted depressing thoughts about tap’s general popularity, the family reunion part was as heartening as ever.

That jam session is another tradition that has been dormant. For a few years around the turn of the 21st century, it was a weekly event at Swing 46 Jazz and Supper Club in Midtown Manhattan, led by the beloved hoofer Buster Brown. As Smith led the jam at that same club Sunday, joking easily but also sermonizing, he invoked Brown amid a litany of dead tap dancers.

“When you say their names, you conjure their spirits,” he said. “And without their spirits, what are we doing?”

Who knows if this revival of Tap Day or the jam will last, but those spirits were conjured, in the dancers. Take the 12-year-old Foreman twins, Jaden and Ellis, who put down a highly impressive mix of duo unison and trading, swinging as dancers of their great-grandparents’ day used to do. Or those young guns in the “Raising the Bar” ensemble, especially Jalen Saint Phifer and Jabu Graybeal, who with some more room to spread out, sent the crowd into a frenzy.

Based on yelled-out commentary, no one was more proud than the three organizers. Twenty years ago, they were the hotshots proving themselves at Swing 46. Now, as “Raising the Bar” and the whole Tap Family Reunion proved, they are the parental generation, the educators. When, at the end of the jam, they took the floor, it was an unmistakable demonstration of mastery and maturity. Over at the tables occupied by the generation just below them, a sea of smartphones recorded the lesson.