It’s rare that a book comes out that’s immediately hailed as definitive, but that’s what happened to Brian Seibert’s monumental and engaging cultural history, “What The Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing.” It’s an intriguing title, which is Seibert’s theme, that tap is both dance and music, movement and sound. When Seibert recently spoke about the book at Southampton Library, he concluded his talk with a brief improvisational performance. The audience went wild. Seibert was delighted, and the audience was delighted with him, his learning, his modesty. It took him 15 years to complete the book, he said, and he could have gone on.
Though his day jobs include teaching in the theater department at Yale and writing dance criticism for The New York Times and The New Yorker, Seibert is a well-schooled tap dancer, having taken lessons since the age of six, when his mother, seeing how awful he was at soccer, wanted to improve his coordination. Did he ever improve and fall in love with tap and its stars—John Bubbles, The Nicholas Brothers, Bojangles, Gregory Hines. Savion Glover, who choreographed Shuffle Along, now on Broadway.
The book is long and overly inclusive at over 600 pages, excluding photos, but how could he ignore all those wonderful hoofers, sung and unsung, including women, their stories, all the imitation and theft routines that defined the tap dancing world in its heyday—the ‘20s through the ‘50s.
Although the ultimate origins of tap remain unknown, Seibert’s extensive research has led him to attribute its early development in this country to ex-slaves and indentured Irish, two poor immigrant groups who lived near each other in squalid parts of town and often wound up sharing gene pools and step dancing.
One of the particular pleasures of the book is the ease with which Seibert interrupts his narrative with personal remarks. He loves Fred Astaire, not Gene Kelly, a great dancer but not as original or as devoted to tap and thinks Donald O’Connor under appreciated. As for what’s been hailed as Hollywood’s greatest musical, “Singin’ in the Rain,” who knew the tapping was dubbed, not unusual as it turns out for movies.
Seibert’s personal remarks also include anger at the racism that dogged tap from its earliest days when slaves were forced to dance to entertain their masters. One of the great ironies of the Jim Crow Reconstruction Era, however, was that blacks copied minstrel shows, which were originally white, and mocked and surpassed them as entertainments. A typical vaudeville skit would feature blacks blackening up to portray whites portraying blacks!
Seibert admits that tap, unlike ballet, “remains peripheral to contemporary popular culture.” The venues are gone, the jazz clubs, the big band dance floors. But it’s still with us—America’s only distinctive dance form—and “What the Eye Hears” show why, paying joyous homage.
