ABSTRACT
No Maps on My Taps, an hour-long documentary by filmmaker George T. Nierenberg, emerged in 1980 at the same time my West Coast colleagues and I were creating a new format for tap dancing-live, and in concert. On a mission to rediscover, reinvent, and revive the form, we aspired to be the Modern Jazz Quartet of tap, a small chamber ensemble of distinctive soloists, each with a singular voice and able to participate fully as instrumentalists in the totality of the music-making. We were creating a tap-dance company with live jazz music, in which the creative collaborations and ideas of the dancers and musicians intended to engage an audience for a whole evening’s presentation of tap dancing-not as a novelty, not as a seven-minute vaudeville song and dance routine, and not for the sake of nostalgia, but as a lively indigenous dance art worthy of attention and begging for new exploration.
