Review: _Diary of a Tap Dancer_

[jducoeur]

Another season, another new show at the ART. Tonight was a preview showing of Ayodele Casel's Diary of a Tap Dancer. It's worth talking about.

The show is intensely autobiographical: a memoir told on stage in the form of (mostly) monologue and dance, with a fine and diverse cast of performers backing her up. They fill in the roles of some of the important people in her life (most notably her mother), but the story is mostly narrative, starting from a young age.

The first act is mostly chronological, outlining and filling in what it was like growing up biracial, first in the Bronx and then exiled for years to Puerto Rico. Then the hunt to find the father she had never met, and finally the discovery of the movies of Ginger Rogers, and beginning to get a hint of her calling.

Act two continues in that vein, but begins to explore the history of tap, and her growing realization of how little she really knew about her own art form. Finally, there comes the dawning realization that, far from being a historical outlier as a black female tapper, she is instead following in a deep tradition -- a tradition that had been almost entirely erased from history, of the black women who had been major stars only fifty years before, and then deliberately forgotten.

Calling the last third of the show "impassioned" would be an understatement: it is a cry of sadness and anger about the women whose legacies were almost buried forever, and a fierce demand to remember them and the generation now rising.

It's as personal a show as I've seen, with a raw intensity at times that is almost hard to watch -- I have no clue how she can bare herself to such a degree night after night and then keep on dancing. But it's impossible to look away.

Obviously, this is a story that is deeply about racism and sexism, told not in facile metaphor or melodrama but simply in the facts of her own life and the history that she gradually learned.

And not to be overlooked: this is also about tap -- not so much the show-biz-smooth styles of Rogers and Astaire, but the from-the-soul expressions that became her obsession and her pride. There's a lot of truly great dance on stage here, telling the story just as much as the words are.

It runs through early January at the ART, and is well worth seeing. If you can make it, please take the opportunity.