Clad in a loose black suit and soaking-wet tank top, Savion Glover stands hunched over onstage, sweat flying from his shoulder-length dreads as he drums out a series of beats and rhythms with terminology-defying footwork on an amplified floorboard. Rrrat-tat-tat-tat! It is difficult for the crowd at the Performing Arts Center in Purchase, N.Y., to keep up with Glover's fast and furious size 12 1/2 EE Capezio tap shoes. He manipulates his feet so it looks as if they have more movable joints than they actually do. The movement is so beautifully organic, the steps so unpredictable, it appears to be completely improvised.
"I want to give the audience what they want but also something unexpected," Glover says later.
So far, his plan is working. After the performance, middle-aged women and men gather at the stage door like groupies waiting to meet a rock star. In the lobby, kids who appear to be dance students imitate Glover's trademark hoofing, a gritty, harder-hitting form of tap. When Glover slides out to sign autographs, he almost goes unnoticed amid all the activity.
This is not the type of reaction one expects for a tap dancer. When people think of tap, what usually comes to mind is Steppin Fetchit in blackface or stiff-bodied, tuxedoed men jauntily doing step-flap-steps.
Then came "Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk." When the musical, which Glover helped create, opened in 1996 on Broadway, it wowed audiences with its contagious exuberance and inventive storytelling. The production covered every major era in African-American history with breathtaking tap numbers that brought down the house nightly. At the climax of one sad, funny scene, several dancers hailing a cab stomp rhythmically across the stage in frustration when one empty taxi after another purposely drives by. Glover, the show's star, won a Tony for best choreography in a musical. He left the cast in the summer of 1997, two years before the show's run ended.
Since then, Glover has starred in Spike Lee's 2000 movie "Bamboozled" and choreographed a popular TV spot for Nike with professional and playground legends dribbling a basketball and dancing to an old-school beat (an extended version aired on MTV). In February, he performed at the closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics.
It's rare for people in his profession to gain fame outside the dance world, but Glover mixes mediums as easily as he shuffle-ball-steps. "The art is far more important than show business to me," he says. "I just try to have as much fun as possible."
Glover returned to the stage last month in Atlanta with "Noise/Funk's" original cast to kick off a 10-month tour that includes shows in Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles before traveling to Tokyo. Glover hopes this will get the public to take tap seriously. "You still have some dancers with that vaudeville mentality. They would come in here and if this was a marble floor, they would do that floor," he says, meaning they would dance just to get paid. "A real dancer's mentality is, we need good wood." He stomps on the floor.
Most choreographers were once performers who turned from interpreting movement to creating it when their bodies got tired. Glover, however, is an energetic 28-year-old who's still called one of the best dancers on Earth. He likes to "establish a comfort zone" with his dancers but takes training very seriously. The "Noise/Funk" cast went through four intense weeks of rehearsal, meeting eight hours a day, five days a week, and later 10 hours a day, six days a week.
Sometimes his youth works against him. A dancer his own age once got in his face during a rehearsal. "I had to deal with him on a street level," Glover says cockily. " 'We're from the same block. Don't think because I'm the choreographer I can't talk to you like I talk outside.' "
There's a namby-pamby stigma that comes with being a male dancer, and at times Glover overcompensates. He often dresses in baggy clothes and a pair of Jordans or Timberlands with the laces undone. Street credibility is just as important as artistic credibility, and he thinks of himself as a tough, hip-hop kid who just happens to be extraordinarily gifted on his feet.
Growing up in Newark, N.J., he lived with his mother, two brothers, his grandmother, his aunt and her nephew. "The house was crazy," he says. At an early age, he started taking classes at the Broadway Dance Center in Manhattan. He wore little brown-and-beige Thom McAn cowboy boots because his mother couldn't afford tap shoes. He was so good that the school director arranged for a private audition with a Broadway choreographer, which eventually led to Glover's 1984 debut in "The Tap Dance Kid." He has been working ever since.
Asked what he would do if he ever lost his dance ability, Glover pauses. He's never had a "real job." In high school, he applied at a McDonald's; they never even called back. "I have no idea," he says, finally. "I don't know what I would do."
Noise/Funk was conceived in 1992 by top theater director George C. Wolfe, the man responsible for such daring works as "The Colored Museum" and the new musical "Harlem Song." Wolfe came up with the idea while watching Glover rehearse for Jelly's Last Jam. It was as if he was channeling tap greats like Buster Brown and Jimmy Slyde, says Wolfe, who won a directing Tony for "Noise/Funk." "Savion is a living repository of rhythm. These old black tap dancers passed that information on to Savion, and it landed in his feet and his being and his soul."
