Born to save tap Fuh-duh-BAP! Fuh-duh-duh-BAP! A new language, a new sound. Savion Glover has redefined tap dancing, and it can never be the same again. He speaks to the world with a power and ease that has stunned and captivated millions. This exciting biography captures that essence--often in Glover's own voice--and treats readers to an inside look at his work while also providing a brief yet compelling history of tap dancing. Reverberating with the rhythm of a unique musical language, the book includes more than 50 photographs and features an eye-catching two-color design. Foreword by Gregory Hines Fuh-duh-BAP! Fuh-duh-duh-BAP! A new language, a new sound. Savion Glover has redefined tap dancing, and it can never be the same again. He speaks to the world with a power and ease that has stunned and captivated millions. This exciting biography captures that essence--often in Glover's own voice--and treats readers to an inside look at his work while also providing a brief yet compelling history of tap dancing. Reverberating with the rhythm of a unique musical language, the book includes over fifty photographs and features an eye-catching two-color design. All ages. "He's the greatest tap dancer to ever lace up a pair of Capezios or any other tap shoes."-- Gregory Hines in the Foreword to Savion: My Life in Tap 2001 Best Books for Young Adults (ALA) Foreword by Gregory Hines Fuh-duh-BAP! Fuh-duh-duh-BAP! A new language, a new sound. Savion Glover has redefined tap dancing, and it can never be the same again. He speaks to the world with a power and ease that has stunned and captivated millions. This exciting biography captures that essence--often in Glover's own voice--and treats readers to an inside look at his work while also providing a brief yet compelling history of tap dancing. Reverberating with the rhythm of a unique musical language, the book includes over fifty photographs and features an eye-catching two-color design. All ages. "He's the greatest tap dancer to ever lace up a pair of Capezios or any other tap shoes."--Gregory Hines in the Foreword to Savion: My Life in Tap

Dramatizes the life of Jelly Roll Morton, pianist, composer, and self-proclaimed inventor of jazz.

The first authoritative history of tap dancing, one of the great art forms—along with jazz and musical comedy—created in America. Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction Winner of Anisfield-Wolf Book Award An Economist Best Book of 2015 What the Eye Hears offers an authoritative account of the great American art of tap dancing. Brian Seibert, a dance critic for The New York Times, begins by exploring tap’s origins as a hybrid of the jig and clog dancing and dances brought from Africa by slaves. He tracks tap’s transfer to the stage through blackface minstrelsy and charts its growth as a cousin to jazz in the vaudeville circuits. Seibert chronicles tap’s spread to ubiquity on Broadway and in Hollywood, analyzes its decline after World War II, and celebrates its rediscovery and reinvention by new generations of American and international performers. In the process, we discover how the history of tap dancing is central to any meaningful account of American popular culture. This is a story with a huge cast of characters, from Master Juba through Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Gene Kelly and Paul Draper to Gregory Hines and Savion Glover. Seibert traces the stylistic development of tap through individual practitioners and illuminates the cultural exchange between blacks and whites, the interplay of imitation and theft, as well as the moving story of African Americans in show business, wielding enormous influence as they grapple with the pain and pride of a complicated legacy. What the Eye Hears teaches us to see and hear the entire history of tap in its every step. “Tap is America’s great contribution to dance, and Brian Seibert’s book gives us—at last!—a full-scale (and lively) history of its roots, its development, and its glorious achievements. An essential book!” —Robert Gottlieb, dance critic for The New York Observer and editor of Reading Dance “What the Eye Hears not only tells you all you wanted to know about tap dancing; it tells you what you never realized you needed to know. . . . And he recounts all this in an easygoing style, providing vibrant descriptions of the dancing itself and illuminating commentary by those masters who could make a floor sing.” —Deborah Jowitt, author of Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance and Time and the Dancing Image

An introduction to the life and career of dancer and entertainer Savion Glover includes coverage of his time working with Gregory Hines and his work on the movie "Happy Feet."

"This dynamic mixture of rock, calypso and ballads features a dozen singer-dancers in 20 numbers. In revue-style format, Don't Bother Me ... explores the African American experience through vibrant song and dance."--Publisher

Here is the vibrant, colorful, high-stepping story of tap -- the first comprehensive, fully documented history of a uniquely American art form. Writing with all the verve and grace of tap itself, Constance Valis Hill offers a sweeping narrative, filling a major gap in American dance history and placing tap firmly center stage.

"Musical theatre dance is an ever-changing, evolving dance form, egalitarian in its embrace of any and all dance genres. It is a living, transforming art developed by exceptional dance artists and requiring dramaturgical understanding, character analysis, knowledge of history, art, design and most importantly an extensive knowledge of dance both intellectual and embodied. Its ghettoization within criticism and scholarship as a throw-away dance form, undeserving of analysis: derivative, cliché ridden, titillating and predictable, the ugly stepsister of both theatre and dance, belies and ignores the historic role it has had in musicals as an expressive form equal to book, music and lyric. The standard adage, "when you can't speak anymore sing, when you can't sing anymore dance" expresses its importance in musical theatre as the ultimate form of heightened emotional, visceral and intellectual expression. Through in-depth analysis author Liza Gennaro examines Broadway choreography through the lens of dance studies, script analysis, movement research and dramaturgical inquiry offering a close examination of a dance form that has heretofore received only the most superficial interrogation. This book reveals the choreographic systems of some of Broadway's most influential dance-makers including George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, Katherine Dunham, Bob Fosse, Savion Glover, Sergio Trujillo, Steven Hoggett and Camille Brown. Making Broadway Dance is essential reading for theatre and dance scholars, students, practitioners and Broadway fans"--

In illustrations and rhyme describes the dancing of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, one of the most famous tap dancers of all time. A brief Afterword outlines his career.

Here is a dazzling collection from Joan Acocella, one of our most admired cultural critics: thirty-one essays that consider the life and work of some of the most influential artists of our time (and two saints: Joan of Arc and Mary Magdalene). Acocella writes about Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor and chemist, who wrote the classic memoir, Survival in Auschwitz; M.F.K. Fisher who, numb with grief over her husband’s suicide, dictated the witty and classic How to Cook a Wolf; and many other subjects, including Dorothy Parker, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Saul Bellow. Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints is indispensable reading on the making of art—and the courage, perseverance, and, sometimes, dumb luck that it requires.

A magical concoction of the mischievous, tender, whimsical, and debauched real-life adventures of Alan Cumming, told in his own words and pictures. Described by the New York Times as “a bawdy countercultural sprite” and named one of the most fun people in show business by Time magazine, Alan Cumming is a genuine quadruple threat—an internationally acclaimed, award-winning star of stage, television, and film, as well as a New York Times best-selling author whose real-life vivacity, wit, and charm shine through every page of his third book, You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams. In these forty-five picture essays, Cumming recounts his real-life adventures (and often, misadventures), illustrated by his own equally entertaining photographs. From an awkward bonding session with Elizabeth Taylor to poignant stories about his family and friends to some harsh words of wisdom imparted by Oprah that make up the title of this collection, You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams is as eclectic, enchanting, and alive as its author.