My Philly Tap Dance Chronicles (1992-1997)

By Pamela Hetherington

In January of 1992, I was twelve years old and back to not having a regular dance teacher of any kind, again. The Next Step had closed at the end of 1991, and the Philadelphia Civic Ballet, after moving to the top floor of the Episcopal Church at 21st and Sansom was about to close, too. I was unusual and lucky to have done a lot of dancing and performing up to this point, but I was still young, painfully shy, desperate to twirl constantly like I had at the Next Step. I needed another “studio-for-real.” 

By March of 1992, and I have to guess it was through recommendations, I ended up at my first placement class at the Rita Rue School of Dance on Frankford Avenue, nearest the intersection of Longshore. Hers was the smallest (as in square footage) studio I had been to thus far. Upon entering, there was a maybe three feet of waiting room space, (importantly, no chairs available for parents), a desk and then, the long rectangular dance floor, also linoleum and gray-black from tap dust. The far side of the room had a tiny alcove for dance bags, one bathroom, and a screen door to the outside. That screen door was our only source of air in the hot months. The lack of chairs is an important element in this scene. You might think it is the dance instruction and the choreography that is the art and craft of our business, but the primary thing you have to master is how to teach the parents boundaries, rules and respect, so that you can even do your work. 

I do not remember that first encounter, because it all happened so fast. I assume that I showed Miss Rita what I knew, and it was OK, because by June of 1992, I had my own group costume, a new pair of tan high-heeled tap shoes, and I was performing in Miss Rita’s “senior line” at the recital. (If you are not familiar with how dancing schools work, that costume-ordering maneuver would have been unheard of). I was 12 years old, and Miss Rita was my primary tap teacher for the next five years. She was of an indeterminable age because she was so trim, sharp and quick. Her class uniform usually consisted of suntan “Hold and Stretch” tights, tap shorts and heeled tap or jazz shoes. Her makeup - stage ready, immaculate. Her hair - teased, sprayed, in a white-blond French twist. As I got older, I adopted the French twist for class, too. 

With the exception of Miss Rita, I had this tendency to treat my dance teachers like gods. I imagined they occupied a seat high above me, and I observed them from far below: a humble and willing acolyte. Class time was worship time. I wordlessly executed the steps they barked at me, and they let me know if my offering was sufficient by either correcting me or ignoring me. When I left their class, an imaginary curtain dropped between me and them; so much so that if I had encountered any of my teachers outside in ‘real life,’ I would have ducked for cover to avoid seeing them. 

In comparison, when I entered into Miss Rita’s world, something about how she considered me and spoke to me made me feel like we were allies, or co-conspirators, or even friends. It is not a coincidence that her sixth sense ability to become exactly the person I needed allowed me to grow into a confident, sassy teenage dancer, one that would have been unrecognizable even a year prior.

I had always been able to do steps; now, under her direction, I was learning how to dance them, or as she would often say, “Put Something Into It.” I came to adore performing and all of the nuances and tricks that come along with knowing how to get an audience to love you. She gave me that gift. I loved dancing on stage. It was all I wanted to do, forever. 

I am not alone in the universe of people who were impacted by Miss Rita’s special and proprietary blend of teaching magic. On Facebook, there is a group called “I Was A Rita Rue Dancer,” where folks even older than me talk about her ability to teach crystal-clean tap technique while also dispensing a wizardly combination of stage-ready poise, sophistication, wit, and aplomb to all of her kids. There was also something about her specific style that carried with her dancers, long after they left her studio. If I didn’t know how to walk into a room under Mr. Stephan’s direction, I certainly learned how to do that under Miss Rita. I now occupied a place in the front line, center.

On Thanksgiving weekend in 1994, myself and the other girls in my senior line were waiting nervously together at THE only place to be on Thanksgiving weekend those days - no, not Black Friday shopping - it was the Performing Arts Alliance dance competition in King of Prussia. Without taking an entirely different book to write about the changes in competitions “then” and now,” just take everything about what you see on Dance Moms and think the opposite. Tl;dr: real tap judges, actual tap categories, only three winners per category, one level. Oh, also: this was the only competition like it in the area, so every studio worked toward it all year, and every studio attended, claws out.

Our group routine that year was quite unusual in that we weren’t using our usual upbeat show tune. She made our routine to a jazz drum track that was on the end of one of her vinyl records. That year, in our teen large group tap category, there were dozens and dozens of entries - at least 30. We huddled together and watched each group perform to loud, wild screaming and applause. Remember, three winners.

Miss Rita said one thing to us before we went on. 

“Go Out There and Kill.” 

And we did. First place.

****

So, here I am, French-twisting my hair, legs for days, kick-lining in my heels, living in my Northeast Philadelphia bubble, when 1995 hits, Savion Glover crashes into everyones’ brains and his new show, Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk, became the ‘thing in the air’ that everyone could not stop talking about. We did not have the Internet at my house until the year 2000, so my entire understanding of what was happening beyond Philadelphia in tap dance came mostly from a monthly print copy of Dance Magazine - - which rarely covered tap, you are right. But in 1995, nobody could ignore writing about this show. I saw photos of the cast members in articles, clips of the show on TV, and then the actual show twice, in New York, in 1996. I was beyond ignorant of tap dance history then to understand what was being conveyed in the story. When the Bill “Bojangles” Robinson character came out with the Shirley Temple doll strapped to his feet, I did not know enough to flinch, nor did I even know who the Nicholas Brothers were or why their depiction in that show was so problematic. But frankly, all I could see was the dancing, which was so complex, loud, fast, and full of steps I had never seen before. What was this? 

Obviously, it was tap dancing, but of a lineage and level of musical understanding that Miss Rita did not know enough about to teach. Years before, I was exposed to some jazz tap by Leon Evans, Delphine Mantz, and Jaye Allison, but I was too young to grasp the musical concepts. Just by virtue of where she was from and who her teachers were, Miss Rita’s style was influenced by the dancing she saw in movie musicals -- which I also devoured as my primary way of actually seeing tap dance and tap dancers, but I did not know, until many years later, these dancers been influenced and taught by uncredited black tap dancers. 

It was my own ignorance, too, that blinded me from the realization that my primary tap dance teachers had been white women and what that implied for my training. Dance studios in Northeast Philadelphia of my era taught “Broadway tap.” Tap steps are pretty cut-and-dried, in that there are not hundreds of defined ones, (ie. shuffle, flap, brush, Maxi Ford). You can learn the entire atlas of tap step names in just a few classes. The liminality between Broadway tap and jazz tap is in the understanding and connection of the music in relation to the dance and, therefore, in one’s proficiency to improvise. Miss Rita certainly scatted everything and counted beat subdivisions. She made us feel everything in the music and know the phrasing inside and out. We danced to jazz drum tracks, for goodness sake. But, her preference and choice was that the steps came first, followed by precise formations, arms and stage presence. 

I think we make mistakes when we try to define the styles qualitatively, because to me, Broadway tap is a historical reflection and the by-product of what happened when the showgirls and male dancers in the movie musicals went on to open dance studios all across America. They codified a way of teaching tap steps to young people, because steps were the way to measure improvement. Improvement is what parents want to see and pay for. Enter Al Gilbert: he proceeded to serve a hole in the market for a plug-and-play tap syllabus that thousands, maybe millions, of dance studio kids heard in their ears growing up. Other tap technicians, like the genius Stan Kahn, created their own graded way of teaching technique. Technique is absolutely important and your calling card. You really cannot do anything in tap without having the technique. My point is, how you enter into the dance is just the first lens through which you enter your place in history. Eventually, if you have the itch to learn more, you look for better glasses.

My fifteen-year-old response to seeing Noise/Funk was, I wanted to learn “harder” steps like the ones I had seen in the show. Dutifully, my mother called somewhere or somebody, and in the summer of 1995, I found myself in the University of the Arts evening extension class, taught by LaVaughn Robinson. LaVaughn also taught for the two-week summer World of Dance program. Over the period of two years, I took every class he taught. This was long before UArts had the fancy buildings with air-conditioning, and because of the heat, they suggested you only take four 90-minute classes a day. I didn't do that, because LaVaughn's adult classes were in the late afternoon and evening. I took 6 classes a day: two in the morning, two in the afternoon and two tap classes in the evenings.

Ironically, I did not get the “harder” steps I wanted in LaVaughn’s classes. Pretty much every class I took with him, we did the same eight-bar phrase over and over. (Side note: I learned his definition of a bar: four beats). Rarely, if there were just a few of us in class, and he knew we had spent weeks doing that same eight bars, he would add, maybe, four bars more. To my teenage mind, doing the same phrase dozens of times was "easy." Oh, how I had zero concept of the education in timing, phrasing, accents and groove that LaVaughn was dishing out in front of me. Twenty plus years later, I will teach that same LaVaughn phrase to a class, and I can still find another new detail or nuance to it that I have never found before. That is true musical mastery - when your material is so rich that you can play it hundreds of times and still find something new. 

Most of the young people I was dancing with at Summer World of Dance were nowhere near the level of tap dance-diehard that I was, so the classes were pretty empty. (Not much has changed, haha). And still, LaVaughn taught that same "easy" eight-bar phrase, which I repeated back, "perfectly." To me, that's all tap dancing was - the perfect execution of steps. What else was there? I did not know yet. One memory that I still return to, time and again, was LaVaughn, listening to his class practice his music, taking a beat, and then laughing to himself while telling us, "it's more than a notion." If I had to have one sentence inscribed on my tombstone about tap dancing, it would be: "it's not about steps."