My Philly Tap Dance Chronicles (1996)

By Pamela Hetherington

Upon meeting me and discovering my obsession for tap dance, a question I get from a lot of people is, did anyone else in your family tap dance? No tap dancers directly, but as for musicians, yes. And, I imagine I might have had a few wildly dancing Albanians in my family tree. Balkan music has incredibly complex rhythms. Who knows where it comes from? (I actually made a piece about that called “Tyner and Timmons (TNT)”).

Another thing about me, that's just 'in my blood,' is I'm not as Type A as I appear. I have a serious Bohemian tendency that makes me apt to wander, hang out, sit and stare at trees for long periods of time and free spirit my way through a day's tasks. You might find this hard to believe, but I do not do a lot of advance planning. I decide to do something, and then I figure out the details as I go.

Most people who meet me would likely describe me as introverted. That is true, but it is less about shyness and more about how I am consistently lost in my own head. I can be a total space case. And while I am in my head, I am gathering a multitude of particulars about the world around me. I can remember exactly what a friend was wearing at a house party twenty years ago, but I find myself having a harder time remembering names of people I should….middle age is interesting. 

The kids use the catchphrase “My Roman Empire” to refer to those touchstone moments that ‘live rent-free’ in their heads. My Roman Empire is I vividly remember a Philadelphia dance showcase I went to on a Saturday afternoon in June 1996 at the Drake Theater. I even remember what I was wearing: a late-90s trend: Gap short-sleeve Oxford in blue and green windowpane plaid. I had to scroll back through my iPhone calendar to figure out the correct date. June 1, 1996.

On that day, my mom and I were downtown. Sixteen, a dancing queen, I was training often, and Saturdays meant that I was taking my Saturday afternoon adult modern jazz class with Roni Koresh. (In his first studio, on the second floor of the corner building at 20th and Chestnut). After the class was over, I recall Roni saying to all of us, "come over to our show at the Drake." I wanted to be one of the cool kids, so I begged my mom to stay a little bit later in town, and my mom agreed to it, likely because the showcase was free.

It was a gorgeous, mild, early summer day - one of those rare days in the city when it is not too hot or crowded, when everyone is out shopping and staying on the streets a little longer than they had planned, and I could not get enough of this vibe. In 1996, the Drake was still a low-rent apartment building, and the black box theater could still be rented by anyone. It felt like a place where things happened. My eyes were glued to the stage.

At that showcase, I received my first introduction to post-modern dance and that was wild. I remember Karen Bamonte and Melanie Stewart on the bill. There was an early iteration of the Koresh Dance Company. I also saw two performances that literally crashed into my skull and transformed my mind about what dance could be. 

I saw Rennie Harris leading one of his first crews in "Students of the Asphalt Jungle" and "Endangered Species." All these years later, I can still recall how I felt, watching these super-human creatures demolish the stage, and how my heart burst out my chest as I first encountered dance as story-telling. I had never seen a dance piece lit or staged or constructed in that way before. It opened up a door in my mind to seeing choreography as: something that could touch people; a medium for making people feel all of the same things I felt when I heard music; a tool for me to use all of the details and pictures and colors and sounds and ideas I had long collected in my own head. 

I also saw Robert F. Burden, Jr. perform for the first time, leading Tap Team Two and Company through a set that included Robert singing, shouting, and leaping about ten feet in the air at various intervals....basically being Robert. I remember looking at my mom and saying "I want to do that." Little did I know the connection that Robert had an inextricable link to LaVaughn already, and that I would be doing a lot of that, less than two months later.

My mom actually encountered Robert first, without realizing it, on her way to and from work. He would busk for crowds at the Clothespin. After that dance showcase, in the summer of 1996, Robert also took over the evening UArts extension classes for LaVaughn. It is kind of funny how, when you look back, that you see how there are no coincidences in life. 

Tap dancing outside is great publicity, because Robert's night classes in 1996 were consistently packed. It was late summer of 1996, when Robert called me over after his class and asked me to come to a rehearsal for his company, Tap Team Two. At that time, Robert was rehearsing in South Jersey, but he could have asked me to travel to Newfoundland: I would have been there. One of my most favorite dance memories is riding home on the El that night, with my mom, and I was squirming in my seat, I was so excited and overwhelmed with pure glee. This invitation to tap dance was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me.

I remember a Saturday in my senior year of high school when I literally danced and traveled all over Philadelphia with Robert F. Burden, Jr. all day long. I can’t even tell you what we were doing. I remember a class, a rehearsal, some sort of movie shoot for a friend of his, hanging out on the boards. When I finally walked through the front door in the evening, disheveled, with my falling apart dance bag, my mother looked at me and said, "my daughter, the Gypsy." A little off in the political correctness - it’s a generational thing. Yes: I was learning how to be a tap dancing traveler, a seeker, an absorber of the culture, meeting those people by default who had this new information I craved.

So many of our early performances were outside, amongst crowds, busking while people walked by, that I learned a lot about improvising and dancing in the moment. It was a crash course in straight-up, classic, Philadelphia street hoofing. You got to have something to say, because it's just you and the board holding someone's attention. You had to keep up your end of the conversation. Nowhere to hide. The sound was also very, very different than what I had previously thought of as “tap.” 

There was a year of overlap where I was finishing my senior year of high school with Miss Rita and Mr. Robert as my teachers, and there could not have been a wilder difference between their personas and approach to the dance. I had a foot in each world, but the one that called to me like a Siren song was this new one, where I changed my shoes from heels to flats and every time I entered the room, I had no idea what we were going to do. We did not practice flap heels, or go across the floor, or perfect our cramp roll turns. No - in Robert’s rehearsals, we improvised. Our improvisations were woven into the ‘etudes’ created by LaVaughn Robinson, (by that point, I had learned more than the eight bars from class). I learned what a tap jam was. I heard new names of legendary tap dancers, and in some cases, I met them in person!

Robert had this unique way of changing a performance on a dime, be it the tempo, the actual order of what we had carefully planned to do, or even your practiced part. If you weren't keeping an eye on him, you would be sorry. If you were not minding the groove, you would be even more sorry. For someone like me who had always done exactly as I was told and performed the same steps every time, it felt like diving off the deep end and remembering mid-dive that you did not know how to swim. Yet, I never found it terrifying, because I realized that there weren't any mistakes, if you just kept going and kept riding the wave of energy. Listen for a while and find the groove when you're ready. Or pick up your feet and keep moving, there was always a way back in. I was forever hooked. And I felt like I was starting from the beginning.