You’re The Tap Dancer

By Pamela Hetherington

A couple of years ago, I was handed a unicorn gig when Homer Jackson commissioned me to make a new tap dance work for presentation at the Fairmount Waterworks, in the midst of an exhibition called POOL. The piece was planned for performance in two old, drained swimming pools. I had to think creatively about how to make the work move across the exhibit as a complete story, using tap boards, ladders, diving boards, and plastic Dollar General bins that I filled with an inch of water for additional foot and hand sounds. Homer, the director of the Philadelphia Jazz Project, always believed in me and my work, even though I had NEVER done anything like this before. Ever.

I visited the pools and the exhibit many times leading up to the performances. I took inspiration from the sounds of the Schuylkill, the decades-old photographs of the people who frequented the pools, the smell of the wet concrete, and the people who found this exhibit interesting enough to walk through. Catacomb-like, the spaces underneath the Waterworks were prone to flooding and the caverns, pits and dead ends that remained were literally carved away by water, time and neglect. Victoria Prizzia curated the staggering exhibit and had an uncanny way of providing spaces for deep silence and also giving sharp, clear voices to the people who had once been there, swimming segregated in the pools.

Since I kept showing up and asking to see the pools, the manager of the exhibit got to know me as the weirdo artist who kept climbing up on platforms and crumbling window sills, jumping off of things and asking out loud, to no one in particular, “does this seem too dangerous?”

Sometimes, I would bring my colleagues with me, and we did more weirdo things, like pretending to swim in projected wave water and singing out loud to test acoustics. I told the manager we would be tap dancing in the pool and, like most people I encounter, when I tell them 1) I am a tap dancer, 2) I tap dance for a living, and 3) the things I’m imagining doing as said tap dancer, I got a full triple take. But, still, he smiled encouragingly and said, “Well. I look forward to seeing it!”

After more weeks of work: transcribing, stage plotting, sound checking, practicing, revising, printing charts and sending last minute voice notes with changes at wee hours of the morning, the show dates arrived. As they always do. This was the first time I had to have help carrying tap boards down a tiny ladder into a concrete pool. My percussion bins were filled with water from the back kitchen sinks. It was go time unlike any other I’d ever experienced. Tap dance surely has taken me to some far-off and wild places.

One moment from the performances stuck with me, and sometimes, I look back on my life in the arts and even I have to take, a triple take.

As I parked my car at the final performance and prepared to unload my trunk full of tap boards, bins, programs and costumes, the security guard out front smiled and waved at me. He loudly proclaimed, to me and to anyone who would listen, “You’re the tap dancer! Here comes the tap dancer!”

Instinctively, sheepishly? I put my head down Philly-style, and mumbled, “yea, that’s me.”

Why was I acting this way, when he was just pointing out exactly who I am?

I am standing outside one of the biggest gigs of my life, and yet, I’m trying to be invisible. I carry and offer so many generations-worth of true and false representations about tap dance that I wonder often if I’m cut out to be any kind of ambassador.

Then, in that same moment, the guard’s words landed. “You’re the tap dancer.”

My body and mind disconnected; I zoomed out on the vast bank of memories of people, throughout my life, grabbing my attention in exactly the same way, and saying the exact same thing, since I was a child.

… So many times: as a kid, I would be performing outside somewhere in Philadelphia, come off-stage, walk with my mother to the bus, and hear people call after me, “you’re the tap dancer!”

… Years ago: I presented my work for the first time at a major dance concert in New York, I didn’t know anybody in the audience, after the show I was in my head walking down a side street, and a car stops next to me. “We saw you! You’re the tap dancer!”

… Recently: I was in Norf, standing in the lobby of the Cecil B. Moore Library, waiting for a parent to pick up one of my students, and a woman I don’t know walks through the door, looks at me, and says, “you’re the tap dancer.”

… So many times: as a kid, because I carried so much enthusiasm for the art form, I’d walk into a studio with a teacher I hadn’t met and they’d call out to me, “oh, I know you, you’re the tap dancer.”

Yea. That’s me.