It's been Kimi Okada’s longtime dream to host a tap dance festival at ODC.
The prolific choreographer began her tenure at ODC as a founding member of the company, and now she is a director of ODC's school division, which boasts a wide variety of movement classes and workshops.
But for ODC's stellar reputation as a hub of contemporary dance in San Francisco, it has never had a tap scene to match. The Eddie Brown Tap Dance Symposium may be the seed to plant such a future.
The festival, which ran from Aug. 6-9, brought together tap dancers from around the San Francisco Bay Area in an enthusiastic celebration of legendary tap dancer Eddie Brown. After three and a half days of classes and evening events, the festival culminated in a showcase paying tribute to Brown, featuring some of his most famous numbers like the Eddie Brown chorus, as well as mashups of other choreographies taught in the preceding days.
During the 90 minutes of performance in a relaxed atmosphere, students of all levels presented the pieces they'd been working on in class last week. The teachers performed solos and duets, sometimes to live music by the jazz band Karina Deniké and The Cottontails.
Tap dancer and teacher Gabe Copeland introduced one piece, "Doin’ the New Lowdown," with an interesting anecdote on its origins: the piece was originally created and performed by Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. At the age of 16, Brown had studied it so well that he auditioned for Bojangles and was offered a job in New York. Eddie Brown lived in Omaha at the time, and his mother did not give him permission to move to New York, so Eddie Brown left on his own one day, catching a freight train to New York under the guise of going to school.
While tap festivals are numerous around the country and the globe, they do not usually focus specifically on one tap master. It's fitting that San Francisco is the city to honor Brown, as he used to teach at a small studio in Bernal Heights. One of the teachers at the symposium, Bill Irwin, said he learned a little-known routine by Brown, the Irish Jig, in that very studio about a half century ago. The piece was performed with a heaping dose of humor during the showcase, as Irwin and the students kicked off the number by tossing their hats on their heads in a sort of magic trick.
The showcase featured not only live performances of Brown's choreographies but also fantastic musical interludes by Karina Deniké and The Cottontails. Deniké's rich vocals topped off the evening.
A singular complaint: the band did not play with most of the tap dancers! It was a missed opportunity for tap dancers and musicians to make music together. Tap dancer and teacher Babs Yohai did perform one piece with the band, a lovely rendition of “My Baby Just Cares for Me,” made famous by Nina Simone.
Rounding out the evening was a short documentary created by Yohai about Brown. Yohai was a protégé of Brown and included footage of key moments in his life as well as his performances and teaching. The documentary offered a personal touch to the showcase. Yohai has dedicated her life to preserving the heritage of American tap dance, and this documentary contributes to that project.
Just three months after San Francisco's tap festival hosted by Melissa Tannus, it's remarkable that the city, with its small, fragmented tap scene, has hosted another festival with a showcase attended by over 100 people. After the showcase, dancers chatted with one another in the lobby, forming connections and saying goodbyes. One wonders where else these connections may lead, whether San Francisco may one day be home to the kind of tap dance community that flourished when Brown first left his mark here.
