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Abstract
The research project Tapping the Margins was undertaken by Ann Kilkelly and Mary Neth from 1999 through 2005 and focused on women in tap dance. Their scope was unprecedented: to analyze constructions of gender, race, class, and sexuality in tap history. This article has a dual purpose: to detail the project’s materials, which will be accessible at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and include notes for a never-completed book, archival video footage of dancers, film analyses, oral histories, plus stage and film production records; and to examine Kilkelly’s feminist, personal, and embodied explorations of tap dance history.
Acknowledgements
The organizing of the Tapping the Margins research boxes was supported in part by The Changing Times Tap Initiative, a division of the Changing Times Tap Company, Inc., New York, NY. Thank you to Dance Chronicle editors for publishing this work and the helpful feedback from two anonymous readers. Deepest appreciation to Ann’s wife, Carol Burch-Brown, and Catherine Gatenby, Ann’s friend, student, and Footnotes company dancer, for invaluable assistance in gathering and going through the archive and many conversations about Ann’s work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Ann Kilkelly and Mary Neth, “Tapping the Margins: Abstract,” Application for Smithsonian Institution Fellowship Program, January 14, 2000, Tapping the Margins archive, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York, NY (hereafter called the TTM archive). All writings cited, unless otherwise noted, are by Ann Kilkelly and Mary Neth from unpublished drafts, presentation scripts, and grant applications for the Tapping the Margins project, located in the TTM archive.
2 See Ann Kilkelly, “Brenda Bufalino’s Blues: Too Small?” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 3:6 (1990) 67-77. Kilkelly’s extensive interviews of and unpublished writings about Bufalino, who was one of her main mentors and teachers, are in the TTM archive.
3 Ann Kilkelly, interview by Margaret Morrison, July 31, 2015, Blacksburg, VA, transcript, TTM archive.
4 As of the writing of this article, the TTM archive is in the process of being donated to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which will prepare the materials for public viewing and research.
5 Kate Mattingly addresses the white supremacy and systemic devaluing of Africanist dance forms in academia and dance criticism in Shaping Dance Canons: Criticism, Aesthetics, and Equity (University Press of Florida, 2023).
6 As a person of European descent, I intentionally capitalize Black and White when referring to these racial identifiers. I follow the work of recent tap and jazz dance scholars, as recommended by American Psychological Association guidelines for bias-free and inclusive language (https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/bias-free-language/racial-ethnic-minorities). Any exceptions to this are in quoted material where lowercase was used by the original author. I regard choice of language as an essential tool to confront structural systems of racism that run through tap history. I follow the Center for the Study of Social Policy’s statement: “To not name ‘White’ as a race is, in fact, an anti-Black act which frames Whiteness as both neutral and the standard… . We believe that it is important to call attention to White as a race as a way to understand and give voice to how Whiteness functions in our social and political institutions and our communities. Moreover, the detachment of ‘White’ as a proper noun allows White people to sit out of conversations about race and removes accountability from White people’s and White institutions’ involvement in racism.” https://cssp.org/2020/03/recognizing-race-in-language-why-we-capitalize-black-and-white/
7 See Brynn W. Shiovitz’s in depth analysis of the Production Code, tap dance, and racial stereotypes in Behind the Screen: Tap Dance, Race, and Invisibility During Hollywood’s Golden Age (Oxford University Press, 2023).
8 Kilkelly, interview.
9 Neth’s detailed film proposal and her work on Ralph Brown is included in the TTM archive.
10 An exploration of the theoretical underpinnings of Kilkelly’s approach would be a rich area of research, but is beyond the scope of this article.
11 All autobiographical citations and information in this section are from the 2015 Kilkelly interview, except where noted.
12 I intentionally use all four terms, together, of “Africanist vernacular jazz dance” (rather than separate terms in use of “authentic jazz” or “vernacular dance”) in order to affirm the Black roots of these forms and resist erasure of the African American community that created them.
13 Ann Kilkelly, “Dance Class” draft writing for “Going to Class” in “JillCMTSDance_Class,” 5, TTM Archive.
14 “Ann_Kilkelly_CV_2007,” curriculum vitae, TTM archive.
15 Kilkelly, interview.
16 Kilkelly, “Dance Class,” 6.
17 Kilkelly, interview.
18 Kilkelly and Neth, “Tapping the Margins: Abstract.”
19 I examine multiple ways dominant narratives about tap have invisibilized women’s participation in my chapter, “Juanita Pitts: Race, Gender, and the Female Hoofer,” in The Oxford Handbook of Black Dance, ed. Thomas F. DeFrantz (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
20 Rusty Frank, Nadine George-Graves, Constance Valis Hill, Germaine Ingram, Jacqui Malone, Cheryl Willis, and others have written extensively on women tap dancers of the past. For my discussion of ongoing marginalization of women’s contributions to tap in Brian Seibert’s What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing, see Morrison, “Tap Dancing: Reports of Our Death Have Been Grossly Exaggerated,” Los Angeles Review of Books (September 18, 2016), https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/tap-dancing-reports-death-grossly-exaggerated/.
21 Ann Kilkelly and Mary Neth, “Tapping the Margins Project Proposal,” Application for Smithsonian Institution Fellowship Program, January 14, 2000, 4-5, TTM archive.
22 Ann Kilkelly and Mary Neth, “NEH draft,” (proposal for National Endowment for the Humanities Grant for Tapping the Margins, 2000), TTM archive.
23 Kilkelly, interview.
24 All citations in this section, except where noted, are from Ann Kilkelly and Mary Neth, “Sexuality in the Labor and Performance of Jazz Tap Dancing” (lecture/performance, Colloquium, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, September, 2000), TTM archive.
25 Kilkelly, interview.
26 All citations in this section are from Kilkelly and Neth, “Sexuality in the Labor of Tap.”
27 All citations in this section, except where noted, are from Kilkelly and Neth, “Sexuality in the Labor of Tap.”
28 The website for the Apollo Theater, https://www.apollotheater.org/amateur-night.
29 This is Kilkelly’s transcription. While Waller’s line could be interpreted differently, I agree with Kilkelly’s point that this scene of male-female interaction across races, along with Waller’s characteristic style of comic commentary and innuendo, could have been viewed as sexually charged by 1936 arbiters of moral standards.
30 All citations in this section are from Kilkelly and Neth, “Sexuality in the Labor of Tap.”
31 Dudley quoted in Kilkelly and Neth, “Sexuality in the Labor of Tap.”
32 Kilkelly and Neth, “Sexuality in the Labor of Tap.”
33 Dudley quoted in Kilkelly and Neth, “Sexuality in the Labor of Tap.”
34 Quoted phrases by Dudley in Kilkelly and Neth, “Sexuality in the Labor of Tap.”
35 Quoted phrases by Dudley in Kilkelly and Neth, “Sexuality in the Labor of Tap.”
36 See Hazel V. Carby, “It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues,” in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 479.
37 Bufalino quoted in Kilkelly and Neth, “Sexuality in the Labor of Tap.”
38 Wayburn quoted in Kilkelly and Neth, “Sexuality in the Labor of Tap.”
39 See my analysis of meanings embedded in Pitts’ performance in Morrison, “Juanita Pitts.”
40 All Kilkelly film analysis citations in this section, except where otherwise noted, are from Kilkelly and Neth, “Sexuality in the Labor of Tap.”
41 I center bell hooks’ oppositional gaze–the critical spectatorship to view African American talent within an environment of racist imagery–in my article “Tap and Teeth: Virtuosity and the Smile in the Films of Bill Robinson and Eleanor Powell,” Dance Research Journal 46, no. 2 (August 2014): 21-37.
42 See Jayna Brown’s work on the discourses of racialized femininity that Black women dancers have contended with in Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 232.
43 Ann Kilkelly, “Turn on the Red Hot” (in notes on Dottie Salter [in Ernie Smith Collection reel] “Spreading the Rhythm Around”), TTM archive.
44 Mary Neth, “Production Codes and Production Numbers: Censors Battle Jazz Dance in 1930s Hollywood Films” (paper presentation, World Vernacular Congress, Vernacular: International Colloquium for Vernacular, Hispanic, Historical, American, and Folklore Studies, Puebla, Mexico, October, 2003), TTM archive. All of Neth’s “Turn on the Red Hot” citations in this section are from this paper.
45 Ann Kilkelly, “Temporalities: Dancing in the Archives” (notes for presentation and dance performance, Performing the Archive panel, Modern Language Association Annual Meeting, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, December 27, 2006), 1, TTM archive.
46 Kilkelly, interview.
47 Kilkelly, interview.
48 All citations about Neth and Tapping the Margins in this section are from Kilkelly, interview, except where noted.
49 Kilkelly, “Temporalities: Dancing,” 6.
50 Ann Kilkelly, “PEDAGOGY_APRIL_2” (draft for Going to Class), TTM archive.
51 Ann Kilkelly and Mary Neth, “Narrative Description of Research During the NEH Collaborative Grant,” 2005, TTM archive.
52 Kilkelly, “Temporalities: Dancing,” 4.
53 Ann Daly, “Unlimited Partnership: Dance and Feminist Analysis,” Dance Research Journal 23, no. 1 (Spring, 1991): 2.
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Margaret Morrison
MARGARET MORRISON is a rhythm tap artist, dance historian, teacher, and writer. Her tap dancing, theater productions, fiction, and scholarship explore gender, race, sexuality, LGBTQ themes, and history in tap dance. Her tap scholarship has been published in Dance Research Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, and is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Black Dance, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz. She is the recipient of the Flo-Bert Life Achievement Award and the American Tap Dance Foundation Hoofer Award for her contributions to tap dance. Margaret has performed across the globe and began her career in the 1980s with Brenda Bufalino’s American Tap Dance Orchestra. Critics have hailed her as “feather-footed and musically astute,” and a “consummate artist who breaks the mold.” She holds an MFA from American Dance Festival/Hollins University, and is Education Advisor for the American Tap Dance Foundation, where she created and co-directs the Tap Teacher Training Program.