The Online Program of events for the 2024 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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The Body as Instrument, the Body as Insight: Bridging Jazz Music and Its Dance through Rhythm Tap, MDSG Workshop 2024
Time:
Saturday, 16/Nov/2024:
7:30pm - 9:30pm
Location:Honoré
2nd floor lobby level, Palmer House Hilton Hotel
Session Topics:
Jazz, Evening [2 hours max], African American / Black Studies, Dance
Presentations
The Body as Instrument, the Body as Insight: Bridging Jazz Music and Its Dance through Rhythm Tap, MDSG Workshop 2024
Chair(s): Rebecca Schwartz (University of Michigan), Rachel Gain (Yale University)
Presenter(s): Bril Barrett (M.A.D.D. Rhythms “Making A Difference Dancing” Chicago)
Organized by the Music and Dance Study Group.
Rhythm tap dance has been largely excluded from writings on music, thanks to prejudiced historiographic framings of dance, embodied practices, and Black vernacular art forms. In recent years, there has been a blossoming of tap scholarship within music studies, including monographs by scholars such as Brian Harker (2022), Christi Jay Wells (2021), and Todd Decker (2022, 2011). However, work in this area is only just beginning. Tap played an integral role in the development of jazz (Harker 2006) and was thoroughly inflected by shifts in venues and institutions, racism, and class prejudice. As such, its study promises fuller insights into areas such as jazz’s development, scenes, and historiography; racial and class dynamics in society and on stage; and American history as a whole. Moreover, because tap is a form of music that is indivisible from movement, its study through the lenses of embodiment and the sounding and visual dimensions promises nuanced understandings.
Chicago has a thriving rhythm tap dance scene—arguably second to only New York City. For the 2024 annual meeting, the AMS Music and Dance Study Group (MDSG) is organizing a workshop that utilizes local talent. We have invited Bril Barrett, who is a renowned tap dancer, an NEA National Heritage Fellow, and the founder of a leading Chicago-based rhythm tap company M.A.D.D. Rhythms (“Making A Difference Dancing”). This interactive workshop, led and facilitated by Rebecca Schwartz (University of Michigan) and Rachel Gain (Yale University), will be open to all AMS attendees.
The ninety-minute workshop will introduce participants to issues surrounding rhythm tap through a two-pronged approach. First, Barrett will teach a lesson on the basics of tap dance, covering rudimentary steps and fundamental concepts. As an art form inseparable from its physical dimension, experience executing tap steps is essential to understanding it musically (Bilidas and Gain 2023), from the level of how rhythms are produced and perceived through combining individual steps (Gain 2022) to how visible gestures impact the music at the broader level of the audiovisual product. Second, Barrett will provide valuable insights on tap’s relation to music. Given that tap is a rich yet under-documented oral tradition, he will also draw on stories and embodied knowledge passed down verbally and kinesthetically through master tap dancers in his lineage. As much of tap’s history and practice is only accessible through learning directly from practitioners, bringing a living source of history to the Annual Meeting will provide essential insights unavailable elsewhere.
By developing an embodied understanding of the physical side of rhythm tap dance and offering unique insights into tap’s complex history, our workshop will provide attendees with nuanced and integrated knowledge of rhythm tap dance as music, will demonstrate tap’s importance to music scholarship and pedagogy, will develop skills necessary to engage with tap research, and will spark further interest in this under-studied Black vernacular art form. Moreover, MDSG aims to use this event to build community and facilitate connections and conversations within our membership and between scholars and dancers.