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Lynn Dally, Artistic Director • Gayle Hooks, Managing Director • jtensemble@aol.com • 310.475.4412 • 1416 Westwood Blvd., Ste 207 L.A. CA 90024
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"It will make you jump out of your shoes and beat your feet."
- Wall Street Journal
WOMEN IN TAP
Scholarly Presentations
Friday, Feb 8, 12 Noon
Keynote: Can You Hear Us Now?
Sali Ann Kriegsman has served as president of the Dance Heritage Coalition, executive director of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, director of the National Endowment for the Arts Dance Program, dance consultant to the Smithsonian Institution, and executive editor at The American Film Institute. She created “The American Dance Experience” series for the Smithsonian Institution, 1979-1983. With Marda Kirn, she co-produced the first Colorado Tap Festival in 1986. Among her awards is a 1997 Flo-Bert; the 1999 Preservation of our Heritage--American Dance Award from Oklahoma City University; the 2002 Tap Preservation Award from the New York Tap Festival and a 2006 Tradition in Tap Award.
Sisterhoods in Rhythm: A Century of Women in Tap
An historical overview of women pioneers, performers, preservers, and
proselytisers who created new work, new audiences, and new generations of tap artists in the twentieth century.
Constance Valis Hill is a jazz dancer, choreographer, and scholar of performance studies whose writings have appeared in Dance Magazine, Village Voice, Dance Research Journal, Studies in Dance History, and Discourses in Dance, as well as Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African-American Dance (2002) and Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader (2003). Her book Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers (Oxford University Press, 2000) won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. She is the recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and 2007 Rockefeller grant to write a cultural history of tap dancing in America since 1900. She has a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and is a Five College Professor of Dance at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Flashing Women: Feminine and Feminist
Tap scholar Ann Kilkelly explores a variety of theoretical frameworks to look at gender, race, class, and sexuality in women's performance of Jazz Tap.
Ann Kilkelly researches and writes about tap dancing as part of her desire to bridge history and practice of this deeply important cultural phenomenon. As a dancer she has performed at the Kennedy Center, the Duke Theater during the New York Tap festival, and in many other venues and in concerts of original music and dance with artists Elise Witt, Beverly Botsford, Carol Burch-Brown, and Tony Waag. As a Professor of Theatre Arts and Women's Studies at Virginia Tech, Ann devises and directs multi-disciplinary performance work, choreographs, and teaches graduate and undergraduate classes. She received two Smithsonian Senior Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Humanities to work in the National Archives on her work with the late Mary Neth. That project, Tapping the Margins, will result in a book exploring the gender, race, and class dimensions of women's performance of tap dancing. As a member of Alternate ROOTS, she sees art connected to community and social change. Of her performance as the pink part of the Lloyd and Bunny comedy team, Jennifer Dunning of The New York Times remarked, "Kikelly brought down the house."