Bring in 'da Savion

everyday people | Oct 11, 2008 | 2

I first became conscious of Savion Glover...

...while sitting in the audience of Broadway's Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk. My jaw dropped, my mouth hung open and my skin covered in goose bumps. I had heard the name Savion Glover before and I was semi-aware that he was a tapper; possibly I was even semi-conscious that once upon a time he had been the Tap Dance Kid. But it didn't register until half time when I sat program-in-hand and read Noise/Funk's credits:  Savion was the choreographer and a co-creator of this incredible show for which he won a Tony for choreography.

I loved Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk--in concept, content and style--from its first BAM! until its last. It was a masterpiece. I still can't shake that show. Its style of tap was one that I was unaware of before that time. I was raised with a shuffle-off-to-Buffalo, flap heel, fil-ap heel-heel yellow bonnet-tied-on-my-head, white socks and a prickly raspberry and white ballet tutu kind of tap. Bring in 'da Noise was something else. With Noise style tapping, you could wear jeans.

Baby-faced with a Fresh Prince-like Kewpie doll innocence, I consider Savion a god. The man can get down, get funky and certainly get loose with more rhythms and beats than most of us can fathom, more beats than most of us can feel, let alone replicate. Even using our mouths, fingers, slapping our thighs or stomping our feet or using all four combined, many of us just still aren't there. But this man can do it all using just his feet. Starting as a kid in cowboy boots, then hoofing it to five-gallon plastic paint bucket beats (or was it a pickle bucket?) with subway drummer turned Broadway player Larry Wright to the swells and crescendos of the likes of Vivaldi in his Classical Savion 2005 Tour, Savion is my man.

I am psyched for this coming Sunday, October 12th. Savion and troupe will be performing in his Bare Soundz Tour at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in his hometown of Newark, N.J.  

My guess is that by Monday I'll find myself in my kitchen dressed in my clogs hoofing it to the sounds and rhythms of whatever may be at home:  pickle bucket, pasta boxes, kitchen faucet dripping, my leaky roof tapping. There is noise everywhere; there are rhythms everywhere. There is funk inside our selves and out. Sometimes we just gotta tap it out.

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Hip Hop, Tap, Broadway, Enthusiast, Studio, Performance, Bare Soundz, Bring in 'da Funk, Bring in 'da Noise, Classical Savion, Larry Wright, Savion Glover, Tap Dance Kid (all tags)