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10/17/2009
Tap Dancing America by Constance Valis Hill

Constance Valis Hill’s new book, Tap Dancing America, will be published by Oxford University Press in January, 2010.

The book tells the story of a unique American vernacular dance form in which in the rhythms and steps of every dancer resound in those of the elders, ancestors, teachers, masters, and griots who came before. This is the beauty, and what is most unique, about tap dancing - the passing of the history from body to body: it is an act of reincarnation; referential and reverential, all the ancestors are present in any one moment in the dance.

This book will be the first comprehensive history of tap dancing (our oldest American vernacular dance form and one that has long been regarded as a male-dominated form), documenting its three hundred-year evolution in America, in a history that is inclusive of the women in tap.