Tapping into America’s love affair with dance

Friday, May 25, 2001 | 8:54 a.m.

Tap Facts

What: National Tap Dance Day Concert

When: 3 p.m. today and Saturday.

Where: Winchester Community Center, 3130 S. McLeod Drive

Tickets: $7 general admission; $5 for seniors and children under age 12.

Information: 455-7340.

Today is National Tap Dance Day.

This is the day to pay homage to the likes of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.

In 1989 Congress declared May 25 National Tap Dance Day in honor of Robinson, one of the dance form's most famous practitioners. He was born May 25, 1878, and died Nov. 25, 1949.

Robinson began dancing professionally at age 6 and had a distinguished career onstage and in movies (he often danced on stairways with Shirley Temple).

Susan Abbott-Doskocil, who teaches tap at UNLV and the Community College of Southern Nevada, is heading up a local tap celebration. She is the producer of the eighth annual National Tap Dance Day Concert to be held today and Saturday at the Winchester Community Center.

She said more than 20 tap dance artists will perform during the two-day concert. Performers will include choreographer Henry Le Tang; Peggy Ryan (called by some the "Buddy Rich of Tap"); Tyler Haydon of the Riviera's "Splash," and Chris Racine of the production show "Tap Dogs."

Abbott-Doskocil, a producer and choreographer as well as teacher and professional dancer, also will perform.

"I held the first concert back in 1994 at the Four Queens in the lounge," Abbott-Doskocil said. "The lounge was so packed they offered me a monthly contract to do a jazz-and-tap dance show."

Tap Dance Day was created at the urging of Tap America Project, a Washington, D.C., organization that was established 12 years ago. Its first project, says Executive Director Carol Vaughn, was to have Congress create a National Tap Dance Day.

"Our goal is to preserve tap and to give it the respect it deserves," said Vaughn, who teaches tap at American University in Washington, D.C.

Although New York City will have more tap-dance celebrations than anywhere else, Vaughn said Las Vegas has more professional tap dancers.

"More tap dancers are employed in Las Vegas than anywhere else in the world," Vaughn said.

Vaughn said Tap Dance Day celebrations have spread around the world.

"It's celebrated in 46 American cities and 14 foreign countries," she said. "It's spreading in Europe like gangbusters. Helsinki (Finland) even has a National Tap Dance Day."

Vaughn said the popularity of tap dancing peaked in the 1930s and '40s.

"That's when tap hit the forefront of the American scene," she said.

Those were the years that Robinson, Fred Astaire and a host of other hoofers were churning out musicals that usually included tap dancing. Among the more popular films were "The Barkleys of Broadway" (1949), "Broadway Melody" (a series made in 1936, '38 and '40), "Follow the Fleet" (1936) and "Holiday Inn" (1942).

"Tap dancing never really made it on TV," Vaughn said, "and so in the 1950s and '60s it disappeared. In the '70s it came back a little bit."

Today, she said, interest in tap is again on the rise. Many older people are doing it for exercise, and college students are discovering the dance form.