What the Eye Hears Read online

  This exactness, noted the botanist, was synchronized with drums. Europeans who wrote about African dance rarely failed to mention drums. African dancers studied by twentieth-century researchers were in constant communication with drummers. In the words of one Bakebe tribesman, the dancer “creates within himself an echo of the drum. Once he is seeing the echo, he is dancing with pride.” The drummer directed the dancer, yet the dancer could also signal the drummer with gestures and rhythms; they could converse. (And since in many West African languages words could be distinguished by pitch, drums could “talk,” transmitting messages with pitch patterns.)

  “Every member of their body expresseth a different motion”—this might have registered a distinguishing trait of music in the region, what musicologists call polyrhythm. From a European perspective, the music of West and Central Africa uses at least two different rhythmic systems at once. (To take the most basic example, one drum plays three beats in the time it takes another to play two.) Though the individual parts are often simple, they interlock into a complex pattern that to many European ears throughout history—perceiving no pattern or only the repetition of one—has sounded chaotic or monotonous. Perhaps polyrhythm is what the botanist was seeing: the feet following one drum, the hips another. Such segmentation would pervade twentieth-century West African dance: polyrhythm encouraged isolation of body parts, and skilled dancers could follow three or four rhythms simultaneously. The best dancers could add more.

  Music of that character, and the dancing to it, required a particular approach to time. One musicologist called it a “metronome sense,” the listener’s ability to hear the regular pulse of a metrical pattern, to feel it bodily, whether or not it’s expressed aurally. In relation to tap, what’s most intriguing is that, in addition to handling polyrhythms, a person with a strong metronome sense can divide or multiply the pulse, so that rhythmic accents that might seem off or random are sensed instead as being on the beat—the beat if the song were played at two or three times the tempo. Call it fractal rhythm, an apprehension of patterns across scales of magnification. It allows a seeming suspension of the beat that is, at a deeper level, no suspension at all. It sounds like essential equipment for a tap dancer, a secret to keeping time.

  If the Europeans, in their appreciation of the Africans’ exact timing, picked up on this, they likely missed much else. Several early European visitors noticed that the songs that accompanied dancing worked to “praise or blame” certain people, inducing laughter. The failure of these Europeans to mention the satirical dancing described by twentieth-century researchers might be explained by the probability that the earlier visitors, unfamiliar with norms or exaggerations, would have had trouble identifying the joke—particularly since they tended to find serious African dancing laughable. Among their descendants, those who could recognize themselves as the object of danced satire remained a minority. (And when they did recognize themselves, they tended to respond as the colonial government of Zambia did, by banning the dances.)

  Also hiding in the silences of the record could be more of what a Dutch man of science witnessed in 1673: the propensity of dancers to “stamp on the ground vigorously with their feet … with a fixed expression on their faces.” Robert Farris Thompson found something similar among twentieth-century Yoruban dancers, who performed the wildest movements while balancing upon their heads terra-cotta sculptures and containers of fire. Balance was the idea; a controlled dance style expressed self-mastery. “To do difficult tasks with an air of ease and a silent disdain,” as was admired among the Gola, sounds universal, yet “the aesthetic of the cool” that Thompson identified in multiple Central and West African languages was “a special kind of cool,” a spiritual principle, a metaphor for right living.

  This is the kind of meaning that early European observers, who generally found sub-Saharan dance immoral from a Christian perpective, were least likely to intuit. Arranging serial solos within a circle of dancers is, like call-and-response, a way of negotiating the relationship between individual and group, between innovation and tradition. The set parts provide a foundation against which the swerves of the soloist acquire significance. It’s safe to assume that for sub-Saharan Africans in the time of the slave trade, dance functioned as a mnenomic. Just as danced imitation could be a form of mockery, it could also be emulation of the most radical kind, the embodiment of ancestors or gods. In Yoruban tradition, the appearance of a god in a dancer is recognized as much by a signature rhythm and motion as by costume and mask. Across the region, it was commonly believed that ancestors lived on in the bodies of dancers, who entered a state of possession by disrupting a rhythm. (“Breaking the beat or breaking the pattern,” as Thompson explains it, “is something one does to break on into the world of the ancestors.”) It was believed that executing the ancestors’ steps brought them back to life, a principle that in some measure carried over into tap. “When you’re dancing,” said Buster Brown, “I’m dancing with you.”

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  The ships that transported Africans to the New World starting in the 1500s were densely packed. Diagrams of the hulls resemble the inside of a pomegranate. The cargo was chattel, yet those crammed-in bodies carried culture. The same immateriality of dance that frustrates the search for hard historical evidence helped African dance survive the Middle Passage. Among historians, a debate long raged between those who argued that the displacing forces of slavery had destroyed a usable African past in America, and those who insisted upon continuities. Until the 1960s, many blacks had no interest in being associated with an African culture assumed by majority opinion to be inferior; they and some well-meaning whites feared that admitting to African retentions would be giving ammunition to racists or be part of an argument that slavery wasn’t so bad. With his 1942 book The Myth of the Negro Past, Melville Herskovits gave the continuity school a leg up, cataloguing hundreds of American practices with African analogues; he believed that dance had carried over the most. Other historians indentified more retentions, but more important was a “grammar of culture,” the theory that it was an African way of doing things that affected how transplanted slaves adapted to the cultures of their Euro-American masters and neighbors and forged new cultures. The African heritage was less what the slaves danced and sang than how. Or, as Trummy Young and Sy Oliver, African-American musicians of the 1940s, would put it, “’Tain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.”

  BRITAIN, IRELAND, OR THE MOVING THING

  Africans weren’t the only percussive dancers who came to America. They weren’t even the only ones who came as slaves. One might expect the history of dance in Britain and Ireland to be more fully documented than that of Africa, yet while the court dances and theatrical dances that emerged there left a wealth of records, the probable British ancestors of tap were not so highborn. For the most part, the folk traditions in question were deemed unworthy of mention by the literate, who either weren’t aware of them or took them for granted. Often, the only way folk dance left a trace was by being adopted and altered by the upper classes—refined, polished, and tamed by “dancing masters,” professionals who codified rules to teach and publish in treatises. This continual circulation of dance practices among the social classes, a process of imitation that was often parodic, further confuses any search for origins or authenticity, as does the constant traffic between folk customs and theatrical representations, particularly considering that when the dances changed, the nomenclature often didn’t. In the oral tradition itself, the words used to label movements varied regionally: the same name might refer to different steps, or the same step might go by different names.

  Take the word jig. The etymologist who traced it back to the ancient Sanskrit jagat, or “the moving thing,” was probably overshooting, but he was onto something, because in the Europe of the late Middle Ages, the various cognates (gigue, giga, Geige, jigge, jegg, etc.) came to be applied to the fiddle and to almost any lively dance or dance tune—to anything that moved. In Elizabethan English, iygges, gygges, and jigs labeled various kinds of dance. In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare characterized the “Scotch Jigge” as “hot and hasty” in a metaphor for wooing. (However, the dance that William Kempe, the great clown of Shakespeare’s day, did with bells on his ankles, was a morris dance. When Kempe said he spent his life in “mad jigges,” he meant bawdy song-and-dance afterpieces.) By the seventeenth century, jig had emerged as one of the most popular, if generic, terms for the dance and music of informal social occasions. Consider the good time Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary of 1665, watching his wife’s maid dance a jig, “which she does the best I ever did see, having the most natural way of it and keeps time the most perfectly.” Rhythmic accuracy and naturalness—meaning ease, lack of inhibition—were virtues that a university-educated, upwardly mobile son of a tailor might recognize, with some wistfulness, in his servant.

  In the eighteenth century, the jig was danced alongside—and frequently conflated with—a dance called the hornpipe. The first uses, likely named after the instrument, include a Baroque court dance with a rhythm adopted by Purcell and Handel as characteristically English. But a different hornpipe popped up on London playbills in the 1700s. This denoted a solo step dance, a percussive style, usually performed in the character of a rustic. The dancer Nancy Dawson found fame in the class satire of The Beggar’s Opera, hornpiping to the tune that would become known as “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.” (Earlier, it was called “Piss on the Grass.”) Increasingly, the stage hornpipe grew associated with the character of a sailor, incorporating pantomime of sailorly activities. Actual sailors may have also done the hornpipe, for exercise and to stave off boredom. In any case, something called the hornpipe became basic equipment for performers in British fairgrounds and
saloons, a dance that lower-class audiences recognized as an elaborated version of their own pastimes.

  Scattered reminiscences of the early nineteenth century portray “stepping” as a standard feature of feasts and wakes and Saturday nights at the alehouse. These dances were percussive, too: even without a fiddler playing along, listeners could recognize the tune in the steps. Yet the dances were also meant to be seen. Dancers elevated their footwork closer to eye level by dancing atop tables; ladies raised their skirts. The upper-class attitude toward such stepping comes through in the remarks of a well-heeled witness to a Grasmere harvest dance in 1827: “The country lads tripped it merrily and heavily. They called the amusement dancing, but I call it thumping; for he who could make the greatest noise seemed to be esteemed the greatest dancer.”

  The county of Lancashire, associated with hornpipes since the seventeenth century, became associated in the nineteenth century with a dance called the Lancashire clog or clog hornpipe—the old hornpipe, perhaps, in different shoes. Clog as a term for wooden shoes was more than a century old. Farmers wore clogs, and during the Industrial Revolution, mill workers adopted the footwear as cheap protection against damp workplaces and cold stone floors. According to oral history, the workers, inspired by the beat of machinery, rattled their feet to keep warm and were pleased by the sound. During breaks, they held competitions on the cobblestones, folding in jigs and morris dances. Factory lads took the dance into alehouses, huddling on the flagstones by the hearth. (Their “quick, well-timed clatter” caught the ear of Edwin Waugh, who in his 1855 Sketches of Lancashire Life writes about following the curious noise into a tavern.) Clogs were originally loose-fitting, necessitating a flat-footed style lest the shoes fall off. Sole guards made of iron only encouraged further abuse. Metal against stone strikes sparks.

  Clogs were associated with labor. Miners wore clogs, as did canal boat workers, who could practice their dancing on the job. Establishments wishing to exclude the “unwashed” put up notices that “Persons in Clogs” would not be admitted. Clog dancing was something most everyone could do, yet some people were experts. “Twopenny hops” of the 1850s might feature a paid exhibition by a “first rate professor.” Street cloggers worked inside and outside of public houses, collecting coins, but competitions were also formalized with judges, rules, prize belts, and wagers. Clogging was an athletic event, taught aside wrestling and boxing. (One of the earliest mentions of “clog-hornpipe” is as a skill ascribed to the Lancashire pugilist Jack Carter in Pierce Egan’s Boxiana of 1824.) In the second half of the century, the dance of the pub moved into the music hall. Stage dancers adopted the tighter-fitting clogs of dandyish young men, shoes snug enough for a high style, up on the toes. Compared with the more down-to-earth and presumably older “heel and toe” tradition, the new style was urban and social-climbing. Clogging of all kinds was referred to as “noisy shoe” and “shoe music,” the difference residing not just in the skill of the dancer but in the ear of the beholder.

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  Considering that a large portion of the workers in those Lancashire mills were Irish, refugees from the famines of the 1840s and ’50s, it’s possible that much in Lancashire clogging could have been Irish in origin, or Irish-inflected. But Irish step dancing, at least from the late eighteenth century on, was generally called jigging. Prior references to jigs in Ireland are missing, but references to any dance in early Gaelic texts are few and unspecific: circle dances, sword dances. The accounts of traveling Englishmen, as shaped as European descriptions of Africa by the prejudices of a conquering power, repeatedly stress the Irish fondness for dance, often contrasting Irish vivacity with staid Englishness. The Irish stressed this about themselves. “An Irishman may be said to love fighting well, whiskey better, and dancing best of all,” wrote the Irish antiquarian Thomas Croker in 1829. William Carleton, an Irish writer invested in defining Irish national character, charged (in 1840 but referring back to “racy old times” before the already compromised present) that “of all the amusements peculiar to our population, dancing is by far the most important … it may be considered as a very just indication of the spirit and character of the people.” Furthermore, he boasted, “no people dance as well as the Irish,” citing as explanation and proof the well-known Irish susceptibility to music.

  Croker and Carleton were principally referring to dance figures and steps likely imported from England, Scotland, and Europe in the mid-to-late eighteenth century. The population learned these from itinerant dancing masters, upwardly mobile Irishmen who larded their high-flown speech with French and took pride in their shabby-genteel attire of tall hats, fine stockings, ornamental canes, and light pumps. Dancing masters taught deportment along with various kinds of dances. In the earliest descriptions of any specificity (from the mid-1800s, alas), jigs were danced by couples and distinguished by a 6/8 time signature and steps whose names—drumming, battering—suggested noise. The dancing masters demonstrated steps of common currency alongside those of their own invention, which might then enter the general fund under their name. Exhibitions of mastery came in solo step dances, interchangeably labeled hornpipes and jigs, full of hops and rapid crossings of the feet suggested by the adjective twinkling and the expression “cover the buckle.” These solos were often beaten out atop a door pulled off its hinges, a sounding board in a land of sod or clay floors. The door was also a stage. Confronted with this spatial limitation, dancers embraced it as a preference. According to twentieth-century folklorists, those dancers who stayed most in place shot up highest in esteem. (The ability to execute every step starting with either foot was also prized.) If someone said you could “dance on a plate,” you were dancing well. Dancing “on a sixpence” was better. There were stories of competitions in which the door started on the floor and was raised in successive rounds like a high bar—up onto the table, up onto barrels on top of the table. In one story, the contest ends with the door on top of the chimney.

  In Ireland, the idea of dance as a competition, often with a cake as a prize, goes back at least to the seventeenth century. For rivalrous dancing masters, challenge matches served as advertising and a way to vie for fame, pupils, and territory. Many challenge stories have the sound of endurance contests, the winner being the man who lasts longest. Or the victor is he who spools out the most steps, displaying the most knowledge or invention. Where there’s a suggestion of improvisation, it’s treated as exceptional. Routines were set, and some sequences, mated to a matching tune, are still performed today, the oldest supposedly dating from around 1750, preserved through an unbroken line of teachers and students. The aesthetic became highly controlled. It wasn’t just that the dance stayed in place; the body was disciplined, an ideal manifest in tales of dancers performing with a pan of water on their heads and not spilling a drop. It was dancing masters who fixed the arms to the dancers’ sides, banning as vulgar the rhythmic rise and fall of upper limbs and the snapping of fingers mentioned in early descriptions. Some teachers, it is said, weighed down their pupils’ hands with stones. That’s one solution to the problem of what to do with the arms while the feet are making a racket. It made for a severe, unchanging front, all the motion from the hips down, a chest-forward martial rigor appealing to Irish pride and lacking in any show of sensuality to which the Church might object.

  It appears that the influence of the dancing masters was greatest in the south, where the dominant style placed the weight over the ball of the foot, with the heels not touching the ground except when heel drops were explicitly part of the step. The north was characterized by a rocking between heel and toe, while in the west, the approach was flat-footed and low-slung, with the arms and torso unrestrained. While closely tied to music, the western style was more free-form; improvisation was encouraged and individual style linked to personality. It is sometimes presumed that the western style of dancing is the oldest. (Such is the assumption behind the name given to it by twentieth-century revivalists: sean-nós, Gaelic for “old-style.”) But it was the southern style, the dancing masters’ style, that Irish cultural nationalists of the early twentieth century codified and enforced: the rules, rigidity, and uniforms that came to dominate the teaching of Irish dance, both in Ireland and in America. It’s worth remembering, though, that many of the Irish who came to America before that time might have danced quite differently.