African American Studies 101  Group Profile Project
by: Liv, Albert, Ingrid, Ryan, Sami

What is Northwest Tap Connection?

Northwest Tap Connection is a social justice oriented dance studio located in Seattle, Washington that specializes in rhythm tap. The studio’s philosophy is that dance enriches the lives of the students, while developing self-discipline, instilling self-confidence, and encouraging achievement and goal setting. The organization provides an environment where dancers can grow artistically and technically, while simultaneously developing leadership skills and social responsibility. The primary mission of Northwest Tap Connection is to provide dance and job opportunities to under-served communities, and to raise a generation of socially conscious artists who produce work that fosters change. Their goal is to bring the art of dance to multi-cultural and inter-generational audiences through dance instruction, cultural events, and arts education programs locally, nationally and internationally.

Founder and Artistic Director – Melba Ayco

The founder and the Artistic Director of Northwest Tap Connection is Melba Ayco, fondly known as Ms. Melba. She is a tap dance historian, choreographer, and storyteller. Ms. Melba was born into segregation in a small town near New Orleans, and she survived integration by pursuing enlightenment through cultural diversity. Ms. Melba’s goal in founding the Northwest Tap Connection is to define and share the African American experience through the performing arts. She has received numerous accolades including the 2009 Mayor’s Art Award, the 2017 African Town Queen Award, and the 2017 Martin Luther King, Jr. Medal of Community Service Award for District No. 2 of the City of Seattle.

Not only is Ms. Melba the founder of Northwest Tap Connection, but she is also a 31 year veteran of the Seattle Police Department. A part of why she founded the dance studio was to give the underprivileged youth in the area an alternative to being on the streets. And she was successful in doing so – if students were involved in the dance studio, they didn’t come across her desk at the SPD. Through her endless dedication to the community and desire to offer opportunities for growth and enlightenment to people of all ages and backgrounds, Ms. Melba has made a lasting, positive imprint in the Pacific Northwest.

Goals and Objectives of Northwest Tap Connection

The Northwest Tap Connection aims to “close the gap” for people of color in the dance community. In this context, closing the gap means making classes that are affordable and accessible to all. In the dance world, beginning levels of dance are easier to access because they require minimal hours. However, beyond this when dancers become more advanced and require more hours and practice at a competitive level, accessibility becomes more difficult. While families may be able to pay for a few hours of dance, once students start to require more hours, families are often not able to pay. This creates the gap. To target this disparity, the Northwest Tap Connection offers classes that get progressively cheaper with more hours. Additionally, if a dancer has siblings in the program, they are offered discounted classes. Beyond classes, the Northwest Tap Connection also offers its dancer’s enrichment programs that combine dancing with education and social justice, where they learn professional and leadership skills.

To fund these classes, the Northwest Tap Connection holds events to raise money. The main event is a yearly auction, for which people purchase tickets to attend and engage in both a live and silent bid for different products and experiences. All the money raised at the event goes directly back to funding children’s dance classes and improving the Northwest Tap Connection. The main goal of the Northwest Tap Connection is to “close the gap,” and events like the auction allow for the funding of dance classes in order to do this. 

Membership and Achievements

The members of the Northwest Tap Connection are the dancers enrolled in classes. The organization serves over 150 students on a weekly basis. They’ve had the opportunity to perform at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., Paramount and Moore Theaters in Seattle, and the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Chicago. In addition, dancers have had the opportunity to travel to where they may not have had the opportunity to do so before. Northwest Tap Connection dancers have been able to travel within the United States to places like Los Angeles, Louisiana, Chicago, New York, and Washington D.C and also abroad to Germany and Austria.

Cipher Goings, 18, is one of the members of the Northwest Tap Connection and has been dancing with them since the age of 7. He was named a National Young Arts Foundation Dance Finalist of 2019, a competition between young artists in different realms across the U.S. This is an example of the achievements that the Northwest Tap Connection facilitates for their dancers.

NWT’s Significance to Communities of Color 

In order to understand the importance of the work that NW Tap Connection and Ms. Melba have, we must look at the history of tap, and how it is intrinsically tied to the African American community.  Historically, many African tribes utilized drums not only as a means of creating music and facilitating important events, but also as a form of communication; they were often the primary source of correspondence between neighboring tribes, and could transmit messages across immense distances. When slaveholders discovered this, the use of drums by slaves was banned in the U.S. South. African music is closely integrated with dance, and without drums to create the rhythm, slaves used other forms of percussion to accompany their dancing – their hands, feet, and thighs all became instruments.

Tap is often thought to be a fusion of several percussive dances with roots in many different countries: African tribal dances, Spanish flamenco, English clog dancing, and Irish jigs. Tap gained popularity after the civil war as part of traveling minstrel shows, where performers (both white and black) wore blackface and played into negative racial stereotypes about African Americans; that they were dumb, lazy, and a great source of entertainment. Early tap shoes had wooden soles, which sometimes had pennies attached to the heel and toe to create the signature brassy sound that identifies tap. As jazz and Ragtime become more popular throughout the late 1800’s, tap absorbed many of the rhythms of these new music styles and popularized syncopated step. This is nowhere more apparent than in the 1898 musical, Clorindy, written by Will Marion Cook and Paul Laurence Dunbar, which became the first Broadway musical to employ an all-black cast. However, within other popular forms of entertainment such as Vaudeville, black people were only allowed to perform under certain conditions, including the “two-colored rule” which forbade black people from performing solo, ensuring that the majority of Black tap dancers danced in pairs, preventing them from achieving the kind of stardom that solo white tappers could. Even so, some of the most famous tap dancers, the ones who revolutionized tap, are Black people. Some of the tap dancing greats are described below. 

William Henry Lane (1825-1852) – also known as “Master Juba” – was possibly the only African American man to perform in minstrel shows before 1858, and the only one of the era to perform with a white minstrel group. Charles Dickens saw him perform in 1842, and described his dancing as “resembling the noises of the fingers on a tambourine” – one of the earliest records of tap dance.

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (1877-1949) started his craft in his minstrel shows and vaudeville, and was one of the first black men to go solo, as well as the most highly paid African American entertainer in the early 20th century. He went on to star in many Hollywood films, most famously in The Little Colonel, where he danced with Shirley Temple – the first interracial couple to dance on screen. World Tap Dance Day (May 25), which was signed into law in 1989, was chosen to honor his birthday.

Famous stair dance from The Little Colonel

Eleanor Powell as Bill Robinson in Honolulu 1939 – he taught her the routine, and it is meant to pay “respectful tribute” to his work.

John “Bubbles” Sublett (1902-1986), often considered the father of rhythm tap, performed in the Vaudeville duo “Buck and Bubbles,” made up of himself and pianist Ford “Buck” Washington. They popularized the polished tuxedo and cane look of tap. They were the first black artists to perform at Radio City Music Hall, and the first black artists in a television program. Sublett gave tap lessons to Fred Astaire in 1920; Astaire considered him to be one of the best tap dancers of his time and paid homage to him and Bill Robinson in a number from Swing Time; unfortunately, it was in blackface.

Fred Astaire, Bojangles of Harlem

Buck & Bubbles – Varsity Show (1937)

Although some of the most famous tap dancers throughout history have been black, it is still an inaccessible dance form – in the same way as ballet – due to racial biases of what dancers should look like and rising costs of lessons and equipment. Northwest Tap Connection gives black people the ability to participate in a form of dance that has been historically used to disparage them; “as a result of tap dance’s affiliation with minstrelsy and thus its ties to caricatures of blackness, tap dance on its own has come to signify not only “blackness” but a national identity that creates space for the white body through the exclusion of the black” (Shiovitz 11). They seek to close that gap and to allow African Americans to learn a form of dance that is deeply rooted in their heritage, and to bring dance to a community that is often under served and underrepresented in the arts.

How Does Northwest Tap Connection Relate to the Course?

Self-Organization

Because of institutionalized racism, the American system has largely failed over the years to provide equal opportunities to African Americans. In result, the Black community, and other marginalized groups, have needed to provide opportunities for themselves through self-organization. One way that these communities have provided opportunities is through local organizations that focus on providing services to marginalized individuals in the area.

The programs offered By Northwest Tap Connection continue the long history of self-organized sports and recreation by the African American community.  Before the organized play movement of the early 1900’s brought playgrounds and recreation centers to African American communities, community sports and recreation were self run and organized. This self-organization sparked creativity, expression and above all else a sense of unity among the African American community. While the organized play movement brought new facilities to the African American community these often failed to meet the needs of the community. As a result the 1920’s through the 1940’s were highlighted by the efforts of independent Black social clubs organizing  competitions and other recreational opportunities. The impetus for much of this self organized competition was the Jim-Crow segregation that dominated organized sports and even dance. The self-organization of the Black Community has often been sparked by systematic inequalities, and a need to provide to the community what the system cannot. This phenomenon is demonstrated by the Free-Breakfast programs instituted by the Black Panther Party. This program provided breakfast for schoolchildren who would otherwise be unable to afford and eat breakfast, similarly Northwest Tap Connection provides arts programs for students who would otherwise not have this access.

While dance is often thought of as an apolitical art form, Black artists have in fact used dance throughout history as a form of protest. Pearl Primus was one of the mainstays of Black concert dance in the 1940’s, she used her background in dance and anthropology to construct “protest dances” which called for racial equality and an end to racial terrorism. One of the most notable of such performances was “Strange Fruit,” featuring poetry of Lewis Allan, which condemned lynching. Northwest Tap Connection has continued this tradition, following the shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, dancers from the studio were filmed dancing in the streets among unrest and protest. This sparked the interest of directors, Joseph Webb, Denzel Boyd, and Tyler Rabinowitz who have partnered with Northwest Tap Connection to produce the short film “Hell You Talmbout.” The film is a protest to the modern day lynchings by police shootings of African Americans.

Inequality and Underfunded Schools

Due to economic inequality, schools with more students of color are under-funded. For instance, the top 10% of school districts “spend nearly 10 times more than the poorest 10 percent” (p. 31, Allen). Students in the poorest districts receive $1,000 less on average when compared to wealthier districts. With a lack of funding more diverse schools are then forced to remove funding from arts programs and focus on courses that teach directly to Common Core Standards. One can see this lack of funding specifically in dance. In the school year of 1999 to 2000 20% of schools funded dance programs, but in the school year of 2009 to 2010 only 3% of schools funded dance. Dance has essentially been removed from public education. The removal of such programs has a dramatic effect on college admission. One study found that students who took four years of art classes scored on average 91 points higher on SAT tests. The removal of arts programs then has a disproportionate effect on African Americans because their schools are the ones most underfunded and, therefore face the largest cuts to the arts. School districts serving majority African-American or Hispanic students are twice as likely to lack art programs as school districts serving predominantly white students.

Programs like Northwest Tap Connection are then a major, and often overlooked, option to combat educational and future economic inequality. Northwest Tap Connection is able to provide an opportunity that can help to lower educational inequality by supplementing an education in the arts that was lost in many public schools. Ultimately, by evening the educational playing field there is a greater potential for educated African Americans to transcend the institutionally racist barriers put before them. Just as Cipher Goings proves, Northwest Tap Connection moves beyond just a center for dance by helping students get an education in the arts, an important factor to overcoming educational inequality. According to 2008 data, African-American and Hispanic students were two times less likely to have access to art programs in their school districts in comparison to their white peers.

Works Cited

Allen, Donald W.R II, “What are the ways K-12 public school systems and teacher training programs contribute to the exploitation of black educators; what political, cultural and economic ends does this serve? How does the current treatment and deployment of black educators hamper rather than further black educational progress?” (2018). School of Education Student Capstone Projects. 186. https://digitalcommons.hamline.edu/hse_cp/186

Dance Studio | United States | Northwest Tap Connection. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.nwtapconnection.org/

Gates, H. L. (2009). Harlem Renaissance: Lives from the African American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hill, C. V. (2009). Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History, New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rees, G. (2011). Tap Dance. Encyclopedia of African American Popular Culture (pp. 1367–1370).

Seibert, B. (2015). What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. pp. 445–6.

Shiovitz, B. W. (2016). Masks in Disguise: Exposing Minstrelsy and Racial Representation within

American Tap Dance Performances of the Stage, Screen, and Sound Cartoon, 1900-1950. UCLA. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1023p0b6