Tap dance reminds cinema of its origins in the turn-of-the-century vernacular of vaudeville, circus, carnival and other diffuse kinds of attractions and spectacles. In fact one can make out, in the difference between the smooth aerial flights of a Fred Astaire and the earthier moves of a Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, a rhythmic struggle between the technical sophistication of the cinema in its developed form, and its lowlier, more vulgarly corporeal origins and appetites. This chapter examines the contrast between the clog-dancing rustic (black or Irish) and the sophisticated man-about-town. To do so testifies to a class ambivalence that is never quite resolved in tap dance, which always retains the traces of its ostentatiously corporeal origins, a kind of comic awkwardness that resists being lifted up into the condition of high art. Cutting athwart its slick syncopations, tap dance always acts like a kind decomposition of cinema to its elements of sound and movement, most importantly in its play with the mechanization of human bodies. Tap dance therefore provides an elementary form of cinema’s transaction between body and image, gravity and light.
