BBC Four Dance Season - Tap America

Tap America: How A Nation Found Its Feet, to give it its full title, is an attention-grabbing documentary for many reasons, not least because it’s fronted by the actor Clarke Peters.

Himself a proficient tap dancer, Peters learned to tap dance as a child in the kitchen of his home in New Jersey, taught by his mother.

He’s been fascinated by tap ever since; and in this half-hour documentary for BBC Four Dance Season he leads us on a voyage of discovery to find the roots of this uniquely vernacular form of American, most particularly African-American, dance.

In a film full of startling and fascinating facts, Clarke discovers, for example, that greats such as Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly were indebted to the great African-American tap dancers of the 1930s and 40s, who were nevertheless excluded from significant roles in the movies.

Lavishly illustrated with clips from the great tap dancers of the past – both famous and relatively unknown – Tap America guides the viewer all the way to the 21st century, where tap is going through a time of renewal in the work of dancers/choreographers such as Michelle Dorrance and Beyoncé collaborator, Chloe Arnold.