Glover is the embodiment – and perhaps the cause – of the coolness tap has attained. Visually, from his dreadlocks to his baggy street clothes, he is the perfect image of today’s youth and black American culture. Audibly, the pounding rhythms of his performance would serve as well as – if not better than – a beat box for any rap or hip-hop number.

Growing up in and remaining an active part of that community, Glover is well aware of the challenges he could have been faced with today. He credits tap dance and his mother’s guiding hand, in steering him away from a life of dealing drugs – a path he has seen friends follow.

His dancing is equally masterful, and breathtaking. He dances hard, with incredible power in his legs and delicate precision in his feet. He stays serious and focused, often casting his gaze downward; he believes the essence of tap is in the lower half of the body. “My dancing voice is life,” he tells me over the phone from New York. “It’s my life through dance. People just have the opportunity to see and hear my life on stage.”

If dance is about life, then in Bare Soundz, running for two days at Kaaitheater, Glover and two other dancers – Marshall Davis, Jr and Maurice Chestnut – hone in on life’s rhythm. Bare Soundz is exactly what it says: 90 minutes of the pure sound of tap, no musical accompaniment. As Glover says: “There’s no choice but to become engulfed in the musicality of the dance.”

After performing the show for several years, he sees most audiences reacting in a similar way – a tentative beginning, but “by the end of the second act, they allow themselves to enjoy it.”

From pounding fists to pounding feet

Glover grew up in Newark, New Jersey with his mother and two brothers. His insistence on banging on pots, pans or whatever he could lay his hands on inspired his mother to enrol him in drumming class by the time he was five. From there it was a short hop over to tap dancing – the drum set of dance.

Tap dancing is one of America’s unique contributions to the world. The perfect embodiment of the melting pot, it fuses various ethnic styles, including African dance, English clogging and Irish step dancing, into a rhythmic, improvisation-based style that is often likened to jazz music.

The history of tap dance follows the path of some of America’s more troublesome historical moments. Long since connected to the African-American community, it can be traced back to the slavery of the American South; it featured a phase with many white Vaudeville performers in blackface. It shifted gears in the 1930s and ’40s, helped along by tap greats such as Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, who introduced more ballet elements and bigger arm movements. With Bare Soundz, Glover attempts to pull tap dance back to its roots, away from this more Broadway show style.

Throughout the 20th century, harder, more percussive tap dance developed through a series of magnificently talented “hoofers”, as they came to be known: Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (1878-1949), Jimmy Slyde (1927-2008), Gregory Hines (1946-2003), to name but a few.

Glover feels a deep respect for the hoofers of days gone by. “It’s a way of life for me,” he says. “ ‘Hoofer’ is something that takes a lifetime to become, and a lot of the tap dancers of today use it loosely.”

In the latter part of the 20th century, tap risked fading into a cliché, either remembered from elegant black-and-white films or performed by the aging tap greats. That was when child prodigy Glover entered the tap scene, blowing tap into the 21st century.

Bring in 'da noise

At the age of 12, Glover made his Broadway debut in The Tap Dance Kid, and the same year appeared in the film Tap, featuring a loose plot as an excuse to get some of the finest tapping talent together on screen, including Hines and Sammy Davis, Jr. Three years later, Glover became one of the youngest actors ever to be nominated for a Tony Award for his work on Broadway in Black and Blue, a musical revue featuring the songs and dances of the Parisian black community from the inter-war period.

In 1995, barely into his 20s, Glover started breaking new ground, bringing hip-hop, funk and social commentary into his performances. He choreographed and starred in Broadway’s Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk, which swept the 1996 Tony Awards. The musical mapped the African-American experience from slavery to the 1990s. Not only did it elevate tap as a powerful voice of black experience, tap was now officially cool. And its superstar was Savion Glover.

As superstars go, it would be hard to have more reverence for your predecessors. He started a school of tap in the Newark neighbourhood where he grew up – the school’s building is the same one where he took drum lessons as a boy – and he strives to give the children of this struggling area a constructive activity and a respect for those hoofers who built tap dance over the last century.

The hoofers are “like my gods of this art form,” Glover explains. “I feel it’s my duty to continue to allow people to understand these men as dancers, and as people. They survived at times when it was not cool to be a tap dancer. In my eyes, they are some of the greatest expressionists of our time.”

Bare Soundz
17-18 June, 20.30
Kaaitheater
Sainctelettesquare 20
Brussels
www.kaaitheater.be