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"Jazz Tap: Up Close & Personal"

Savion Glover

Saturday, June 10 • 7pm & 9:30PM

“The finest tap dancing I have ever seen.”
—Joan Acocella, The New Yorker

Tap dancer extraordinaire Savion Glover takes a break from his customary large venues to give back-to-back performances in the intimate setting of Herbst Theatre—an ideal opportunity to witness Glover's jaw-dropping talent in person. “Glover is a perfect illustration of the relationship between technique and art,” wrote The New Yorker. “No one has ever achieved greater virtuosity.”

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Program Notes

Tap dancer extraordinaire Savion Glover takes a break from his customary large venues to give tonight’s back-to-back performances with his jazz ensemble in this intimate theater setting—an ideal opportunity to witness Glover’s jaw-dropping talent in person.

The tap-dance innovator and Tony-winning choreographer behind the famed Broadway show Bring In da Noise, Bring In da Funk, Glover has combined the rhythms of bebop and hip-hop with seemingly impossible footwork to become “tap’s superstar” (The New York Times). His road to stardom began at the tender age of twelve, when he first starred on Broadway in The Tap Dance Kid. Glover’s film debut followed a year later, when the young dance whiz appeared in Tap along with Gregory Hines and Sammy Davis, Jr. In the foreword to Glover’s 2000 memoir, Savion!: My Life in Tap, Hines called Glover “the greatest tap dancer to ever lace up a pair of Capezios.” (And, for the record, those Capezios are literally big shoes to fill—size 12-1/2 EE’s, to be exact.) Glover’s many other projects over the years have included five seasons as a regular on Sesame Street, the founding of the dance companies NYOT’s (for “Not Your Ordinary Tappers”) and Ti Dii, and starring in and choreographing Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled (2000).

Reviewing an earlier performance by Glover and his ensemble, The New Yorker’s dance critic, Joan Acocella, proclaimed the experience “the finest tap dancing I have ever seen,” adding, “The rhythms declare themselves, then change, then take flight, then zoom off in a different direction, then circle back, then take off again...Glover is a perfect illustration of the relationship between technique and art. Most living tap dancers would probably agree that no one has ever achieved greater virtuosity than Glover.”

— Matthew Campbell