Tracing Early Tap Dance, Rhythm, and Improvisation in 19th-Century Transatlantic Performance

Object: a pair of tap shoes.

As a rhythmic, percussive, and historically improvisational art form, tap dance presents many methodological challenges for archival research. As dance historians have documented, tap dance was born from uniting marginalised peoples across the Atlantic from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, stemming from African and African American vernacular dances, alongside Irish step dance and English clog dance. Recognised as America’s ‘national dance’, its early origins, steps, practices, and performances remain largely marginalised and excluded from archives. This paper therefore asks how we might investigate, even re-construct, tap dance across nineteenth-century transatlantic performance, exploring archival fragments, objects, and silences to understand tap dance’s past rhythmic, improvisational, and lively movements. The paper draws on extensive archival research of the ‘first’ named tap dancer in the historical record, William Henry Lane (‘Master Juba’) – a once- renowned, mid-nineteenth century African American performer who found fame on both sides of the Atlantic. Exploring Lane’s performances from 1840s challenge dances in America to variety and minstrel performances in Britain, I investigate Lane’s rapid, dynamic, and affective footsteps, offering a novel rhythmic art form to Victorian audiences. Finally, it explores wider nineteenth-century archival glimpses of early tap dance, such as Edison’s 1894 film, which enlivens tap dance’s more-than-representational movements. 

Lucy Thompson is a final year doctoral candidate in cultural and historical geography at the University of Cambridge, funded by Trinity College, where she previously completed her BA (Hons) and MPhil. Her PhD thesis is titled ‘Stepping in Time and Space with Circum-Atlantic Performance: A Cultural and Historical Geography of Tap Dance’, which explores themes of movement, embodiment, and rhythm, within tap dance’s significant circum-Atlantic histories of colonialism, transatlantic mobilities, and bodily resistance. Focusing on the microhistories and lived experiences of marginalised dancers across critical historical moments, this has included extensive archival research on the mid-nineteenth century dancer William Henry Lane (‘Master Juba’), alongside twentieth-century dancers’ oral histories and lived experiences, to tap dance’s enduring cultural significance today. This research advocates more embodied, participatory, and more-than-representational approaches to historical dance research (with a recent publication in Area), utilising more practice-based, participatory methods working with pedagogical and heritage communities.