Resurgence

Abstract

This chapter begins with the challenge dance scene in the 1989 movie Tap!, starring Gregory Hines; the scene includes seventy-four-year-old Henry LeTang, seventy-two-year-old Howard “Sandman” Sims, seventy-one-year-old Steve Condos, sixty-seven-year-old Bunny Briggs, sixty-four-year-old Sammy Davis Jr., sixty-two-year-old Jimmy Slyde, and fifty-six-year-old Arthur Duncan and ends in a triumphant finale with sixty-eight-year-old Harold Nicholas taking a flying leap over the backs of the men, landing in a down-and-up split with a no-hands assist, and pulling himself up into perfect form as the circle of men triumphantly shout “Olé!” The chapter then retrospects the decade of the eighties, which saw the grand resurgence of tap dance.