Jitterbug! champions American dance and encourages choreographers to reach beyond the dancical's 1931 setting into the future for dance steps not even the jaded Savoy Ballroom regulars back then could have dreamed up to win the climatic dance contest. That includes everything from dub step and hip hop to hiplet. To that end it isn't implausible for the dancical's heroes, Tharbis Jefferson and Billy Rhythm, professional dancers at the Cotton Club, to team up and win the contest by throwing in tap and ballet steps at the Jitterbug break. Or at the same time in a toe-tap sequence that blows everyone away. The fact that a toe-tap shoe was available at that time makes it all the more conceivable. Here's a look at the shoes in action in 1934's The Gem of the Ocean. The dancers are Dick and Edith Barstow. I'm sure Bojangles upon seeing it must have thought, WTF? It's so far over-the-top you gotta wonder why this routine isn't as well-known as Bojangles and Shirley Temple's staircase dance from 1935's The Little Colonel.

To learn more about toe-tap, click the following to download a thesis written by Sarah Helen Williams for her Masters in Dance from the University of New Mexico called "Noisy Feet: The Forgotten Click of American Toe-Tap, 1925-1935." 

Jerome Robbins turns 100-years-old October 11th. Born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, as a high school student he studied with Alys E Bentley who Robbins credits with encouraging her students to improvise steps-- like they were doing on the dance floors in Harlem. By the time he was 20, the Lindy was becoming airborne in Harlem, morphing into the hyper-energized music driven Jitterbug.

Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Power of Habit, describes Robbins as an "innovation broker," an idea  man with "incredibly wide ranging tastes... he knew ballet but would go to these Jitterbug contests they had all over New York. None of his friends from the ballet world would come with him." And none, if any of them, are remembered.

Robbins was a catalyst for change in the arts. He brought vernacular dance into the stuffy snobbish ballet academies more interested in championing tradition than anything coming up from the streets. His first ballet Fancy Free (1944) uses Jitterbug steps in telling the story of three sailors on liberty in NYC. The score was written by an unknown Leonard Bernstein. A few months later his ballet morphed into his first Broadway musical, On the Town. That musical also broke the color bar on Broadway because Robbins insisted it reflect the diversity of a NYC crowd. By 1957, Robbins would conceive, choreograph, and direct West Side Story. If he did nothing else, he would be remembered fondly and honored for that seminal accomplishment. 

Henry Ford changed the world with his introduction of the assembly line. In the 1920's he tried to change America by campaigning-- and investing a small fortune by funding radio shows and dance clubs-- into making square dancing the national dance. Why? Because he believed jazz music was encouraging people to go out and drink and have sex in the backseats of his Model-Ts. His solution was to replace jazz-- the music and dance-- with square dancing,  a dance style and music that-- except for a few places in the Dust Bowl and Jim Crow South-- had pretty much died out by the 1920's. The foundation for this warped and repressed thinking is outlined in his book, "The International Jew," a perennial top read on today's Alt-Right book list.  There he lays out the Alt-Right/Neo Nazi Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory that blames change on the Jews, i.e., Jews were/are trying to re-engineer a Norman Rockwell world by replacing white Christians with a black underclass who will be more than happy to oblige their Jewish overlords.

Thankfully evolution-- change-- and jazz music and dance could not be contained. If it had, we would never have heard or seen such life-affirming and world-changing  music or dances. 

Jitterbug! is very American. It reflects the contributions of black and Jewish creatives working together during one of America's darkest hours. If Henry Ford had had his way we wouldn't have swing music or the jitterbug. We wouldn't have heard "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" (named "Song of the Century" by the Recording Industry Association of America) because Harold Arlen-- the son of a cantor and a character in the dancical-- wasn't allowed to develop his craft writing songs for the Cotton Club revues.  

Unfortunately, it appears following our last presidential election, there are more Henry Fords in America than ever imagined. 

To learn more and to watch a fascinating video, please click here.