A joyful noise Hitting a chord with Tap City BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

Legend has it that tap dance started in the Five Points district of Manhattan, when immigrants from the British Isles traded steps with free blacks who’d come from the South and the Caribbean. The stomping and clogging of Celtic culture met the high-spirited rhythms of the African legacy, and the result was an early form of tap dance.

It came into its own as a performance art on vaudeville stages, and that eventually led to its popularity on Broadway and in Hollywood musicals. But in the late ’40s, as ballet and modern dance crept into musicals and as television began to replace vaudeville, tap dance moved into tiny venues and jazz clubs. There it stayed until the ’70s and ’80s, when a few hardy souls re-introduced it to the American public by producing an award-winning documentary called Great Feats of Feet in 1975, by doing workshops in schools, and by establishing the American Tap Dance Foundation in 1986.

Brenda Bufalino and Tony Waag, two of the founders of ATDF (the third was the late Charles "Honi" Coles), also began the annual New York City Tap Festival, called Tap City, in 2001. In 2003, they started taking Tap City, the performance revue, on the road. The current incarnation will be at Rhode Island College on November 18.

As often happens when someone cherishes an art form and works to preserve it, he or she mentors and inspires those who will carry it on. Such was the case with "Honi" Coles, who became a mentor and then a dance partner with Brenda Bufalino, And such was the case when ATDF executive director Tony Waag first encountered Bufalino in ’76, when she and Coles came to do a workshop in his hometown of Fort Collins, Colorado.

"I dropped everything and started tap-dancing," he remembered with a laugh, in a phone conversation from ATDF’s New York offices. "Because you can bring almost anything into tap and make it your own. You can be practically anybody. You can be 90 or 31/2. You can weigh 500 pounds or be skinny as a rail. You can be from Estonia and still become a professional tap dancer."

In fact, according to Waag, enthusiasm for tap dance had become so global when he created Tap City in 2001 that there were already tap dance festivals around the world.

"I’ve watched the whole thing grow to what it is now," he noted. "It’s been a long, stretched-out revival, but I think it’s here to stay."

Bufalino has just finished a book on her life with tap — Tapping the Source (Cod Hill Press) — that gives a behind-the-scenes look at the most recent Renaissance of tap. Bufalino directed the Great Feats film, and she brought the tap group the Copasetics back into performance around that same time. And Bufalino and Coles worked side by side in developing methods of teaching tap.

"It was always thought that this rhythm tap, this musical form, couldn’t be taught, kind of like jazz," Bufalino explained, in a phone conversation from her New York home. "You could either do it or you couldn’t. We created a pedagogy, and I became a master teacher."

She also helped set up the American Tap Dance Orchestra, in which some tappers did percussion and others tapped out melody. Bufalino, 67, has been tapping since she was seven, and she will do a piece she choreographed to three compositions by jazz great Charles Mingus for Tap City.

"Tap is probably the most complicated dance form that I’ve ever done," she emphasized. "It has the most depth. It’s like being a musician — you can keep mining it for more and more possibilities. And you can tap dance late in your life. I’m dancing better than I ever was."

In addition to Waag and Bufalino, eight other dancers will perform in Tap City. Several will present improvisations, including Walter Freeman, a former member of the Riverdance cast, and 19-year-old Kendrick Jones II, whom Gregory Hines, a Tap Festival co-founder, discovered three years ago in Michigan and subsequently found scholarships for him to study dance in New York. Jones will do an improv and also a piece to the Ellington/Strayhorn standard "Caravan."

With her eponymous female tap troupe, veteran tapper Barbara Duffy will do "Little Jimmy Fiddler," as well as a tribute to Hines, a dance he choreographed called "Boom." Waag will interpret the late Donald O’Connor’s famous number "Make ’em Laugh!" And Karen Callaway Williams will do a tribute to the late Ann Miller, "Shaking the Blues Away."

Other Tap City tributes include a suite of numbers by "Honi" Coles, paying homage to him and the Copasetics, and an a cappella tribute to the Boston tap master Leon Collins. Waag will sing as well as dance on "Crazy Rhythm" and "Just In Time," the latter with Jones and Lynn Schwab.

"Tap hits such a chord with audiences, because it’s such an honest and natural art form," Waag reflected. "If you’re in the audience and you see someone having a great time, you know from your heart that you could feel that way too."

Tap City will perform on Thursday, November 18 at 8 p.m. in the Auditorium in Roberts Hall at Rhode Island College, 600 Mount Pleasant Avenue, Providence. Call (401) 456-8144.