Tiptop tap Savion Glover’s Improvography BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

Following the success of his Tony Award-winning Broadway hit Bring In ’da Noise, Bring In ’da Funk, choreographer and master tapper Savion Glover has created several other shows, both solo and with other dancers, that highlight the versatility of tap and celebrate new and veteran tap dancers. Glover’s dedication to his art has brought audiences a new appreciation of how precise and expressive a musical instrument a tap dancer can be. He kicked off a national tour of his newest work, Improvography II, in March in Los Angeles, and he will bring it to the Providence Performing Arts Center on Friday, May 20 (call [401] 421-ARTS).

Improvography II puts tap together with the sounds of jazz, hip-hop, R&B, neo-soul, rock, and funk. In the first act, Glover is accompanied by his band the Otherz, and he does free-ranging improvs with each of the musicians. In the second act, he joins three other dancers, called Chapter IV, for new choreography he has created for them. One of those dancers is 15-year-old Cartier Williams, who has been on the road with Glover on and off since the 2000 tour of Footnotes, in which they performed with tap veterans Dianne Walker, Jimmy Slyde, and Buster Brown. In 2001, he became part of Glover’s dance company called Ti Dii, and he also was in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled with Glover.

Growing up in Washington, D.C., Williams attended the same ballet school as Chelsea Clinton, where he was also well-known for his tapping. It was tap that garnered him an invitation to perform at the Clinton White House, where he met Glover for the first time. Glover was so impressed by the young dancer that he invited him to tour with him.

Glover had starred in his first Broadway role (The Tap Dance Kid) at the age of 10 and just a few years later with Gregory Hines in the 1989 film of Tap, where Glover found himself surrounded by tap icons like Sandman Sims, Sammy Davis Jr., and Bunny Briggs. Later Glover would do Black and Blue and Jelly’s Last Jam with Hines; in recent solo gigs, he keeps a photo of Hines, who died of cancer two years ago, atop the onstage piano. Even in Noise/Funk, Glover dedicated a sequence to showing several different styles of tapping that he’d learned from those old-time hoofers, and his debt to Hines shines through all of his work.

Thus, in a recent phone conversation with Williams, while he was still on the tour bus for Improvography II, he described the most important thing he’d learned from Glover this way: "To pass the dance on to the next generation like he did for me. I’ll pass it down to someone else once I’m his age. And then, God willing, that person that I passed it onto will pass it on to someone else, so it never stops — the dance."

He explained the group Ti Dii as "doing any styles of tap dance and dancing to any kind of music — it was like a tie-dye rendition of everything." And he was glowing about the Footnotes tour with Slyde, Walker, and Brown: "I was really blessed to be on the road with them and learn all different styles of dance from them. They told me, ‘Don’t beat the wood up. Don’t hurt the floor, it’s your friend; don’t be banging up on it all the time. Just take it easy sometimes, relax and have clarity.’ "

That advice, along with his early ballet training, lends a certain looseness, even a lightness, to Williams’s tapping. In Chapter IV, he’s joined by Maurice Chestnut, Ashley DeForest, and Glover. They do pieces set to Bjork and Michael Jackson; an a cappella number created by Williams, Chestnut, and DeForest; and a dance called My Father John, in which they do some solo improvisations. They also join Glover for Stars and Stripes Forever (For Now), a piece Glover was inspired to make after the recent birth of his son.

Williams is thrilled to be able to express himself through dance — "to make my own music, whether I’m happy or sad." Looking into the future, he has great dreams for tap dance: "Tap dance would be like rap music almost. We’d be on billboards, we’d be on the TV all the time, on stamps, on magazines; we’d have records out, CDs out . . . everything."

With that kind of enthusiasm and with the dancing you’ll see in Improvography II, Williams will most likely make you a believer in his dreams.