Music and Dance Reviews : Copasetics Tap at Pepperdine

Senior citizens of tap, the Copasetics form a link to the glory days of the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theatre, but also to the shameful period in America when black tappers were imitated by whites but never given the credit and prominence they deserved.

Sauntering onto the stage of Smothers Theatre, Pepperdine University, on Tuesday, these five men in their 70s quickly got down to business: demonstrating not just the technique of tap but the contrasts in personal style that are central to the art.

Here was big, genial, self-effacing Henry (Phace) Roberts (Does this guy EVER dance a solo?) and small, dynamic, self-aggrandizing James (Buster) Brown (Does this guy EVER slow down?). Here, too, was loose-limbed Louis Sims Carpenter with his hard-driving soft shoe and Leslie (Bubba) Gaines tapping away while jumping rope double time--37, 38, 39 jumps as if he were still a kid on some playground or street corner.

Finally, here (only briefly, alas) was Charles (Cookie) Cook, with a style almost postmodern in its economy, reliance on line and skeletal suggestions of show-biz exuberance.

Though M. C. Leroy Myers announced that the first half of the program dealt with “Tap-ology . . . the science of dancing,” only a display of the Time Step in its various forms qualified as even implicitly academic. No, the Copasetics seemed very happy to remain popular entertainers, dancing to the accompaniment of Jim Roberts’ versatile three-man band and telling the jokes that they probably learned along with their first tap routines.

But it was all highly instructive: the group’s suave walking-into-dancing demonstration and Brown’s whimsical sketches of how different places require different modes of tap-locomotion. The formal and expressive resources of tap are, clearly, still underappreciated.

Most of all, the sense of personal interplay proved endearing: No other form of theatrical dance depends quite so much on who the dancer is and what he or she gives to partners. So, beyond the footwork and rhythmic sophistication of the solo showpieces, the Copasetics projected the mellow warmth of a moment in time shared with friends, colleagues, rivals--plus those lucky enough to be in Malibu on Tuesday.