Tapping Into Fred Astaire’s Real Legacy

Fred Astaire would have turned 100 today. And to justly celebrate his birthday, it might be useful to ignore the top-hat-and-tails cliches that he frequently tried to escape, cliches that distance him from contemporary America and threaten to make him mere nostalgia fodder. Instead let’s celebrate his originality and the risks he took--among them his acknowledgment of the black roots of jazz and tap, obvious to us, perhaps, but nearly invisible in classic Hollywood musicals of Astaire’s prime.

His death in 1987 came at roughly the time when African Americans reclaimed tap dancing after several decades in which it had been deemed too demeaning in its audience courting to be an instrument of black pride. However, with such projects as the revue “Black and Blue” on Broadway (1987) and Gregory Hines’ groundbreaking films “White Nights” (1985) and “Tap” (1989), the idiom radically changed. It emerged as a demonstration of African American self-sufficiency and even defiance, leaving Astaire’s screen persona and dancing style irrelevant to what fast became a streetwise, Savionized cutting edge of tap.

OK, so Astaire’s tapping never exactly brought in ‘da funk. But he loved jazz, playing drums and what he called “feelthy piano” in more than one film, and composing a song titled “If Swing Goes, I Go Too” that spelled out his identification with the pop music of his time.

More significantly, he connected jazz to black culture often enough in his films and TV specials to represent a real anomaly in American entertainment, emphasizing that link in the “Slap That Bass” number from “Shall We Dance” (1937), the assaultive solos in an improbably integrated Army guardhouse in “You’ll Never Get Rich” (1941), and the joyous duet with bebop shoeshine man LeRoy Daniels in “The Band Wagon” (1953).

The most graphic example is also the most politically incorrect: his blackface “Bojangles of Harlem” number in “Swing Time” (1936). The impersonation section near the beginning finds Astaire way out of his range--he simply wasn’t much good at imitating someone else’s style; some sources claim his dancing here evokes John W. Bubbles (a black tapper he greatly admired) more than Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.

Only when he cuts loose in an abstract sequence of complex steps opposite his triple shadow does the number become classic Astaire. But even the Jolson poses and unfortunate minstrel gestures early on reveal an amazing mission for a white popular entertainer in the first half of this century: showing Robinson as the king of tap, with the whole town at his feet.

Put bluntly, who else at Astaire’s level of star power ever tried to pay this kind public tribute to a pioneering black colleague? And which image of Robinson do we prefer: his mid-’30s identity as Shirley Temple’s subservient dance-partner (an image savagely parodied in “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk”) or Astaire’s portrait of him as a cultural icon?

As it happens, “Bojangles of Harlem” also represents a milestone for Astaire having nothing to do with blackface. Those three projected shadows behind him mark his first use of film technology to expand his dancing beyond what would be possible on a stage.

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Not merely a gimmick, trick photography deepens the sense of theater that often makes Astaire’s formal performance numbers unexpectedly intense or neo-Expressionist, taking him into different emotional terrain from the plots of the films they embellish.

This concept of theater as something mysterious and liberating turns up free of special effects in the moody interlude of Astaire’s “Top Hat” title number (1935) but grows stronger and stranger when he dances with nine photographic clones in “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (“Blue Skies,” 1946) or in slow-motion--with backup dancers moving at normal speed--for “Steppin’ Out With My Baby” (“Easter Parade,” 1948), or in response to footwear dancing by itself in “Shoes With Wings On” (“The Barkelys of Broadway,” 1949).

Indeed, the Magic Theater of Fred Astaire may be as important as his sublime lyric duets in explaining why he’s irreplaceable. Stuck with some of the silliest scripts ever written, he and his collaborators managed to emphasize the power of dance and the theater to free the imagination. The results haven’t been surpassed.

Yes, MTV choreographers do harness film technology to create dance-fantasy a la Astaire, but his art focuses on what the dancing body can do, theirs on what the film-editor can do, almost always leaving dance-continuity fragmented if not incoherent. Astaire didn’t deal in such piecemeal impressions of dancing, he dealt in dance itself, insisting on longer takes, fewer cuts and more whole-body compositions.

(Unfortunately, all these priorities went out the window in his final film musical, “Finian’s Rainbow” in 1968, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, a filmmaker responsible for minimizing more great dancers than anyone in Hollywood up to Debbie Allen. One Astaire solo features 13 shots in less than two minutes--MTV style before MTV existed, and reason enough for turning away from the big screen.)

Astaire made 31 musical films in 35 years and right now there’s more of him on view than ever, since we can buy, rent or tape off-the-air nearly everything. The wonder is that he repeated himself so seldom--he would screen his past work to avoid just that problem--and how much he brings to roles even when he’s seriously miscast.

In “Shall We Dance,” for instance, he’s transparently himself while trying to play a ballet star, yet when he demonstrates a ballet and tap version of the same step, he zeros in on a primal American vision of dancing: the fusion of classical and popular, the academy and the street, black and white. A key component of Astaire’s dance style, that vision has obsessed some of America’s greatest concert-dance choreographers, from Alvin Ailey (6 years old when Astaire’s film was released) to Twyla Tharp (born four years after the movie) and beyond. You can also find it on MTV nearly every night.

So, when Astaire fans gather to honor his centenary at events such as the upcoming one at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Friday, don’t think of him merely as a dead white guy who tapped elegantly in a tux. Fred Astaire has lots of moves we haven’t caught up with yet--and plenty left to teach Hollywood even now.