Tapping the Wellspring

“There are people who take tap class, do a tap dance,” says Savion Glover. “And then there are people who know the dance, who know why they take tap classes. Who know why they do 20 shuffles, or 50 shuffles, before they go on.”

Sitting in a chair at the side of a practice studio in Manhattan, he lifts his right foot and illustrates a shuffle as he talks. Tatut, tatut, tatut, say the metal taps, crisply. “Shuffle, not this: Shuh, full,” and his foot flails sloppily, creating an imprecise sliding sound across the floor.

“Shuffle,” he says again, and the foot illustrates the difference, faster and faster, the clean precise tatut, tatut, dadah, dadah, dadah getting louder, more aggressive, hammering under his words. Gregory Hines says Glover hits the floor harder than anyone else.

“You want to know that your shuffle is going to be this, every time,” he says. “A lot of cats, they’ll get on their drum sets and do, bahbahbah”--his voice blurs into a vague rumble--”before they know how to move their sticks.”

Glover, 26, as much of the world knows, is an improvisational virtuoso at wielding the “sticks” of his tap shoes. Now, he’s brought together four generations of tap dancers, mainly his mentors, to rehearse “Foot Notes,” a tap “concert” that opens at the Wilshire Theatre Wednesday night as part of a seven-week tour.

“Every day will be different,” Glover says, watching debonair tap legend Buster Brown, whose fluid step belies the age implicit in his seven decades of performing, jam by the piano. Closer at hand are the bright, flashy taps of 10-year-old Cartier A. Williams, known as Coop, who is working out a few moves of his own.

“Buss,” Coop demands, turning and going over to Brown, “listen to this,” and puts the headphones of his Discman over Brown’s ears. In a minute, the two have begun a spontaneous improvisational tap to the music of Santana.

Glover has been redefining the image of tap at least since his show “Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring In ‘Da Funk” triumphed on Broadway in 1996. Instead of conventional “Top Hat”-style Broadway tap fare (a la “The Tap Dance Kid,” the hit musical of the 1980s in which the 11-year-old Glover got his start), “Noise/Funk” was a free-form tap odyssey that told the entire history of the African American experience, brought the art form back to its street roots and made Glover a star.

Being hailed as a genius at the age of 21 is a hard act to follow. Since “Noise/Funk,” Glover has founded his own tap troupe, Not Your Ordinary Tappers, done television specials for ABC and PBS, tapped at the opening of “Monday Night Football” and made a Coke commercial. He’s performed at the White House and off-Broadway in a 1999 show called “Savion Glover Downtown.” But he hasn’t followed up with anything quite on the scale--in terms of concept or impact--of “Noise/Funk.”

“I used to think I had this responsibility to carry on this tradition,” he says. “Now I just feel like I have to keep the dance out there, keep it in the public eye.”

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Not that his sense of tradition has waned. If “Foot Notes” is about anything, it’s about watching tap pass from one generation to another, every night. Brown and Jimmy Slyde, another “Foot Notes” performer, are guardians of the tradition Glover began to absorb eagerly as a teenager performing in the 1988 revue “Black and Blue,” when they dubbed him “the sponge” because of the way he soaked up information. Tap tradition and its proponents also provided Glover, who grew up without a father, with a second family. During “Black and Blue,” he began calling tapper Dianne Walker, also featured in “Foot Notes,” “Aunt Dianne.”

Nor have Glover’s goals grown any more modest. True, his current projects run more to collaborations than his own creations. He stars in Spike Lee’s next film, to be released this fall (“Let’s say it’s like the minstrel era in the year 2000”). He’s also on the creative team of a new Disney musical, “Hoops,” about the Harlem Globetrotters.

But be it through his own work or other people’s, Glover’s ultimate goal is to bring tap into the mainstream of popular culture. “I want tap to be something danced in arenas,” he says, “sort of like a rock group. Other art forms happen every night. Take theater, opera; there’s always opera happening every night. I want [tap] to be an institution like that.”

To this end, he’s mulling over various large-scale, popularizing projects. He plans to make an album to demonstrate that tap is music as well as dance, working with some “murderous musicians, whoever’s still around: Herbie Hancock, Sade.” He also wants to make his own feature karate film, the story told entirely in tap, but he doesn’t want it to be seen as some kind of marginal experiment. “I have to figure out: How can my approach be suitable for the viewer?” he says.

His latest bid for mainstream attention is the book “Savion: My Life in Tap,” co-authored with New York Times reporter (and now theater critic) Bruce Weber, just issued by William Morrow. Targeting a young, hip audience with its funky montages of voices, images and in-your-face graphics, it’s also a cut above your average young star bio: It’s genuinely informative about tap and Glover’s place in it, getting its point across in a concise 80 pages.

This relatively modest length is a kind of reflection of the fact that Glover, for all of his desire to hustle tap into the big time, has a marked restraint. When he dances, his eyes often focus on the floor, or on some place inside himself. Even in conversation, he doesn’t make a lot of eye contact; slouched in his chair, he monitors events in the rest of the rehearsal room as he talks.

And, media-savvy as he is by now--”60 Minutes” is coming to film rehearsal the next day--he maintains a refreshing candor about himself and his goals, admitting, for instance, that the real motivation behind “Foot Notes” was, first, wanting to hang out with the artists he respects and loves, and second, promoting his book.

But he’s not particularly self-aggrandizing. “The book is called, ‘My Life in Tap,’ ” he says. “But I haven’t lived, yet.” He gives a shy smile with a rare glance upward. “So the book should have been called, ‘My Life to This Point, in Tap.’ Because, God willing, there’s more.”

And any thought that Glover might compromise his art form as he pushes it into the mainstream is refuted by his intense focus. “This dance is special,” he says, “it’s sacred. You can tell. In this room, in Studio A, we’re hoofing. If you go into another room, they might be tap dancing. They don’t know about this. We haven’t let them in. I’m not going to give anyone that feeling, like, come on in, yeah, it’s open. You have to want it. You have to let me know that you want to know where I got my tap shoes from, you want to know about the way they cubanize the heel.

“Whatever you do, just learn about what you’re doing, get into it. I mean, a lot of these rappers today, those are not musicians. They’re just picking up the mic, they’re just going, blah blah blah; they ain’t saying nothing.”

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As he talks, he watches Coop, still improvising in front of the mirror.

“Coop--” he says, “not only does he dance, but he’s into the dance. He’ll just come up, and be like, ‘Yo, look’ “--Glover’s feet execute a rapid tap sequence--”and then just walk away. I mean,” he says and laughs, “that’s telling me, that’s keeping me on point, like, don’t slip. I mean, he’ll go home, and he’ll work on things. It’s not just something his mom signed him up to do. He’s walking with it; he’s living with it. That’s the interest you have to show.”

“ ‘Scuse me, Save,” Coop says, “is rehearsal over?”

“Yeah,” Glover says. “I just want to tighten up that last piece with you tomorrow.”

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* “Foot Notes--The Concert,” preview tonight at 8, Wilshire Theatre, 8440 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills; opens Wednesday and plays Wednesday-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 3 p.m. $15-$57. (213) 365-3500.