Bring in ‘da finesse

When Savion Glover isn’t redefining the art of tap-dancing, he slips the most famous feet in show business into size 12 1/2 Jordans or boots.

Filling that footwear would be a tall order for anyone else, because nobody in millennial dance so dominates any style or idiom as definitively as Glover dominates tap. At 31, he’s the acknowledged master -- the summation of tap’s past, the torchbearer for its future -- with no real rivals on the horizon but plenty of imitators and proteges.

Sitting in a Burbank dressing room before a TV taping -- his thick dreads tied back, his skinny arms wrapped around his chest -- he tries to laugh away the hype about himself.

“I’m happy that people think of me as the greatest tap-dancer that ever lived,” he says. “But it’s just a rumor. Because the greatest dancer that ever lived knows everything, and I don’t. I’m still learning. I still have a lot of work to do.”

Some part of what he’s learned will be on view Tuesday though Saturday at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood in a program called “Improvography.” Act 1 features his solo improvisations; Act 2, his choreography for himself and the dancers billed as Chapter IV: Maurice Chestnut, Ashley DeForest and Cartier Williams.

“We sort of made a safety net with that title,” Glover explains. “Anything can happen at these shows. We may have some guests come on, some surprise dancers, something like that. I may do something that even the band doesn’t know that I’m going to do. We’ll keep it fresh, keep the improvisation.”

Featuring a four-member jazz band, the program will give local audiences their first chance to hear Glover sing -- both scat syllables and lyrics, he says -- along with their first experience of him as a songwriter. He also plans a tribute to beleaguered pop star Michael Jackson, because, he says diplomatically, “there’s so much negativity now around him.”

“You have people who literally stole his style -- people who sing and do that type of dancing. But if you ask them where they got it, they say, ‘This is my own style, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ So if these people aren’t even acknowledging him, I feel that I should say to the world and to M.J., ‘Thank you for the influence you’ve had on me.’ ”

Glover talks a lot about influences -- especially the veteran tap stylists he grew up emulating. He began his performing career at age 6 as a drummer in Newark, N.J., but two years later his mother signed him up for dance lessons in New York City and he quickly became spellbound by the likes of such rhythm-tappers or hoofers as Chuck Green and Lon Chaney. (He and wife Nina’s 5-month-old son is named Chaney.)

“They’re definitely a part of me,” he says of a tap generation now passing into history. “I loved everything about their state of being, their way of living. To me, they will always be the greatest.”

Glover made his Broadway debut at 12 in “The Tap Dance Kid” and his film debut at 13 in “Tap,” and for five seasons he was a regular on PBS’ “Sesame Street.” Although he grew up in public, he kept surprising everyone with new approaches and ambitions -- for instance, using tap to retell black American history in the award-winning 1996 Broadway musical “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk.”

More recently, he scored another breakthrough by tapping to Bach, Bartok and Vivaldi in a program titled “Classical Savion.” However, the challenge of Baroque masterworks caused him to modify his style -- now just as fast and intricate as ever but far less deliberately clompy and rough-edged in attack. “I’m trying to make tap more sound-friendly,” he explains. “I want it to be melodic and musical. I want people to enjoy the sound of tap.”

A company videotape of “Classical Savion” shows him lurching and flailing as always, looking like a conventional performer only when accepting an ovation. Nobody’s idea of poetry in motion. But the sound of him -- the way his footwork exactly matches the keyboard playing or creates counter-rhythms in a piece -- is newly dazzling.

“We need to go back to when tap was identified with sound,” he says. “I don’t think anyone’s ready for it right now, but I want to do a show that’s all dark: You come into a theater and you never see anything. I’m trying to figure out how we can do that.”

Glover understands that some people in the tap world are concerned about this kind of thinking and the effect it’s had on his style. He says his tap buddy Chance Taylor cautioned him recently against abandoning steps, arguing it was no longer exciting to watch him.

“But in my mind, that’s great,” he says. “Because people should be listening.”

Besides his stage projects, Glover has kept working in films and television as both performer (in Spike Lee’s 2000 “Bamboozled,” for example) and choreographer (the Nike “Free Style” commercials). He’s hoping to team up with ballet firebrand Rasta Thomas in something similar to “White Nights,” the 20-year-old film drama that paired classical virtuoso Mikhail Baryshnikov with Glover’s mentor, the late Gregory Hines.

Significantly, he’s not prepared to sacrifice his musical priorities for the kind of empty Hollywood flash he ridiculed in “Noise/Funk” -- the emphasis on visual spectacle that he believes all but killed tap as an art form.

“The Nicholas Brothers were the best tap-dancers,” he says of a team most often celebrated for high-velocity tap gymnastics. “I’m not talking about their flash-dancing, I’m talking about tap-dancing. They were really saying something with their feet.

“But America was not interested in that. America was more interested in what they looked like, what they were doing with their hands, and that totally sabotaged the whole situation.”

He praises Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and other Hollywood dance icons as “great entertainers. They were tap-dancing as America knew it, before hoofing.” But hoofing, a.k.a. hitting -- the rhythm-dominated approach to tap that emerged in black nightclubs and was showcased in a few historic Broadway revues and films -- remains for Glover the wellspring of the art. It linked dancing and drumming in his mind when he was a child, and it continues to inspire him.

“I just love it, man,” he declares, “enjoying the time spent, becoming the music. There’s no secret, nothing hidden.

“People are here to do what they’re here to do. I feel I was put here to tap-dance -- in a basement or a theater or anywhere. So for you guys to see it -- for it to be done on the stage -- is like extra credit. It’s like, wow, people are going to pay to see it if they’re into it.

“If something else comes along, if people want me to do some straight acting, I’m cool with it. That’s one of the accessories of life as an entertainer. But, regardless, I will always be tap-dancing.”

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‘Improvography’

Where: Kodak Theatre, 6801 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday

Price: $21 to $53.50

Contact: (213) 480-3232