In Colonial America, dance moves with African origins became intertwined with the rapid footwork of the Irish jig and the percussion of English clog dancing. Whether cultures intermingled in the rural South or in crowded city neighborhoods, the result was a budding new set of hybrid dance forms based on a skilled and ever-changing combination of movement and sound.

From its roots in popular entertainment, tap has grown into a significant art form praised as a major American contribution to world dance. As it continues to evolve through influences from jazz and hip hop, this dynamic form of dance will be equally at home in the most prestigious performance halls and on the streets, building on tradition while staying fresh with the infusion of new cultural influences.

Historians trace the deep roots of tap dancing to the beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, especially to contact between enslaved Africans and Irish and Scottish indentured servants on Caribbean plantations in the 1600s. In Colonial America, a wide range of dance elements with African origins — including a relaxed torso, hip movement, improvisation, using the body as a percussive instrument, and the rhythmic shuffling, gliding or dragging of the feet — became intertwined with the rapid footwork of the Irish jig and the percussion of English clog dancing.

Whether cultures intermingled in the rural South or in crowded city neighborhoods, the result was a budding new set of hybrid dance forms based on a skilled and ever-changing combination of movement and sound.

By the 1920s, tap as we know it had fully emerged and was popular on the Broadway stage. During the 1930s and 1940s, movies tended to highlight white dancers who tapped in a choreographed style that showed the influence of dance schools, while African American dancers were more likely to be seen performing off-screen in a more improvisational style with jazz-influenced rhythms. By the 1950s, interest in tap dancing was waning, but by the 1970s, aspiring tap dancers looked to their elders and learned from their skills and experience.

As young dancers from wide-ranging backgrounds began to study tap again, new generations of professionals infused tap with influences from jazz and hip hop to express their own personalities and experiences. From its roots in popular entertainment, tap has grown into a significant art form praised as a major American contribution to world dance. 

As it continues to evolve, tap will be equally at home in the most prestigious performance halls and on the streets, building on tradition while staying fresh with the infusion of new cultural influences.

Derick Grant, the much-acclaimed tap dancer, teacher, and choreographer of the new generation, was born on into a dancing family. He was raised by his grandparents, Yvonne and Melvin Grant, from Barbados, who traced their heritage back to the slave plantation. His mother, Yvette Grant, was an aspiring actress who, with his aunt, Andrea Herbert Major, had both grown up in the dancing school of Mildred Kennedy on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston. "I grew up dancing," says Grant, who began dancing at the age of two. "Everybody in my family danced for a while when I was younger. I was bussed to school, forty-five minutes from the hood, from Dorchester to the suburbs. So there weren't a lot of black students, but the ones that were there went to my dancing school. So I just assumed that everybody danced for a very long time." Mildred Kennedy was the mother to many dancers, like Dianne Walker, Arlene Kennedy, and Andrea Herbert Major. During the school year, Grant studied dance at Major's studio, the Roxbury Center for the Performing Arts, and with Dianne Walker at Leon Collins' studio in Brookline; summers were spent in Los Angeles at Paul and Arlene Kennedy's (who were Mildred's children) Universal Dance Design, which they opened in 1980. Grant considered the Kennedys as family; he respectfully called them aunt and uncle, and considered himself a third-generation Kennedy dancer.

When not in the studio studying ballet, jazz, and tap, Grant read comic books, played video games, and listened to music. He also watched a lot of television. The first tap-dancing film to impress him was not a Hollywood musical rerun but George T. Niremburg's 1979 tap documentary No Maps on My Taps, which he had not seen in the movies when it was release in 1979. In 1982, when he was age eight, No Map's stars-- Chuck Green, Bunny Briggs, and Howard "Sandman" Sims-- were on a promotional tour of the film and were to appear onstage in Boston. Three young male Boston dancers were chosen to appear in the show, to portray the hoofers as their young male counterparts. Dianne Walker, as director, chose the three best dancers from her Advanced "Steppers" class at Andrea Majors' studio: Dwayne Jones, to play Chuck Green, Rashan Burroughs to play Bunny Briggs, and the eight-year-old Grant to play Sandman Sims. The sixty-year-old Briggs, sixty-three-year-old Green, and sixty-seven-year-old Sims all reminded Grant of his grandfather. "But they could dance," he remembered. ":They were all clean and smelled good. And I never associated mature gentlemen with dance. It was like two different worlds colliding. It appealed to me instantly."

In his early twenties, Grant became a principal dancer with the Jazz Tap Ensemble, performing with them for three years and touring worldwide, during which time he was awarded the Princess Grace Award for Upcoming Young Artist. Tobi Tobias in a 1992 review of JTE at New York's Joyce Theater called Grant "the eighteen-year-old "whiz kid of the group . . . a live wire with an upbeat sunniness [who] epitomizes youth and optimism . . . . His way with staccato is a form of physical wit." He came to prominence in 1996 as an original company member and dance captain in the George C. Wolfe-directed musical Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk, at both the Joseph Papp Public Theater and on Broadway; he recreated Savion Glover's choreography and starred in the role of ‘Da Beat for the first National Tour.

But it was the 1996 tap musical Imagine Tap!, which Grant choreographed, directed, and premiered at Chicago's Harris Theater, that allowed him to spin his own resources into the most original tap musical of the decade, not all from his comic-book adventures and king-fu fantasies. With a cast of gospel-blues singers and eighteen of the freshest rhythm tap dancers on the planet, the musical was cited in Dance Magazine as "a surreal, acid-induced tap dance dream" that envisioned tap dance as a movie musical come to life, its dancing stars raising their glistening gowns and tuxedo pants to hoof the audience into ecstasy. Opting not to cast any of his star dancers as star soloists-- who were all but one exception under the age of thirty-three-- Grant focused on superbly choreographed ensemble numbers, thus expanding tap from a virtuosic solo form into group choreography by designing eye-catching movement patterns that focused attention on rhythmically brilliant feet. I was so determined to create a chorus that people wanted to be proud of," Grant reflected. "I wanted to make a piece to collaborate and be part of a team, to celebrate each other and togetherness." Yet the real driving force for Grant was the need for the tap community to unite; to get past the divisive boundaries of race, gender, and tap style.

As Arlene Kennedy said of Grant, "He has had the best of the old and new. With his formal training, he knows how to perform as an old timer. His style is made up of it all. He's not just a fad dancer. He has substance because he has combined his youth and energy with the technique of the old legends to form his own personal style."