“It’s just so funny that tap dance had its renaissance in the country when we think of it as being such an urban form,” says Brenda Bufalino in a scene from The Woodpecker, an in-progress documentary about her life and art. By “funny,” of course, the tap dancer and choreographer, who turns 89 this month, means “unusual.” And the story of the New Paltz resident, who the New York Times dubbed “a dancer of Dickensian complexity” and is credited with singlehandedly launching the revival of tap dance, one of America’s true homegrown art forms, in the 1970s and ’80s, is unusual, indeed.
Family Business
Bufalino was born in 1937 in Swampscott, Massachusetts, a suburb on Boston’s North Shore. Her grandmother was a piano prodigy, and her mother and aunt performed regionally as the Strickland Sisters, a vaudeville-adjacent act that featured harmonized classical art songs with coloratura by her mom, who also specialized in theatrical oration. Once she turned seven, little Brenda became part of the show as well, doing whimsical novelty dance routines. But even at that early age she was already a dance veteran, having started studying tap six days a week at the local Professor O’Brien’s Normal School of Dancing when she was five. In Boston, Bufalino next studied Afro-Cuban, jazz, and other styles with the revered West Indian dance teacher Stanley Brown and, though underage, performed with supper club troupe the Bobby Clark Dancers.
Yet despite her initial inroads into the dance world, at that juncture she also found herself cultivating a competing creative interest. “I really wanted to be a writer,” says Bufalino, who would later publish a memoir, two novellas, and book of poetry. “When I was growing up, there was always a lot of music in the house, but very little literature. When I was 15 I started reading Herman Hesse, T. H. Lawrence, the existentialists—that got me interested in writing. I’ve always loved stories. Eventually I discovered that through choreography I was able to perform my stories.”
Manhattan Mentor
In 1955, fascinated by jazz and the avant garde, Bufalino moved to New York City to immerse herself in the Beat era’s experimental culture. “Nightclub work was great for male performers, but it wasn’t so great for women,” she says. “Swing was out and [non-dance-friendly] bebop was in, so nobody was really dancing. But I realized that [avant-garde spaces] could be another type of venue to perform in.” Predictably, though, the avant scene didn’t pay well, so the 17-year-old, soon to be pregnant with her first of two sons, found work as a Calypso dancer at famed Greenwich Village nightspot Cafe Society. She also began training at Dance Craft, a studio operated by a giant of tap dance: Honi Coles.
Born in Philadelphia in 1911, Charles “Honi” Coles revolutionized the tap genre during the 1940s via the idiosyncratic fast, elegant, and effortless-looking technique he pioneered. Awarded the National Medal of the Arts (1991) and numerous other artistic honors, Coles in his teaching emphasized melody and personality in dancing with an instructional approach that was as light as his stage moves. “Dance Craft was right above Jimmy Ryan’s jazz club on West 54th Street,” says Bufalino. “Honi would teach me eight bars of something and then he’d leave the room. Then he’d come back after a few minutes and say, ‘Okay, show me what you got.’ And then I’d do it and he’d say, ‘That’s it!’ That’s the only kind of training I got from him. But from watching him I got the ideas of phrasing and tonality that guided me for the rest of my career in tap.”
Cole soon invited his apt charge to join the Copasetics, the renowned tap ensemble he’d cofounded in 1949 with other dancers and Ellington composer and arranger Billy Strayhorn. As a young white woman in the 1950s, she certainly stood out within the otherwise older African American male group, which enjoyed popularity in New York clubs—until the middle of the following decade, when having to compete with the new entertainment outlet of television made it difficult to get gigs. “No one was really interested tap dancing anymore,” she says. “I’d been married since 1959, and by then I had two kids. We left New York and ended up living in Mexico for a little while, then Poughquag.” Next would come a move north, to a very different scene.
Rural Rendezvous
In 1965, Bufalino, her husband, and their children relocated to Lagrangeville and then farm-dominated Gardiner. Initially she focused mainly on raising the kids and writing plays and poetry, but soon enough she was back before audiences when she met up with another transplant from the New York experimental scene, saxophonist and composer Ed Summerlin. Summerlin was best known for his liturgical jazz compositions, and the two collaborated on performance art projects with Bufalino contributing interpretive dance to his works. “I’d put my tap sounds through a synthesizer and dance to them,” she recounts. A memorable performance took place at a 1973 avant-garde festival at the South Street Seaport featuring Nam June Paik and other electronics-oriented artists when the power went out, leading to Summerlin breaking out his sax and Bufalino dancing with the tap shoes she happened to have with her. “The audience really loved it,” she says. “I thought, ‘Hey, there is a place for tap dancing in the modern world.”
Signing on as an adjunct professor of jazz dance at SUNY New Paltz, Bufalino created, under the auspices of the university, choreographed modern dance pieces that included Watch the Bouncing Ball, Diary of Samuel and Rosalie, and the short film Traveling. She also opened a studio, the Dancing Theatre, and launched a local dance company. In 1975 she reconnected with Coles and the Copasetics, who she brought up to New Paltz to rehearse and perform. The summit is chronicled in the 1977 Bufalino-created documentary Great Feats of Feet: A Portrait of the Jazz and Tap Dancer. “I was able to get a grant to do the shows, and for some of the guys it was the first paid gig they’d had in years,” says Bufalino. “Tap had been dead for years, but now here we were, up in the mountains, bringing it back. Some of my fans from the avant garde world didn’t like me going back to traditional tap dancing, but I always say, ‘If you don’t do something sometimes that alienates half your audience you’re not growing.’ [Laughs.]”
The stylistic re-emergence stepped up with Bufalino’s leading “Singing, Swinging, and Winging,” a well-received revue of her original tap choreography at Boston’s Pilgrim Theatre that included Coles and members of her New Paltz company. The revival was on.
Rhythmic Resurgence
Divorced from her husband, Bufalino left SUNY New Paltz in 1980 and began splitting her time between Gardiner and New York City, where she premiered new works at small jazz clubs and occasionally at large halls. She also began touring internationally with the Copasetics and in a duo with Coles, the latter aggregation dancing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and with legendary tap duo the Nicholas Brothers and young upstarts Gregory Hines and Savion Glover.
There was also an infamous Atlantic City engagement. “It was for a live TV broadcast, and they asked us to cut the closing number we’d had planned,” the dancer recalls. “The producers said it was because of time, but we knew it was because we touched at the end of it, and they were afraid to show an older Black man touching a younger white woman. Honi told them we’d cut it, but we did it anyway. The emcee came out because he thought the show was over and we just ignored him and went right into the number.”
Unstoppable, Bufalino unveiled other landmark shows like 1984’s solo interpretation of Ellington’s “Cantata and the Blues,” which incorporated counterpoint, weight, and complex rhythms. She taught in New York and abroad, became increasingly involved in the new wave of tap dance festivals that were beginning to spring up in US cities, and in 1986 launched what’s arguably her greatest project: the American Tap Dance Orchestra (later renamed the American Tap Dance Foundation). Utilizing as many as 11 members, the ATDO was based on Bufalino’s concept of having different groups of dancers function like the instrumental sections of a musical orchestra. “It was something I’d wanted to do for a long time,” Bufalino explains. “To have the taps be the instruments and ‘play’ the bass and drum parts, with a solo dancer doing the melody parts.” Clad in matching black tuxedos and tails, the group debuted at that summer’s Statue of Liberty Fourth of July festival in Battery Park.
One of the ATDO’s cofounding dancers is Tony Waag, the producer of The Woodpecker. “I’ve known Brenda since I was a teenager, and she’s definitely the most influential and inspiring person connected to my life and career,” says Waag. “She’s a real philosopher, a guru of tap dance.” From 1989 to 1995, Waag and Bufalino also ran New York’s Woodpeckers Tap Dance Center, which became a model for tap organizations and studios around the world. While based at the center, the ATDO woodshedded more key works, including the “tap opera” “Gertude’s Nose,” inspired by the titular cliff ledge in the Shawangunks. Mid-1990s federal arts budget cuts led to the closure of the Woodpecker center, although the American Tap Dance Foundation persists with Waag at the helm.
Return and Reflection
Although her pioneering efforts to bring tap dancing to the concert stage and her taped performances, vivid storytelling, and challenging, hyper-rhythmic choreography continue to resonate, the shuttering of the Woodpecker facility helped to prompt Bufalino’s full-time return to the region, where she toggles between her New Paltz apartment and Gardiner studio. With the senior tap matron dancing less these days, much of the activity at the latter property involves ceramics, one of her other creative passions, and along with her many colorful abstract paintings, her quirky pots and vases adorn her New Paltz home. Another current project is a novella based on her grandmother’s life.
How does the influential icon feel about her legacy as she nears her 90s? “I never had any doubts about being an artist,” she muses. “But when I look back on it all, I’m amazed.” So, too, are dance lovers everywhere.
The Rosendale Theater will host a work-in-progress screening of The Woodpecker on September 27 at 4pm. There will be a Q&A with Brenda Bufalino and director Tony Waag after the film.
