Tap(a) na cara: mulheres negras na dança tap e suas histórias brilhantes

Abstract

This study is dignifying, it portrays black women in tap dance with respect, love and truth, including myself. Many, not to say most of them, faceless, nameless, historyless women, but in my research, I found their traces, their legacies, their living presences alongside mine. Tap dance is based on an African and diasporic cradle and is sedimented by matriarchy and related philosophies that will be discussed in this study, such as Afrikana Womanism (Weems, 2020), the construction of gender (Oyěwùmí, 2021), heterosexual white patriarchy and how these institutions permeate the experience of black women and their womanhood. This work reflects the indignation of my years of practicing tap dance, whose trajectory was forged in erasures, but which, as a primordial characteristic of black women, allowed me to follow the path that led me to prosper. Upon discovering in my research other black women doing this, I gained strength to use forms of writing based on fable (Hartman, 2022), debauchery, irony (Paixão and Santos, 2017), street smarts (Santos, 2020) and another thought of the future, Afrofuturism (Freitas, 2015 and Womack, 2013). The path chosen at the crossroads between Africa and Europe clearly found tap dance being formed in blackness, long before any encounter with other so-called contemporary peoples. Stories will be told because we will tell them, we will be the voices of a time that existed, exists and will exist. Black women, bathed in their knowledge, established, remained and maintained their feet in the best rhythm of their lives that today we call tap.