Stepping in Time and Space with Circum-Atlantic Performance: A Cultural and Historical Geography of Tap Dance

This thesis explores the cultural and historical geographies of dance, offering the first geographical inquiry into the largely overlooked circum-Atlantic histories of tap dance. It explores cultural geographical themes of movement, embodiment, and rhythm, within tap’s significant transatlantic histories of colonialism, migration, and bodily resistance. Utilising archival methods, oral histories, and practice-based, participatory methods, this project investigates the microhistories and lived experiences of marginalised dancers across critical historical moments: from tap dance’s early origins across circum-Atlantic geographies (from the seventeenth to nineteenth century), to its appropriation into nineteenth and twentieth-century popular cultures, and finally tap’s enduring cultural significance. This research works to reconcile cultural-historical geographical debates, bringing together dance’s theorisation as ‘non-representational’ with historical geographical methods and approaches, moving beyond the methodological difficulties of researching dance in the archive. I theorise tap dance as a 'more-than-representational' practice, attempting to reconcile the history and politics of dancing bodies with affective, embodied dimensions of the past. The opening act of the thesis begins with the case study of William Henry Lane, known onstage as ‘Master Juba’, offering extensive archival research on the ‘first’ named tap dancer in the historical record. As the once-renowned, mid-nineteenth-century African American performer, I map Lane’s dancing footsteps across transatlantic performance, which offers insights into the four subsequent research themes – Bodies, Circuits, Resistance, Identity. ‘Moving, Dancing Bodies’ theorises the tap-dancing body across space and time in an embodied, rhythmic, and improvisational art form. The chapter explores a micro-geography of the body: starting with the feet and the beat, moving to the tap-dancing body in time and space, and finally, collectively dancing bodies moving within the art form’s wider heritage communities. ‘Dancing Circuits’ investigates tap dancers’ lived experiences of movement, migration, and mobility, arguing that tap dance historically holds intrinsic circuit geographies of mobility. It explores ‘circuits’ from tap's circum-Atlantic origins, to late-nineteenth and twentieth-century US performance circuits, and finally maps overlooked transnational touring mobilities. ‘Rhythm as Resistance’ further explores how politics, protest, and resistance have been intrinsic to tap’s historical geographies. Focussing on race, the chapter begins by exploring tap’s early transatlantic rhythms of resistance, before considering tap’s rhythmic development during the Harlem Renaissance, its appropriation and performance in Hollywood film, and finally, the art form's late-twentieth century ‘renaissance’. The final act, ‘Dancing Identity’, focusses on gender, utilising rare oral history accounts of marginalised women in tap dance to explore gendered performances and intersectional inequalities across space and time. Overall, this doctoral research theorises dancing bodies in a rhythmic, embodied, and ‘more-than-representational’ art form, centring how dancing bodies are embedded in relationships of power, intersectional inequalities, and bodily resistance, inseparable from their circum-Atlantic histories and geographies.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Thompson, Lucy

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Howell, Philip

• Geographies of Dance
• Historical Geography
• Affect, Embodiment, and the More-than-Representational
• Archives & Oral Histories
• Bodily Resistance, Intersectional Inequalities, Power
• Participatory, Embodied Methods
• Circum-Atlantic Performance

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/1f535a7f-a88c-4c09-975c-13ceb6cf7a76/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0009-0007-3347-7146

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/392853