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Transcription: [00:28:51]
To the old films of the 1930s and 40s that they saw on the Television and from master tappers who are working in Philadelphia and who they met, not only on the street, but in many cases through concert programs and events, cultural events at which both dancers were asked to appear.
There is another source of dance moves, one which is very important in vernacular dance traditions of the black community, and that's acrobatic dancing.
I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with dance traditions of the 1930s in the black community, where an entire tradition developed known as flash dancing. LaVaughn when he speaks of tap dancing in the 1930s, says that tap dancers at that time were a time of a dime a dozen, everybody was out tap dancing. So what happened was, a tradition developed where you had to add a little something to your act. You might add a flip, you might do some taps and go into a splits, you might be dancing on the top of a piano, do a flip off the piano onto the ground, land into some splits, do a backflip out of the split, go off the stage, go into another split at the bottom of the stage, all in conjunction with perhaps two or three other dancers. The acrobatic tradition of dancing that came to the form in the 1930s in flash dancing is, again, a tradition with a long-standing tradition in the black community. Just as stepping can easily be traced back to earlier forms of buck dancing and on back into the 1800s, so also can traditions of acrobatic dancing be traced back, in this country, easily to the 1800s and beyond so that when you look at dance movements and dance repertoires of many African nations, you see acrobatic moves, which are strikingly similar to moves which appear in the new world, both in the dancing of South American and Caribbean countries and in selected times, especially in certain areas in the 1930s today with the breakdancing