Bloomfield dance company named best in state

BLOOMFIELD, NJ — You may need a geiger counter of sorts to find this out-of-the-way dance studio, but once you discover it you’ve struck gold. And the gold is on the shoes of the tap dancers at the New Jersey Tap Dance Ensemble.

Located in Bloomfield, the company was recently named the 2018 People’s Choice in the category of modern/cultural dance company by Discover NJ Arts.

Established 25 years ago, the studio is located at 357 Broad St., in the rear of a shopping mall with its front door facing JFK Parkway and the stands of Foley Field. But according to its founder Deborah Mitchell, many tap dancers of merit know exactly where her studio is located, having already shuffled a path to its door.

“Almost every tap dancer in NJ that has made their mark in this art form, locally or nationally,” Mitchell said recently, “if you trace back their training, their roots come from us. That’s when our name comes up. Especially if they came out of NJ.”

Listening to Mitchell, you learn that a person arriving at her studio needs two attributes to become a good tap dancer. Walking is the first. “It you can walk, you can dance,” she said.

The second is love. A person has to love tap, love the art form of tap, love being the percussive instrument of your feet hitting the floor. Mitchell will go further and say your feet don’t even need shoes. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the man who taught Shirley Temple to tap, danced in tap shoes only when the camera and microphone were running, she said.

There’s a third attribute that a person understands from listening to Mitchell: being taught by someone well-trained.

Born and raised in St. Louis, Mitchell started tap lessons as a child. But her mother withdrew her from class.
“My mother was upset when she observed me,” Mitchell said. “I was pushed to the back of the class. She said, ‘You don’t need this.’ But she made a mistake. She threw my shoes into the closet. So I tapped in the closet.”

Her mother insisted she get an education. Mitchell did, receiving her master’s in social work at Indiana University. Then she headed east, to NYC, seeking her tap dancing fortune. She found it by chance.

“I went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to see the great hoofers rehearse,” she said. “I slept in the car and snuck into the theater and fell asleep in the darkened auditorium. My tap shoes fell to the ground.”

Someone on stage heard and told her to come up. She did and was introduced to a veritable who’s who of tap artists: Buster Brown, Charles Cook, Jimmy Slyde, Fayard Nicholas and Honi Coles. In the corner was another.

“I didn’t hear his name,” she said. “It was ‘Bubba.’”
Bubba asked her a question. He wanted to know why she was not in school. She said because she wanted to tap. He asked her to tap.
“I want to check out your feet,” he said.

What the man saw he liked and Mitchell had found a mentor, Leslie “Bubba” Gaines. Gaines would teach her, “The Jump Rope,” an act where the dancer jumps rope and taps. Mitchell used it to good effect in Francis Ford Coppola’s movie, “The Cotton Club.”

“Tap takes a lot of skill and you have to be taught right,” Mitchell said. “Bubba taught me right. He was taking me into the studio three, four hours a day.”

Gaines, who was 70 when Mitchell met him, did not want to be paid for his lessons. He told her instead to repay him by teaching others to tap. She was in her 20s.

“He saw in me the love of the art form,” Mitchell said. “He also saw in me his partner, who died from drugs when he was 21.”
That partner’s name was “Hutch.” He and Gaines had a running joke. If one of them complimented the other for a brilliant performance, that person would downplay it by saying, “Ah, you’re going to see me again one day — someone just as good as me.”

“‘That little Hutch was right,’” Mitchell said Gaines told her. “‘But he didn’t tell me it would be a little girl.’”
Mitchell considers herself very fortunate having great teachers including the renowned Henry LeTang.

When “The Cotton Club” was being filmed, Mitchell was employed as a social worker in Newark during the day. At night, for 19 weeks, she was on the movie set in Astoria, Queens. She made good money, put it into the bank and quit her day job. She was then cast in the musical “Black and Blue” which played Paris for six months and came to NYC. Mitchell later toured with Cab Calloway.
The NJ Dance Ensemble has two dance companies.

There is the adult, professional company, with 12 members; and a youth company, with 10 members. But tap lessons are available on the second and fourth Sunday of each month. Other than that, the companies train at the studio.

Mitchell said that at one time tap was ignored as an American art form, but now it is expected that a professional dancer knows how to tap.
“Except for the early ‘30s and ‘40s, when they had great black bands,” she said, “tap didn’t get the audience because of race.”
Her professional company gives only a few performances a year because people are not aware of what tap can be.

“They don’t know what they’ll see,” she said. “They think they’re going to see a recital. But what they are going to see is a main stage concert performance. It’s an American art form. My goal is to have people see it as the great art it is. All the men I saw on that stage that day are dead. It makes me happy the art form is being sustained. I’m not worried. I’ve paid back Bubba.”

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