About this item
Magisterial, revelatory, and-most suitably-entertaining, What the Eye Hears offers an authoritative account of the great American art of tap dancing. Brian Seibert, a dance critic for The New York Times, begins by exploring tap's origins as a hybrid of the jig and clog dancing from the British Isles and dances brought from Africa by slaves. He tracks tap's transfer to the stage through blackface minstrelsy and charts its growth as a cousin to jazz in the vaudeville circuits and nightclubs of the early twentieth century. Seibert chronicles tap's spread to ubiquity on Broadway and in Hollywood, analyzes its decline after World War II, and celebrates its rediscovery and reinvention by new generations of American and international performers. In the process, we discover how the history of tap dancing is central to any meaningful account of American popular culture.
About the Author
Brian Seibert is the author of What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing (FSG, 2015) , finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Since 2011, he has been a dance critic and features writer for The New York Times, and he has contributed to The New Yorker since 2002. His reviews, features, and essays have appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, Dance Magazine, and The Threepenny Review, among other publications. He has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Corporation of Yaddo. A graduate of Yale University and Columbia University, he has taught writing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Columbia University, and Yale University. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter. www.whattheeyehears.com
