Gregory Hines (1946-2003)
by Constance Valis Hill
Gregory Hines, jazz tap dancer, singer, actor,
musician, and creator of improvised tap
choreography, was born in the Washington
Heights section of New York City, the son of
Maurice Hines Sr. and Alma Hines. He began
dancing around the age of three, turned
professional at age five, and for fifteen years
performed with his older brother Maurice as The
Hines Kids, making nightclub appearances across
the country. While Broadway teacher and
choreographer Henry LeTang created the team’s
first tap dance routines, the brothers’ absorption
of technique came from watching and working
with the great black tap masters, whenever and
wherever they performed at the same theaters.
They practically grew up backstage at the Apollo
Theater, where they witnessed the performances
and the advice of such tap dance legends as
Charles “Honi” Coles, Howard “Sandman” Sims,
the Nicholas Brothers, and Teddy Hale, who was
Gregory’s personal source of inspiration.
Gregory and Maurice then grew into the Hines
Brothers. When Gregory was eighteen, he and
Maurice were joined by their father, Maurice Sr.,
on drums, becoming Hines, Hines and Dad. They
toured internationally and appeared frequently
on The Tonight Show, but the younger Hines was
restless to get away from the non-stop years on
the road, so he left the group in his early twenties
and “retired” (so he said) to Venice, California.
For a time he left dancing behind, exploring
alternatives that included his forming a jazz-rock
band called Severence. He released an album of
original songs in 1973.
When Hines moved back to New York City in the
late 1970s, he immediately landed a role in The
Last Minstrel Show. The show closed in
Philadelphia, but launched him back into the
performing arts, and just a month later came
Eubie (1978), a certified Broadway hit which
earned him the first of four Tony nominations. He
next played Scrooge, a stingy and heartless
Harlem slum landlord who finds salvation in the
ghosts of Christmases past, in the Broadway
musical Comin’ Uptown (1979), an updated black
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urban adaptation of Charles Dickens’ s A
Christmas Carol, in which he received critical
praise for his “roof-raising dances.” That led to
another nomination, and Sophisticated Ladies
(1981) led to a third. “It’s no secret that Mr. Hines
may be the best tap dancer of our day, but he’s
never had a chance to show himself to quite the
advantage that he does here,” Frank Rich raved in
the New York Times about Sophisticated Ladies.
“Wearing slicked-back hair, a series of sleek
dinner outfits and a raffish smile, he’s more than
a dancer-- he’s the frisky Ellington spirit
incarnate.” Of Hines’s big Act Two solo, Rich
wrote: “He sweeps about gently, and then lets
loose with cataclysmic force; he takes big leaps
and then tucks in his wings for a dazzling display
of terpsichorean precision. The man is human
lightning, and he just can’t be contained.” (Frank
Rich,“Ellington’s ‘Sophisticated Ladies,’” New York
Times, 2 March 1981,C13).
In 1992, Hines received the Tony Award for Best
Actor in a Musical for his riveting portrayal of the
jazz man Jelly Roll Morton in George C. Wolfe’s
production of Jelly’s Last Jam, sharing a Tony
nomination for choreography for that show with
Hope Clark and Ted Levy. Hines made his initial
transition from dancer/singer to film actor in Mel
Brooks’s hilarious The History of the World, Part I
(1981), playing the role of a Roman Slave; one
scene sees him sand-dancing in the desert. He
followed that in quick succession with Wolfen, an
allegorical mystery directed by Michael Wadleigh
that is now a cult hit; in it, Hines played the role
of a coroner. In 1984, he starred in Francis Ford
Coppola’s film, The Cotton Club (1984). Vincent
Canby in The New York Times wrote about Hines’
rare screen presence in the film: “He doesn’t
sneak up on you. He’s so laid back, so self assured
and so graceful, whether acting as an ambitious
hoofer or tap dancing, alone or in tandem with
his brother, Maurice, that he forces YOU to sneak
up on HIM. The vitality and comic intelligence
that have made him a New York favorite in Eubie
and Sophisticated Ladies translate easily to the
screen” (Vincent Canby, “Screen: Coppola’s
‘Cotton Club,’” New York Times, 14 December
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1984, C4). The film seamlessly blended dance into
the framework of the narrative.
The fierce virtuosity of Hines’s dancing is seen in
White Nights (1985), in which he played an
American defector to the Soviet Union opposite
Mikhail Baryshnikov, playing a Russian defector
to the United States. White Nights is best
remembered for the scene that pitted Hines’s tap
against Baryshnikov’s ballet in a challenge dance
that had them charging at each other across a
huge dance studio, each pulling out their fiercest
footwork and stretching limbs into insane
proportion. One of Baryshnikov’s testosteronecharged responses to Hines’s ferocious stuttering
steps was to splay his leg up against a wall and
push into a stretch that nearly dislocates leg from
hip. Yet in the far more quietly dramatic scenes,
which played with bittersweet intensity, Hines
illuminated the most profound and deep
meanings of what it is to be a black man in
America. In doing so, he showed how tap
dancing, as an act of survival and salvation,
became his metaphor of resistance-- functioning
both as an autobiographical text and a symbol of
the broader panorama of the black struggle. “I
haven’t had a terribly traumatic experience as a
black person in this world, but I’ve had
experiences,” Hines told Michael J. Bandler about
the film. “My nature is to let them go-- I wasn’t
going to be burdened with a negative attitude. So
for White Nights I had to dig, but the pain was
there” (Michael J. Bandler, “Tapping Into
Stardom,” American Way, 10 December 1985,
21-26).
The furious propulsions of Hines’ dancing in
White Nights demonstrated how his improvised
rhythm dancing had no musical, physical, or
metaphorical boundaries-- it was a profound
dramatic expression and defiant act of freedom
that allowed audiences to experience an
overpowering surge of exhilaration. And that was
the genius of Hines’s tap-dancing, why he was so
beloved: he was so bodily-and-soulfully
adventurous in his rhythmic forays, and so
generous. We saw it in his performance with the
Jazz Tap Ensemble at New York’s Joyce Theatre in
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1986, where he made a brief but energetic
appearance. Hunched over and dancing on a
miked-and-raised platform placed center stage,
he indulged in a meditation on the paddle-androll in which each riff added a new tap sound to
the bar. With each new phrase, the audience
squealed and clapped, and he had to gesture to
them, with the wave of an arm, to wait for him to
get through his exploration. In his extended
foreplay of the rhythmic phrase, languishing in it
and thrusting it into an explosive climax, Hines
was intoxicating. He was a rhythmic provocateur- even when facing downward or offstage, he
danced to you. He brought sexiness back into the
dance. “Hunkered over like a prizefighter,
unsmiling, he cocked his head and stared at the
floor as if looking for answers,” Sally Sommer
observed (Sommer, “Gregory Hines: From Time
Step to Timeless,” New York Times, 14 August
2003,E3) of the handsome dancer who was
muscled, sexy, new-schooled, and macho; who
was not afraid to wear a t-shirt that was tight,
show a body of substance, a line that was strong.
In 1989, Hines starred in a film that combined his
penchant for both dance and drama, Tap, in
which he played Max Washington, a promising
but disillusioned tap dancer, out of prison and
torn between his craft and the fast-track life of a
high-stakes thief; he co-starred with Sammy
Davis, Jr., playing Mo, an old hoofer with dreams,
who lures Max back to rhythmic life. With fullscale production numbers filmed on location in
New York City and Hollywood, and with an
original soundtrack created especially for the look
and style of the film, Tap became the first dance
musical to merge tap dancing with contemporary
rock and funk musical styles. It also featured a
host of tap legends, including Sandman Sims,
Bunny Brigs, Harold Nicholas and Hines’ co-star
and show-business mentor, Sammy Davis, Jr.
In 1989, he created and hosted Gregory Hines’s
Tap Dance in America, a PBS television special
that featured veteran tap dancers, established
tap dance companies, and the next generation
of tap dancers. The film was nominated for an
Emmy award, as was his performance on
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Motown Returns to the Apollo. Hines made his
television series debut in 1998, playing Ben
Stevenson, a loving single father hesitantly reentering the dating world on a CBS-TV series,
The Gregory Hines Show. As Ben Doucette, he
made up part of the gifted ensemble that won
NBC an Emmy Award for “Best Comedy Series”
in 2000 for Will and Grace. He also earned an
Emmy Nomination as “Outstanding Lead in a
Miniseries or Movie” for his portrayal on
Showtime of the legendary and groundbreaking
dancer/film star Bill Robinson in Bojangles
(2001). He made his television directorial debut
with The Red Sneakers (2002), for Showtime,
and also appeared in the film, which centers on
a 17 year-old high school student-- more
mathematician than athlete-- who becomes a
basketball sensation through the gift of a
magical pair of sneakers.
Throughout an amazingly varied career, Hines
continued to be a tireless advocate for tap
dance in America. In 1988, he lobbied
successfully for the creation of National Tap
Dance Day, now celebrated in forty cities in the
United States and in eight other nations. He was
on the boards of directors of the American Tap
Dance Orchestra, Manhattan Tap, Jazz Tap
Ensemble, and the American Tap Foundation.
He was a generous artist and teacher, conscious
of his role as a model for such tap dance artists
as Savion Glover, Dianne Walker, Ted Levy, and
Jane Goldberg, creating such tap
choreographies as Groove for Jazz Tap
Ensemble, and Boom for Barbara Duffy and
Company. Like a jazz musician who ornaments a
melody with improvisational riffs, Hines
improvised within the frame of the dance. His
“improvography” demanded the percussive
phrasing of a composer, the rhythms of a
drummer, and the lines of a dancer. While he
was the inheritor of the tradition of black
rhythm tap, he was also a proponent of the
new. “He purposely obliterated the tempos,”
wrote tap historian Sally Sommer, “throwing
down a cascade of taps like pebbles tossed
across the floor. In that moment, he aligned tap
with the latest free-form experiments in jazz
Copyright © 2012 Dance Heritage Coalition
and new music and postmodern dance”(Sally
Sommer, “Gregory Hines: From Time Step to
Timeless,” New York Times, 14 August 2003,
E3). The New York Times dance critic Anna
Kisselgoff described Hines’ performance in
1995: “Visual elegance, as always, yields to
aural power. The complexity of sound grows in
intensity and range” (Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance:
Jazz Tap to Gregory Hines,” New York Times, 1
October 1986, C24). In addition to his work on
the dance and theatre stage, in film and on
television, Hines’ wide-ranging career also
included making a 1987 album called Gregory
Hines, and writing introductions for books
Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of
the Nicholas Brothers, by Constance Valis Hill,
and Savion! My Life in Tap, a biography by Mr.
Glover for children. Everything Hines did was
influenced by his dancing, as he told Stephen
Holden in a 1988 interview with the New York
Times: “Everything I do,” he said, including “my
singing, my acting, my lovemaking, my being a
parent.”
Constance Valis Hill has a Ph.D. in Performance
Studies from New York University; M.A. in
Dance Research and Reconstruction from City
College of the University of New York; Bronze
Certificate from the International Society of
Ballroom Dance; Neutral and a Character Mask
certificate from Pierre LeFevre at the Juilliard
School. She has worked internationally as a
teacher, choreographer, director, and mask
specialist, including collaborations with the
French playwright Eugene Ionesco; Czech
scenographer Josef Svoboda; Romanian director
Liviu Ciulei; and Toni Morrison on her play
Dreaming Emmett. Her writings have appeared
in numerous dance periodicals and edited
anthologies. Her book, Brotherhood in Rhythm:
The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers
(2000) received the ASCAP Deems Taylor
Award; and her most recent book, Tap Dancing
America, A Cultural History (2010), for which
she received the Tap Preservation Award from
the American Tap Dance Foundation, was
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supported by grants from the John D.
Rockefeller and John Simon Guggenheim
foundations. As a Five College Professor of
Dance at Hampshire College, she teaches
courses in dance history, performance theory,
jazz studies, choreography on camera, and
feminist performance; and is working with her
colleagues to establish a black studies core
curriculum.
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