She Put Her Foot In It:
Visualizing the Assertion of Willpower
Note: the final version of the article was published in the Journal of Popular Music vol.33 no.4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2021.33.4.56
This presentation is at the intersection of my academic endeavors and the work I’ve been doing over the past twenty years which spans across the fields of both the visual and the performing arts. This presentation, She Put Her Foot In It: Visualizing the Assertion of Willpower, is an exploration I’m engaging with on multiple registers; including dance, theatrical lighting, stage design, science, technology, visual representation, literary and historical contexts.
This title and thematic origin stems from the African American food culture idiom “she put her foot in it.” This phrase articulates an assertion of willpower, on the part of the cook, through the metaphor of stomping on the food as part of the cooking process. Rather than the cautious exploration implied by the phrase “dipping your toe in it,” the powerful effect of a stomp is, in this idiom, humorously proposed as the cause of an exceptionally good tasting meal. It’s a playful statement that communicates gratitude.
This appreciation is based on an expectation that the resources that were available to the chef, such as the money paid by the consumers of the meal and even the pedagogy under which the cook was trained, do not automatically lead to such an exceptionally good tasting meal.
The practical aspects of this project begin with the question, how can this assertion of willpower be witnessed in a way that allows it to be digested visually rather than solely being understood through culinary taste sensations? My intention is to explore the means by which this culinary representation of willpower can be expanded. The goal is not to depart from culinary culture, but to further celebrate the individuality represented in the stomp.
Tap dance is the context in which my creative intervention explores what can result from linking this idiom to the power of a stomp.
The history of tap dance has been associated with both multicultural interaction and with cultural oppression. The historicizing of tap dance as having originated from a multicultural context is based on the proximity of social living environments in America. Enslaved Africans saw and interacted with Europeans who’d brought to America their cultural traditions of the clog dance of northern Britain and Irish step dancing. This history is based on the idea that seeing other movement styles led to each culture incorporating aspects from the others.
In the context of oppression, when looking further back in history we can see that prior to the Atlantic Slave Trade, many of the indigenous African communities used drumming for communication purposes, in addition to their artistic and expressive goals. Specific rhythmic cycles were symbolic of specific activities, such as a cycle that communicates to a neighboring community that your own royal party are on the way to visit those neighbors. When enslaved and brought to the New World, Africans rebuilt their drums from the available flora and fauna around the plantations. Sound’s ability to travel long distances (particularly in the case of low frequency bass sounds) was used to communicate beyond the borders of the plantations. This was considered by slaveholders to be a threat to their authority and control. One historical example of this fear is the ban on drumming that was implemented in South Carolina after the Stono Rebellion in the year 1739. This type of ban spread throughout the colonial environment. In response to the cultural erasure this ban imposed on the communication technology of drumming, the presence of percussion in African American culture respawned in other forms, such as synchronized hand clapping, thigh slapping, and the foot tapping–which has evolved into tap dance as know it today.
One of my concerns about this restriction on drumming is how it may have also caused a loss of the many skilled crafts involved in the making of a drum. Culture is affected by the resources available in its environment. The production value present in a performance, for instance, a drummer and a drum during the precolonial era, is communicated through a different visual vocabulary than, for example, an enslaved person wearing flattened bottle caps tied to the soles of their feet so as to merge sound and movement. The ban on drumming is an example of resource availability being redefined by imposed restrictions, and that leading to a transformation of the understanding of production value.
The power and willpower that I’m associating with the stomp has a history of visualization in tap dance. The full story of how Bill “Bojangles” Robinson–the famous tap dancer of the early to mid-twentieth century–got the idea for his stair dance remains unconfirmed.
I would argue that the way the dancer changes their height–the way the dancer ascends and descends the stairs–has a visual relationship to the way the notes on a piece of sheet music ascend and descend the bars.
This willpower has also often been illustrated in scenarios in tap dance where the power of dancing itself raises to a level where it overwhelms the power of the dancer.
In scenarios of a dancer becoming entranced by the rhythm of the music, the source of that music is usually coming from outside the dancer, such as from a drummer or horn player or singing chorus. But in tap dance the power of movement and the power of music both reside together in the dancer.
The next part of this presentation is intended to address the question of what resources were available in the past and what are available now for this effort to visualize willpower. The practical aspects of this electric tap dance process are presented here, in an illustrative format rather than as a formal electric diagram, in order to make it more accessible.
This process is constructed on the basic terms of how an electrical circuit works. The conductivity of the metal on the tap shoe is what enables it to be the control switch in this dance process. Metal, the material that allows tap dancing to make sound, is also the material that allows it to transmit power. This process can be carried out without any digital computer technology; which is my way of saying this is a method of performance and representation which has been possible since at least the late nineteenth century for example, when Lewis Latimer invented a refined form of the carbon filament and Thomas Edison incorporated that filament into the lightbulb.
In the contemporary era in which we live today, the visualization of the power of the stomp can also be addressed by translating the electrical process into a digital form. Arduino, MaxMSP, QLC+ lighting software, and theatre stage lighting all used together opens up an array of choreography and production design possibilities.
The lighting, pyrotechnics, and other effects that are part of the live performance industry can be triggered with a stomp. The methods that I’ve developed here are not the only way it can be done. The issue of willpower is what led me down the road of electric power, but there are other ways. I encourage those artists, dancers, engineers, and tinkerers to whom this is of interest to develop their own forms.
