Anita Feldman

Anita Feldman, one of a new breed of tap dancers in the early 1980s who expanded the parameters of the art, and one of the earliest to articulate her tap aesthetic, was raised in the suburbs of Chicago. Her mother was an accountant and her father an engineer; both encouraged her to become a mathematician. She began her tap training at age five in Chicago with tap master Jimmy Payne and continued classes with him until she graduated from high school. She also studied ballet and jazz dance, and piano, and learned the rudiments of music theory, becoming attracted to the rhythm section's instruments (bass, drum, and piano) of a jazz combo. When she entered the University of Illinois she studied percussion and African drumming while settling on a major in dance. Modern dance's value as an art form and as a physical outlet was appealing to her, and after graduation she moved to New York where her aesthetic of percussive performance began to evolve. She enrolled in the Dance Education Program of Teacher's College at Columbia University, studying musical composition with Robert Dunn, a John Cage associate who fostered the Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s. Dunn exposed her to new methods and tools of choreographic experimentation. Still working in the modern dance mode, her choreography was rhythm-oriented and extremely complex, requiring accurate and technically proficient performers. Feldman's early partner was Carol Hess.

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