Rhythm in Fusion Festival Brings Texas-Born Body Musician Keith Terry Back Home

Decades ago, Texas native and dance/music pioneer Keith Terry left the Lone Star state for artistic intensity of New York City. Over the years, as he worked with many elder statesmen of the tap dance world, as he traveled the globe and engaged and collaborated with tradition art forms from Bali to Brazil, Terry developed his own singular, grooving approach to movement and music. He founded his own migrating festival, his own ensembles, and became a sought-after performer and teacher of body music, that music/dance created by clapping, snapping, stepping and vocalizing.

Born in Waxahachie and raised in Lancaster, now Terry is coming home to Dallas. Thanks to Rhythm in Fusion Festival (RIFF), the freshly minted tap dance festival, he will perform and teach at the city’s first festival celebrating tap and its seminal role in the dance community.

Terry will perform solo in the festival concerts, as well as teach several body music classes for dancers and musicians of all levels. When asked about his approach to soloing, “ I’ll start out with a groove, and then improvise from that,” he explains. “In my head, I’m playing a tune, like the head in jazz, and then I’ll solo. Then I often come back to the head.” He brings everyone in the audience deeper into the beat, too: Using non-verbal cues, Terry will get the whole theater clapping, stomping, and singing together, in a spirited burst of body music.

Rhythm in Fusion Festival, January 16-19, 2015
Majestic Theater, Dallas TX
For class/performance schedules and ticket information, see www.rhythminfusion.com

Terry’s popularity among tap dancers is no surprise, even if his own work is a departure from tap in the strictest sense. "I’m a bit of a step-child (no pun-intended) when it comes to tap. I was a drummer first, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t play the drums,” Terry explains. “I was in my 20s, when I started dancing, while playing drums for elder tap greats.” 

The first a-ha! moment for Keith came in 1978 while he was rehearsing with the Jazz Tap Ensemble, a group he co-founded and that played a key role in that decade’s tap revival. Always intrigued by the gray area that blurs movement, music, and dance, he suddenly realized that he could transfer the music he was playing on the drum kit elsewhere. “I stood up and moved what I was playing on my drums to my body. That’s how I came to it," remembers Keith.

Encouraged by Charles "Honi" Coles and Charlie "Cookie" Cook—great jazz tap stylists who recognized both the ingenuity of Keith's music and its similarity to the Hambone they'd performed in vaudeville—Keith launched into a boundary-breaking career now known as body music. Body music turns to the universal resonator, our oldest instrument, to explore beats, grooves, and melodies via slaps, claps, shuffles, steps, snaps, and vocalizations. It’s a remarkably rich palette of sound, and there are dozens of traditional forms around the world.

Now based in Oakland, California, Terry’s career has taken him far and wide -- from founding a festival of his own (the International Body Music Festival, held this July in Bali); to intensive touring, artistic collaborations, and teaching residencies in Europe, South America, and Asia; and to receiving a Guggenheim fellowship in 2008.

He revels in the balance of performing and teaching. In transmitting the audible choreography he has developed over the decades, “It’s first and foremost about building rhythmic skills, which are often underemphasized when we study music and dance in the western world,” Terry explains. By exploring the sounds of the palms, fingers, legs, feet, and torso, Terry shows festival participants how to find diverse grooves in and on their bodies, “how to embody and internalize rhythmic skill for dancers, musicians, even rappers and film editors—anyone who is manipulating time.” These rhythmic skills also reflect fundamental math concepts, as Terry explores in his new book for mid-grade teachers and students, Rhythm of Math: Teaching Mathematics with Body Music (out in February 2015 on Crosspulse Media).

Terry looks forward to performing and teaching at RIFF. “I love festivals,” he enthuses. “People come together and share common interests. The tap dance community has a lot of transferable skills to what I offer, and that makes it a joy to create body music with them.”

For more information on Keith Terry and body music, see www.crosspulse.com.