BmoreArt

Baby Laurence, who died of cancer in 1974, would never cross Ali’s path physically. Yet he could be credited in part for the tap renaissance that so inspired her in the 1990s.

Ali first heard of Baby Laurence when a friend in New York showed her a video clip of him dancing at a street festival in Fells Point, Baltimore in the early 70s. But he was doing more than dancing, he was talking about it. “He was so eloquent in articulating what this dance is and also trying to decolonize how people view tap dancing—how they listen to it,” Ali says.

Tap dance—which is understood to have roots in West African as well as Irish, Scottish, and English traditions—is a form the United States can claim as its own. Scholars suggest it was born from the blending of so many cultures in close living quarters in places like New York City and Congo Square, New Orleans—urban landscapes full of sound and rhythm. Ali also acknowledges the Gullah Geechee communities in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida “who gave birth to the Ring Shout tradition which we include in the show, and the blending of Native music, dances, and rituals.” All of which she credits for influencing tap. 

“Unlike ballet with its codification of formal technique, tap dance developed from people listening to and watching each other dance,” writes Constance Valis Hill in Tap Dance in America: A Short History: “…steps were shared, stolen, and reinvented. ‘Technique’ is transmitted visually, aurally, and corporeally, in a rhythmic exchange between dancers and musicians.”

In the mid-19th century, tap gained widespread popularity largely through minstrel shows where dancers performed in blackface as racist caricatures. “Of course, we didn’t start the minstrel shows,” Ali clarifies. “That was white folks imitating Black people. Then Black people had to jump on the same bandwagon to get the jobs.” Vaudeville took over as the most popular American entertainment in the early 20th century, continuing the tradition of portraying Black characters—often still dancing with burned cork or shoe polish on their faces—as simple, clownish, and carefree in segregated society.

Despite the humiliating roles and sweeping discrimination Black American performing artists had to navigate at that time, their undeterred talent and ambitions were ever urging the country forward. By the 1930s, the potent new era of jazz—complexly and brilliantly Black—was spreading across the US. It was in this time of liberation and innovation in music that young Baby Laurence discovered the Hoofers Club in Harlem.  

Tap fell out of popularity in the late 1950s and many performers who relied on it for their livelihoods gave it up. Still Laurence kept dancing. Though by the 1960s and 70s his work as a jazz tap dancer would mean also advocating and educating others on the form.

Ali heard his name more and more—Baby Laurence—especially when she moved to Baltimore in 2018. She began asking around, seeking out anyone who could tell her more about him. 

She shares a glimpse of one story she heard through a video clip onstage in Tracing Steps. In the early 1960s, Todd Barkan had booked Laurence as the opening act for saxophonist Pharoah Sanders at the original Keystone Korner in San Francisco. “Now Pharoah Sanders is one of my favorite saxophonists. His music is so enlightening, and he comes across like this cultured Black man, right?” Ali describes. But when Sanders saw Laurence’s tap floor being set up at the venue, he got upset. He said, “I don’t want no Vaudeville at my show.”

“Todd was like, ‘Hold on now. Baby Laurence, he’s one of our greatest dancers of all time.’ Todd had to talk Sanders off the edge,” Ali recounts. Laurence went on to dance with his band, while Sanders reluctantly watched. By the end, his feelings about tap had changed. “I think since then Sanders was more inclusive of dance, even in his own presentations. I was taken aback to hear that.”

“One of the reasons why we work so hard to preserve this art form and be advocates for the truths of what it really is, is to let go of all the negativity that was placed on it from the stereotypes of minstrelsy and what that ugly period of American history was for Black folks,” Ali says. “So that story, for me, was huge. Baby provided a moment of cultural healing for somebody like Pharoah Sanders who everybody probably felt was culturally astute.”

Ali also heard stories of Laurence’s struggles with drug addiction and that he was in and out of prison and correctional facilities in his later years. She collected letters he wrote from his time incarcerated. “Who was talking about mental health and coping with trauma in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s?” Ali says. “That’s just human stuff. He became somebody that was so familiar, like a family member to me.”  

Like Laurence, Ali talks and teaches as she dances in Tracing Steps, threading film clips, poetry, and stories from her research. In the second half of the show, Bessie-winning Baakari Wilder—a tap legend in his own right—speaks from a letter Laurence wrote when he was in the Maryland House of Corrections in 1972. Wilder and Christina Carminucci, in a recording, read more writings from the times he spent incarcerated, their voices manipulated by Wendel Patrick while Carminucci dances. Ali concludes by reading a poem Laurence penned in one of his letters called, “Convict’s Soliloquy.”

Out here where dull days pass, unremembered
I stand alone against God’s creation
fighting for my life

For this second act, Ali has changed clothes. Out of the black and white satin and velvet, she now wears loose red pants slit to show her bare legs up to the thigh and a flowing white lace shirt. She rejoins her group of dancers, barefoot this time, with movements that remember West African steps. They connect remarkably to the sound of jazz. Somewhere—and I realize I don’t know exactly when—their dance returns to tap again; Ali then tapping solo, shoeless. Soundless. The joy on her face in the first act has changed to an expression of mourning, of reverie, of the way history entangles and holds it all. I feel Baby Laurence’s presence, not just as a dancer anymore but as a man. He is personal as he is universal. And what Ali is invoking is ancestral as it is innovative. “We may have the pain, but we dance it away,” she says.

Ali is the first Performance Resident Artist at the Creative Alliance. The organization and multipurpose art center has offered her not only the black box theater in the Patterson, their main building, but a dance studio in their Creativity Center across the street, where she teaches workshops and where she has developed this performance. From the show’s debut in Baltimore, Ali is touring The Baby Laurence Legacy Project: Tracing Steps with the first stops at the Historic Asolo Theater in Sarasota, Florida in March, 2025 and the Apollo Theater in New York City on May 30th. She is also working on a documentary to archive the unfolding of Tracing Steps’ own story.

“It’s not just about a show, the project itself is a curriculum,” she says. “I am no longer interested in playing a set list and just doing songs. Y’all not just going to be in an audience watching me. You’re gonna be involved. We’re gonna talk. You cry, I’m crying, or we’re laughing. That’s the type of experience that I am trying to create every single time. It’s just as much yours as it is ours.”

Brinae Ali will be performing from The Baby Laurence Legacy Project at Apollo’s Historic Theater in New York City on May 30th, 2025. For more information and to get your tickets click here.