Gregory Hines shares tap pointers with students

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Forty pairs of young eyes watched intently as the man once dubbed the "Magic Johnson of tap dance" fired off a challenging new set of steps at them. A moment later, 40 pairs of metal-enhanced feet copied what the great Gregory Hines had just done. And they were mostly getting it right.

"Lovely! Lovely!" exclaimed Hines, a lithe, beaming man of 55, garbed in loose-fitting dark pants, a red sweat shirt and handmade, glove-leather tap shoes. "Now I want you to lock it. Lock it!"

In tap parlance, "locking it" means stopping on a dime, with no stray taps to mar a snazzy finish.

Warmly encouraging but a stickler for precision, Hines drummed that message into the fresh-faced tap students who gathered to learn from him at the Johnson & Peters Dance Studio in the Green Lake neighborhood.

In town to perform last night at the Paramount Theatre, Hines spent Thursday afternoon giving a master class for budding dancers as part of an education program of the Paramount and the local concert presenter, Foolproof.

In the mirrored dance studio, serious and skilled tappers aged 11 to 17 worked up a sweat during the 90-minute session with Hines while parents looked on. The kids eagerly tried out moves the famed dancer showed them. But they were also just excited to be in the same room with a man who has so tirelessly championed the revival of tap dance in America.

"I've seen him in films and on TV, but never in person, so this is amazing," said Jennifer Lin, 16, a high-schooler who dances "20 hours a week."

Commented tap teacher and studio co-owner Cheryl Johnson: "Gregory is really special. In my generation of dancers, he's been the hippest dude on the scene. And he was the one who really changed tap by bringing it out of the 1940s and into the '60s, '70s and beyond."

Hines, the star of such movies as "Tap" and "Bojangles," strutted his stuff at the class, showing off a style that's superbly rhythmic and deceptively sanguine. His upper body and arms stayed relaxed as his agile feet did most of the work, tattooing intricate clusters of steps in perfect time.

But Hines, a seasoned and generous teacher, also wanted to see what the kids had to offer. After drilling them through a difficult tap combination, he asked for volunteers to show off their own moves.

One of the first up was Alex Dugdale, an 11-year-old with a chipmunk smile and a lot of pizazz on the dance floor. When he launched into a flashy backward kick-step, Hines exclaimed: "Show me that again. I'll have to take that for my own!"

Though every tapper hones an individual style, "stealing" the moves of masters is perfectly kosher. Hines, who began dancing professionally at age 5, cheerfully admits he's borrowed plenty from his own heroes: Sammy Davis Jr., Gene Kelly, Sandman Sims and others. He passes his know-how on to junior hoofers whenever possible and mentored the hottest hip-hop-generation tapper of them all: Savion Glover. (The two co-starred in "Tap" and the Broadway musical "Jelly's Last Jam.")

Maybe the next Glover was lurking in the Green Lake class. But Hines didn't play favorites. He doled out hugs and encouraging words — "That was tasty, tasty ... " — to many of the kids, after each tapped an impromptu solo in what Hines called "the circle of love."

"These kids are very impressive," Hines said, after he had autographed the soles of many tap shoes and patiently posed for souvenir snapshots. "They're so eager, and they're very courageous to get up and try things with me. Like me, they just love to dance."

Misha Berson can be reached at mberson@seattletimes.com..