2-channel video installation, sound, 16:9

Tap Hop (2009) is a split-screen video installation that examines the formal and cultural connections between tap and breakdance. By cutting together footage from the 1942 musical comedy Pardon My Sarong and the 1986 television program Graffiti Rock, a dance battle is staged between seminal 1940’s tap group Tip Tap and Toe and 1980’s hip-hop crew The New York City Breakers. The cultural matrix between these dance forms emerge through this collision, including an inverted audio track that has the breakers moving to the beats of tap, and the tappers dancing to the scratch rhythms of turntablism.

 Tap Hop is part of The Lessons, Soda_Jerk’s ongoing cycle of video installations that investigate the formal, historical and conceptual connections between cultural moments. Archival history is folded into new constellations, producing virtual proximities between disparate temporal moments – bringing into visibility the trajectories of influence and divergence that underpin cultural history.