Keeping time
"Lady Di" Walker keeps one foot in the past and one eye on the future.
World traveler, showbiz veteran, educator and beloved matriarch of the tap-dance community, Dianne “Lady Di” Walker feels right at home in Chicago, even though she neither lives here nor grew up here. “I am a Bostonian,” she says. “But I feel more comfortable in the Chicago [tap] community.” Perhaps it’s because she’s been coming here every summer for the last 18 years to participate in Rhythm World, the annual international festival of tap-dance classes, workshops and performances hosted by the nonprofit Chicago Human Rhythm Project.
For most of those years, Walker came as a guest artist to teach and perform. Since last year, however, she’s been the co-artistic director of the whole shebang, along with Derick K. Grant (noted for his part in the Broadway hit Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk). “These past couple years have been—woo!” Walker says. “It’s so much work! Just figuring out who comes from year to year is a major decision.”
Walker, who has a master’s degree in education, has a keen eye on the next generation of tap dancers—the students who come to Rhythm World to hone their skills and build relationships with mentors and other kids. “I have the luxury of being everywhere with my career, I travel a lot,” Walker says. “It’s wonderful to see kids meet each other, to see the group from North Carolina meet kids from Seattle, or to see the L.A. kids meet the kids from New York.”
But it’s not all fun and games; Walker hopes that this festival will take them to the next level: “We’re not just looking for fun, for having a great time. We’re focused on education.” In the classes and workshops that Walker and Grant coordinate, students learn skills that are as basic as caring for their feet and as technically complex as lighting design for stage productions.
“What we’re noticing is that their technique is strong, but [the students’] performance level needs a shot in the arm,” Walker says. “They need more performance experience.” She makes sure they get it while at Rhythm World, which features several public performances that include students.
While Walker has a huge respect for superstar tapper Savion Glover—“He has led a revolution, an exploration of music. I don’t know that I could have introduced [composer] Morton Gould’s tap-dance concerto to such a wide audience,” she says—her concern is more in preserving the treasured history of American tap dance.
“We have just lost all of the grand masters of the dance form,” says Walker, citing the May 16 death of her significant mentor, Broadway legend Jimmy Slyde. “My generation is really feeling the sensitivity of that issue right now,” she says, adding that as a result there is a lot of focus in the tap-dance world on re-creation and maintenance of historic choreography. “The kids are open to it,” Walker says. “How they share it with the next generation remains to be seen.”
Rhythm World events take place at Millennium Park and on the Loyola University campus.
