The toot of the Montmartre tourist train outside the window of my walkup apartment. The repetitions of La Vie en Rose, Bella Ciao, and the Godfather theme music played on the accordion in the café across the street. These are stale sounds that I close the window to whenever I need to focus.
But one afternoon last spring, it was the swinging rhythms of 1930s jazz and the click of tap shoes against a wooden surface that greeted me as I approached the place des Abbesses.
Amon-Rê dancing on the place des Abbesses, late June 2024.
I eagerly joined the crowd that had gathered around the tap dancer. His steps gave off an electric charge. He tipped his cap with a ready smile at a toddler as she dropped a coin into his case. He finished his songs gracefully, often landing en pointe on his board like a ballerino. After a few minutes, the police arrived on the scene and ordered him to stop. As the dismayed crowd scattered, I approached him and said, “It looks like they stopped you in full swing.”
“Well, not quite in full swing,” he answered, not winded in the least. “I’ve been going at it for three hours. And the people who called the police have friends in high places. They’re only doing their job. If I go on dancing today, I’m sure to get a fine.”
Next week, though, he was back with his father. I was captivated again and before they left, I asked them for an interview. They gave me their names: the son was Amon-Rê – a name inspired by two Egyptian gods – and the father was Jelly Germain.
A few months later, we met at the Hôtel du Nord, a café with a 1930s décor overlooking the Canal Saint Martin in northern Paris. Interviewing Jelly, Amon-Rê and his younger sister, Nephthys, showed me that they were more than dancers: they were educators, plunging into tap’s history, dedicated to sharing it with anyone willing to learn.
Amon-Rê entered first, sporting a leather jacket, T-shirt and jeans. His outfit contrasted with what I had previously seen him wear, an ensemble reminiscent of Gene Kelly.
Jelly followed in a grey three-piece suit, a cap and a red necktie decorated with music note motifs. His teenaged daughter Nephthys was close behind, dressed in a style that was cool and understated. Only their brother Osiris was missing to complete this family portrait. They were well-known by the café staff as they had danced there on many occasions – the back room behind the bar doubles as a performance space.
“I apologize if I’m not in my regular clothes,” said Amon-Rê. “I’ve just returned from a modeling session.” He seemed less at home in this apparel. I could relate, having been frequently teased in school for dressing in an older style. To my mind, the 1930s was a more stylish decade by far.
A toddler, spellbound by Amon-Rê’s dancing, rushes to drop a coin into his hat.
“So,” I began, “what is it that makes the place des Abbesses an attractive dancing spot?”
“I like the atmosphere and rhythm of life over there,” Amon-Rê answered. “There’s a flow of people all day, occasionally with breaks in between.” Jelly had danced there dedicatedly for many years, including in the snow.
“And why tap? When, why, how did you discover it?”
“For me, it was about a year and a half ago, last summer,” Amon-Rê replied. “I hadn’t done any [tap] in a long time – not since the age of seven (…) and couldn’t remember any of the steps.”
I interjected: “If I may, it seemed to me like you had been dancing for much longer.”
“Many people think that,” he grinned before continuing: “I knew that I was hooked when the need for tap came back after several months.”
Prior to this, tap dancing had been the object of curiosity for Amon-Rê and his brother. Their father’s occupation was shrouded in mystery: what did Jelly do? Why did he come home so late? One night, Jelly took his two sons to see one of his performances; Amon-Rê danced with him for a week and a half and earned a bit of money.
“At that time, though,” he went on, “video games were of more interest to me! So, I preferred to buy video games and stop tap. That’s why I didn’t dance for so long.” During that period, his family moved around the Paris suburbs and spent time in the Southeastern city of Sète with an aunt who forbade tap in her house. “Don’t ask me why!” Amon-Rê chuckled.
After experimenting with breakdance, rugby, and boxing – which he had considered as a career – he returned to tap because, as he stated, “you can do every discipline when dancing tap. Fundamentally, it’s the expression of our bodies’ rhythm in relation to our ideas.” He explained this further: “If I hear a rhythm, I’ll think about how I want to express it and how much intensity I put into the movement or step.”
I scribbled on my notepad the words “creative movements tell stories.” To prove this, one needed look no further than Amon-Rê’s idols: Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali, the Nicholas Brothers, Cab Calloway. These were figures I too had admired; how delightful to find somebody to share my awe with!
Nephthys discovered tap around the same time as her older brother: “I started about a year and a half ago and perform nearly every month with my family. It’s a great way to network professionally, and it’s thanks to tap that I was able to meet a few filmmakers and models, for instance. Modeling was what I wanted to do at first”—I felt Amon-Rê grimace because he had said how much he disliked modeling—“but I found that tap opened more doors.”
When I asked how she reconciled her schoolwork with her dance commitments, she answered, “I don’t practice my steps that much while I’m in school, but if I know that I have a show on, I’ll go.” As a student having gone through school with multiple musical engagements on the side, this was a juggle I could identify with.
But what was Jelly’s story? I wondered. His introduction to tap must have been under different circumstances. I knew from research that he was born in Cameroon, had emigrated to France at the age of ten and had worked with high-profile dancers the world over. What more could I learn?
“I’m self-taught,” he began. “I started out as an acrobat in a circus school. Tap and pantomime happened to be taught there. When I was ten or twelve, I went to a movie theater in Montreuil [a suburb east of Paris] that showed rare collector’s movies, called Vitaphones. These dated from the 1920s and 1930s and featured tap dancers and jazz orchestras. And that really influenced me.” He paused. “I’m Black, and when I saw other Black men in France, they were confronted with racism. They were usually streetsweepers or garbage collectors. In these movies, I saw Black dancers with slicked-back hair and tuxedos and wondered ‘where does that come from?’ because this was completely unrelated to the image that French society reflected of Black people. There I was, seeing something from a half-century earlier, and I said to myself, ‘this isn’t what I see in the streets.’”
For Jelly, this was what is called in French l’élément déclencheur – the catalyst. “From that day on,’ I said, ‘I’m getting out of this life. I want to be like them [the people I see on the screen].’”
“So how did you get started?” I asked, my pen dashing across the page.
“The hard part was finding clothes!” Jelly laughed. “I started out by buying average 1970s outfits (…) but I had two friends who were just as inspired as I was [by tap] and didn’t have problems with their skin color. Before too long, there were five of us – four boys and one girl – and the newspapers started talking about us. We began busking and promoted ourselves: one of my friends in the group, who was the son of a judge, was a bit better-off than we were and had a knack for promotion.”
He went on to describe a routine busk: “We would dance in the Montreuil market and people would come up and summon us to a specific spot – Porte de Montreuil, for example – at 5:00 am. We would be at that spot the next morning and trucks would arrive, loaded with American surplus clothes in mint condition. One of my friends took a three-piece Prince of Wales suit, the kind of which you can’t find today for love nor money! We then met designers like Paco Rabanne by going to Les Halles [a central market in Paris] and getting noticed in these quality clothes. You see, it was the esthetic – not only the music – that inspired us.”
It was not long before Jelly took to the stage. “Two weeks after picking up tap, I was already doing shows. I didn’t excel in tap to begin with, but I knew some steps that could make an impression on audiences.” His dancing group gained prominence. “We were the toast of Paris,” he said, “and I had fewer problems with racism from that moment on. My cousin [a fellow dancer] and I, when arriving somewhere, would be known as les Américains, because my then-agent (…) encouraged us to keep an exotic side to our act and not speak French! Doors open ten times faster when you don’t speak French.”
I laughed, then mused on the cultural ties that had bound the United States and Paris in the twentieth century. I knew that Jelly had spent his formative years in New York, mentored by tap masters like the Cotton Club hoofer Ralph Brown, Chuck Green, Buster Brown (one of Duke Ellington’s dancers), Lon Chaney and Dianne Walker. I also knew that he had danced in the Paris production of Black & Blue, a musical revue created in 1985 to celebrate African-American musical culture in Paris between the wars. With that in mind, I asked all three if they felt their work perpetuated a Franco-American connection.
“Absolutely,” Jelly replied. “I went to Chicago shortly after the pandemic and was greeted by the American customs officers. They asked for my occupation and I showed them videos of my performances. They smiled and said ‘welcome home!’”
Amon-Rê smiled at this story as a jazzy rendition of Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side played from the café radio, plunging us into the heart of the city. “I would love to travel to New York,” he said, “because every great tap dancer has been there. Dancing there would be a way of tipping my hat to them.”
“I know that for me,” Nephthys chimed in, “my path as a dancer would have to include the United States at some point, but I’m not sure that it would be New York specifically.”
I nodded and scribbled some more on my pad, then leafed back to review one of my questions. It was to be by far the one with the richest answers.
“So perhaps you could tell me what story you want to tell with tap?”
Amon-Rê was the first to answer: “Historically, tap was a means of self-expression for slaves who were silenced. They expressed their values through their feet and hands. When tap began to be danced onstage, that principle remained, but with more elaborate steps. After the end of the Second World War, everything changed, including the rhythm of the music.”
How did that affect the dance? I wondered. Amon-Rê was ahead of me:
“Tap became what we call les rudiments – steps that are executed without any explanation of their history.”
“And you must have a basic understanding of the history of any art you practice,” said Jelly. For my benefit, he added, “Rudiments are little scales, little bits of routines that tap dancers used to do as warm-ups. In today’s tap lessons, they are the only taught steps (…) they’re very limiting because they don’t allow you to use all your body.” I understood now why my one year of tap classes in Normandy had been so unfulfilling: the teacher never mentioned any of tap’s historic figures to her students and took us through series of stiff, mechanical steps.
“My dad has a different approach to dance because he spent time with the dancers from the prewar generation of tap,” Amon-Rê commented.
“Of course, my generation of dancers learned technical steps,” Jelly said, “but they were for a creative purpose: that served me well when I worked at the Moulin Rouge, because you had to come to work with your own dance routines. Every tap dancer in the golden age retained his own sound; if you closed your eyes, you could tell who was dancing.”
According to both father and son, the Second World War was the cutoff point for tap: to demonstrate this, Amon-Rê hoped to form a Cab Calloway-inspired orchestra in the future, perpetuating the prewar generation’s legacy while adding his own spin. In this band, he aspired to be conductor, dancer, vocalist, and musician (possibly drummer). “I still need to work on my vocals a bit!” he laughed. “Especially because when I dance, I sing à pleine voix [unamplified], like my father does.”
At that moment, it became clear to me that this family sought not only to promote a message about an art they loved, but to share a history they had inherited. They are dancers, I am a writer – perhaps we had the same mission.
“I love tap because it’s unusual,” Nephthys answered. “The people that I talk about tap to don’t necessarily know what it is, and when I show them, it differs completely from what they expected.”
Jelly concurred with this statement. “That is why my promotion is based on education. Most people consider tap to be vieillot.” I chuckled at this word – an informal term meaning “old-fashioned” or “square.” “People don’t realize that tap, like drumming, is a percussive instrument, and you can find that in any musical genre and in many countries (…) Many clichés inherited from Hollywood musicals surround tap, but there is much more to tap than that.”
The experience he then shared placed the European viewpoint in perspective. “Many years ago, in Burkina Faso, I had the privilege of being at a meeting between kings of various West African territories. During the ceremony, there were traditional ballets where dancers tapped with coral tied to their feet. There I was, with my metal-soled tap shoes, and they were very surprised! Tap dancing the way I did it seemed very modern to them, and yet, in Europe, everyone sees it as old-fashioned.”
He spoke with quiet passion and I could not interrupt. “The tap pioneers I worked with taught me a key lesson: anyone can dance tap. It doesn’t belong to any one culture. When people see me dance in the street, they step towards another society. The fact that I don’t use contemporary music makes it a discovery on two levels: that of the dance and that of the jazz music from that era.” Yet another thing I was deprived of in my tap lessons: for a year, we were subjected to the same song by pop singer Fergie. The teacher never used any music from before 2010 – a connection was missing.
“Many young people today have a limited idea of jazz,” Jelly went on. “It is a deceptively joyful music, being rooted in the blues, the work songs in the cotton fields, and the lamentations that Duke Ellington channeled in his music later.”
“Would you say that tap was a purely American art, then?” I enquired.
“The tap we do is definitely American style,” Amon-Rê replied. “But you can find many variants of tap throughout the world.”
“That’s right,” Jelly affirmed. “The United States is not really the birthplace of tap, although places like Kongo Square [a public place in New Orleans where enslaved Africans sang, danced, worshiped and played music from the 18th century onwards] are crucial in its development.”
Jelly beckoned me further down the historical track. “Look at how the Moors brought their own dance traditions to Spain and helped create flamenco, well before the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade. People danced rhythmically with their feet before Kongo Square.”
Jelly later told me that, several years ago, he had even been invited to French Guyana by a fellow tap dancer to take part in a show about Kongo Square. While there, he met and exchanged with descendants of fugitive African enslaved persons, who were known in the French colonies as les nègres marrons (“Brown Blacks”). Dancing on the place des Abbesses and contributing to historical memory were, in fact, two sides of one coin: the joy of dance.
“People who have never been exposed to tap really fall for it; when they see people dancing joyfully to this upbeat kind of music, it uplifts them. Some even come up to thank us after our performances, particularly if they were feeling a bit low before.”
“That was certainly my case,” I said. They returned my smile.
“The trick with tap,” Jelly said wisely, “is not to overthink it: if you’re enthusiastic and work with your heart, that will show. If I’m only interested in earning money, that shows, too. Complicated steps don’t entertain the crowd as much as you might think. I’ve invited dancers from renowned schools into the street and they’re nowhere near as successful – people barely look at them. On the other hand, if you come and dance two simple steps, straight from the heart, people will be amazed. Others may say that what we do isn’t technical enough, but does that matter?”
“And what would you say is your favorite music to dance to?” This question I could not resist asking.
“It just has to be well-played jazz,” Amon-Rê answered.
Jelly dancing to Digga Digga Doo, a hot jazz standard and a staple on his tap playlist.
“Using music from the 1930s is important to me,” Jelly added, “but I have experimented with tango and electro. When I do tap workshops in schools, I do explain that tap can be danced to different genres. In fact, I frequently combine tap with breakdance to make it more appealing. I’m of the opinion that if you feel the music, you can put a groove to it, whatever you hear.”
“What can you tell me about your classes?” I ventured.
“I usually teach beginners,” Jelly explained. “I rarely have students in the middle, since most young people are more interested in soccer and basketball than in dance; boys make an exception for breakdance, which they see as manlier than other dance styles.” I nodded, recalling how many classmates attended les cours de hip hop (“hip hop classes”) after school. Studying tap in seventh grade made me an “odd one out.”
Part of teaching, for Jelly, was also dealing with the changes accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. “Because interest in dance has gone down, children and adults have shorter attention spans. Children only remain focused for twenty minutes and adults now prefer to practice one routine for the whole year, whereas even amateurs used to be able to learn two dance routines in one lesson. That aside, we have a lot of students.”
Yet, teaching is still another side of that coin, the joy of dance. One of Jelly’s fondest recollections proved it to me: teaching tap dance to children living in the forest in French Guyana. “I felt a bit ashamed at first,” he recounted, “because I was teaching them tap and not one of them had shoes. I asked them if they minded, they answered ‘no’ and they learned! Their eyes shone because they were so happy to be dancing. I’ve always kept that memory.”
My wrist ached as I wrote down all that the family had shared with me. If I closed my eyes, perhaps I could picture the sound and smile of each dancer.
“People told me, when I started tap, that you couldn’t make money from it, but I was able to raise my children and it opened many doors. It gave me everything. Plus, I think it’s one of the only art forms that you can always work in if you need work! Tap is not only a great way of staying in shape, but it is also a survivor art. One night, you can be performing in a palace, and the next night, even if there’s no palace, there will always be someone to hear you dance.”
I could only nod and scribble down these words. Amon-Rê smiled at me knowingly.
“Je pense que tout est dit,” I said in French. “I think everything’s been said.”
It was true. Stories had been exchanged. The café was filling up. The bartender was preparing for the lunch rush. I stood up, thanked them for their time, and promised to keep in touch. As I headed home and gazed out at the canal, I reflected on those words: creative movements tell stories.
I don’t know whether I brought words to this family’s dance, but they certainly brought a dance to my writing.
