Late at night, in the bathroom of Colgate’s Harlem Renaissance Center (HRC), Victor Perkins ’01 tap-danced.
When the bathroom was occupied, he took apart the dresser in his bedroom and used the side planks as a tapping surface. He’d only stop once he’d gotten on his roommate’s nerves. “I was hooked, and I was tapping all over the place,” he remembers.
Perkins became infatuated with the art of tap while trying to knock a gym credit off of his graduation requirements. But after that first class, there weren’t enough students interested in advancing to keep tap dance going at Colgate. Fast forwarding to parenthood, he enrolled his daughters, Jalynn and Jaia, in classes. Seeing himself in them, Perkins enrolled in a course at the Broadway Dance Center. This new tap education made him think: “Tap is such a great art. Why don’t we take it to schools?”
In 2018, Perkins cofounded the youth organization TapTakeOverHarlem with the help of his high school buddy, Emmy Award–winning dancer Jason Samuels Smith; Jalynn; and a DJ. “I got about 100 pairs of tap shoes donated that I carried around to the different schools, and we would have jam sessions,” he says. The organization provides presentations for grammar school students, including tap demonstrations and an educational component focusing on tap during the Harlem Renaissance.
Though he works in investment banking technology by day, Perkins pores over history outside of the office. His most-loved subject is the intersection between tap dancing’s African American roots and the dancing style’s impact on the Harlem Renaissance. “The art that we know of today, that we watch today, it came from right here [in America],” he says. He brings that knowledge to TapTakeOverHarlem events: Through his own research, and through hearing stories from dancers ingrained in the tap community, he’s become devoted to teaching the next generation about Black dance history and the impact entertainers had on activism during the Jazz Age.
Colgate had a part to play in the academic aspect of his organization too, Perkins says. The HRC is a living and learning center for sophomores interested in African and African American history and culture, and there he connected with other students who enjoyed learning about 1920s New York City. On Fridays, Perkins and his peers would gather to present on topics from the era. “I always wanted to do something associated with tap,” he remembers. He also felt enlightened by Professor Michael Coyle’s Jazz Age course, and he devoured books from the HRC library about dazzling Black entertainers like Nat King Cole and literature pioneers like Langston Hughes.
Today, he uses that knowledge to help keep this vital part of African American history alive. “[It’s important] to not just do it, but teach it, learn it, and study the history behind it,” he says.
Perkins and his daughter Jaia created a one-of-a-kind tap dancing board dubbed the Jaiaboard, for which they recently filed a patent. Traditionally, to broadcast the sound of tap shoes on stage to the audience, a simple microphone is placed nearby. With Jaiaboards, the microphone is placed in the board itself, which prevents background noise from clouding the tapping sound.