Constance Valis Hill, Five College Professor Emerita of Dance Studies, Hampshire College Constance Valis Hill is Five College Professor Emerita of Dance Studies at Hampshire College. She has taught at the Alvin Ailey School of American Dance, Conservatoire d'arts Dramatique, and New York University. As a choreographer, director, and mask specialist, she worked with the French playwright Eugene Ionesco; Czech scenographer Josef Svoboda; Romanian director Liviu Ciulei, and Toni Morrison on her play, Dreaming Emmett, directed by Gilbert Moses. She is the author of Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers, which won the 2000 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award; Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010), which was awarded grants from John D. Rockefeller and John Simon Guggenheim Foundations, and the 2010 Bueno de la Toro Prize for outstanding scholarship in dance; and Tap Dance in America: A Twentieth-Century Chronology of Tap Dance on Stage, Film, and Media, a 3500-record database of tap performance for the Library of Congress.
The Nicholas Brothers! Legends of the dance and blazers of the trail. Thank you, Constance Valis Hill, for sharing their magnificent story once again. * Dule Hill, Tap Dancer/Actor * The Nicholas Brothers are otherworldly superheroes to me...Hill's book is not only a masterful telling of who they were, but also a testimony to what is possible with an imagination and a commitment to excellence. * Kevin Powell, Poet, Journalist, and Biographer of Tupac Shakur * A peerless jazz-tap biography and an example of dance history writing at its best. * Mindy Aloff, Dance in America (Library of America) *