Coast audiences resumed their love affair with 89-year-old Jeni LeGon, live and tapping, last Friday night at the Heritage Playhouse in a music and dance opening event to the Gibsons Landing Jazz Festival.
Fans loved her and many had returned to see her again, after being inspired by her festival appearance last year and the film about her life, Living in a Great Big Way.LeGon is a tap dancer and was a musical motion picture star since the 1930s when she teamed up with such greats as Fats Waller and later Eddie Cantor in the production Ali Baba Goes to Town. These are not films we have much opportunity to see in this century, but LeGon has produced a DVD, 70 Years of Dancing, featuring clips from many of her films. The segment screened last Friday that shows the early years was a window into another century reflecting the tremendous talent of the time and also the underlying values. In a 1950s film with Betty Hutton, LeGon's coffee brown face is seen in the supporting role of the maid and lady's dresser, while the glamorous white star, Hutton, plays a glamorous white star. The fact that the young black woman's singing and dancing could rival that of any white actress would not have benefited LeGon in the racially conscious 1950s.
LeGon made her professional debut in a chorus line with the Count Basie Orchestra at the Uptown Theater in Chicago. She often skipped school to practise the dance steps she had learned from the movies. She started dancing solo when a costume for a special chorus job didn't fit her boyish figure, and she took to pants.
"I always danced in tails," she told the audience. "That was my trademark."
She became the first black woman to sign a long-term contract with a major Hollywood studio. Among her many appearances she is known for her dance sequence with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in Hurray for Love. In the late 1960s, she made Vancouver her home and became a teacher and choreographer.
Last Friday evening, local jazz band Cedar Groove Quartet warmed up the eager crowd and played a rousing Sweet Georgia Brown to accompany LeGon, who will turn 90 this August, in a brief performance. Two young dancers from the Dance Works Academy in Gibsons, Shantaya Erb and Franklin Cottrell, braved comparison with the veteran performer to show the audience their own jazz dance and tapping skills. LeGon surprised the two by giving an impromptu lesson in "time step" that enchanted the crowd.
During the intermission, LeGon signed her new book, What Tap Dancing's All About, and sold a series of colourful illustrations of her life that had been made into posters.
