Splicing together footage from the musical comedy Pardon My Sarong (1942) and the TV series Graffiti Rock (1986), a dance battle is staged between the pioneering 1980's hip-hop crew the New York City Breakers and the seminal 1940's tap group Tip Tap & Toe. The rich cultural matrix between tap and hip-hop emerge through this collision, involving an inverted audio track that has the breakers moving to the beats of tap, and the tappers dancing to the scratch rhythms of turntablism.
Tap Hop is part of The Lessons, an ongoing series of work that investigates the formal, historical and conceptual connections between disparate cultural moments. Archival history is folded into new constellations, producing virtual proximities that make visible the dis/continuities that underpin cultural history.