Tappin' to the top

Cartier Williams is silent — for once.

It’s a bit of an anomaly, considering the 15-year-old has been tap dancing since he was 4 years old — which has translated into a livelihood built on the sound of metal scuffing and smacking whatever it hits. This weekend, that surface will be the stage at Bethesda’s Music Center at Strathmore.

But at the moment, the Washington native is quiet, because he’s seriously pondering a question that most high school sophomores couldn’t imagine answering: Which was cooler: performing for President Bill Clinton at the White House or for Usher at his birthday party, thrown by none other than Naomi Campbell?

“I’d probably say Usher,” Williams says after a long pause. “We all danced for him at the Rainbow Room in New York. It was like a 1930s party, so it was really cool.”

“Really cool:” That’s how the reserved and thoughtful Williams describes just about everything, from his multiple jaunts across the country to the two weeks he recently spent teaching tap to students at River Terrace Elementary School in Washington. River Terrace is just across the city from Woodrow Wilson High School, where Williams goes to school when he’s not touring — otherwise, he hits the books on the road and sends his work back home. But this week, Williams might be able to pop his head in on an actual class: He’ll perform twice on Sunday at Strathmore in Improvography II, the newest offering from choreographer, dancer and producer Savion Glover — the performer who similarly first made his mark as a preternaturally talented tapper.

Williams was 8 when he met Glover: “He called me up and said come to New York for a minute, and I danced with him, little rehearsals and stuff,” Williams says.

Since then, Williams’ highest-profile engagements have come at Glover’s behest: in 2000, he joined Glover on 31-city tour of his show Footnotes and appeared with Glover in Spike Lee’s 2000 movie Bamboozled, and then in 2002 spent a year on the national tour of Glover’s Tony Award-winning musical Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring In ‘Da Funk. Glover, of course, spent five seasons in regular appearances on Sesame Street and made his film debut at age 13 in the movie Tap, which also featured Sammy Davis Jr. and Glover’s mentor Gregory Hines. Now the 31-year-old Glover’s all grown up — and he seems to think Williams is the dancer who can fill the tap dance kid’s formidable metal-bottomed shoes.

“[Savion] told me that he wanted me to pass the torch down to the other generation of tap,” Williams says. “He’s passing down to me, and I’ll pass it down to someone else when I get to his age. He tells me to take care of yourself, to treat yourself right.”

And some of that treatment involves a little self-indulgence — in this case, in the form of video games. Williams doesn’t hesitate when asked about his favorite recent purchase: He says he plays a hockey game, a basketball game and the Spider-Man 2 game on his new PlayStation Portable, which he says gives him “somethin’ to do on the plane.” Needless to say, life on the road has become the norm for Williams, who travels with his mother and will be away for about 10 weeks with this show — not to mention the weekends he’s spent on the train to get to rehearsals in New York. But as 15-year-old boys are apt to do, Williams shrugs and says he enjoys performing every night — he simply calls that segment of his daily schedule the part where he goes to after and has fun.

Williams’ youthful lack of pretension about his profession is refreshing: He doesn’t hyperanalyze what he does, but rather seems to let his dancing speak for itself, particularly when it comes to his budding efforts in choreography. In Improvography — a term coined by the late Hines — Williams and the two other dancers in Glover’s group Chapter IV get to showcase a bit of their own creations in the second half of the show, following the first act in which Glover dances alone. Williams says he mostly depends on his instincts to guide his choreography.

“It just comes to mind, it’s not really a thinking process, I just start doing stuff,“ he says with a laugh. “I just mix the grooves together and I guess [it works] if it sounds great.”

He spends the majority of his time working out those rhythms, whether it’s in the studio or in his basement at home. Otherwise he focuses on absorbing everything he can from Glover and the numerous other tap luminaries he’s shared a stage with over the past few years. But apparently he hasn’t forgotten to be 15 years old in the midst of everything, as evidenced by his goals for the future.

“To be a tap dancer for the rest of my life,” he says, “to make a horror movie by Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson, and to build a roller coaster.”

It appears this ride is just getting started.