A red Porsche sits on Brunswick Street, a bumpy, ill-repaired road just one block south of Clinton Avenue in Newark, New Jersey. Gentrification has not made it here.
The luxury car seems out-of-place as it sits in front of a nondescript brown building in the Central Ward snuggled between the grassy-gravel parking lot of an abandoned church and a modest two-family home. Across the street is low income, public housing.
The Porsche and other expensive varieties park there several days a week, untouched for the last several years. The owner, Savion Glover, inheritor of the hoofer legacy (hoofer is the proper name for a tap dancer) and who is known as one of the top performing artists in the world today, parks his cars there because just like him, they belong.
In the unassuming brown buildings, Glover opened the HooFerZ Club School for Tap, an intense academy intertwining history, theory, dance technique and style. Glover trains a handful of students from children to adults, along with several highly accomplished dancers and teachers. He also uses the space to choreograph and rehearse the numerous shows that he performs throughout the year around the globe, and opens up his facility to art shows such as poetry, emceeing, and art parties.
