Gloom took a night off Friday as Tapestry 2003 celebrated International Tap Dance Day at the National Heritage Museum in Lexington. According to this year’s Tapestry awardee, veteran tap master and stylist Jimmy Slyde, " What’ve you got to be mad about? Let everybody else figure it out. " Slyde kept up a volley of encouragement from the audience throughout the performance, and finally he took over the stage himself for a talking-dancing demonstration of his apparently unquenchable good spirits.

In addition to the Tapestry Award, Slyde has just added a Guggenheim Fellowship for choreography to his résumé, as dance presenter Jeremy Alliger announced from the stage. It seems he’ll use the prestigious grant at least in part to pass his work on to younger dancers, several of whom were on hand Friday to pay tribute with their feet. Although the younger dancers borrowed things from Slyde, they all had their individual styles and formats.

Van " The Man " Porter adopted Slyde’s way of talking to the audience in alternation with dancing, as if the two things occupied a single conversational channel. Porter’s feet sounded firm and musical on the resonant wood floor, even before Paul Arslanian’s jazz combo began to play. His upper body didn’t do much, but his legs sent him into spins, runs, airplane turns and a crouching backwards shuffle while his feet kept up intricate rhythms underneath.

MC Dianne Walker’s solo seemed " feminine " after that — light and fast but no less intricate, and you had the impression her whole body was energizing the feet though she didn’t wiggle around in any stereotyped way. Arms and decorative torso movements aren’t important in rhythm tap — they could almost be an unconscious by-product of the dancer’s main business.

Three of Slyde’s current protégés were introduced by Walker as " Young Lions. " Rocky Mendes kept his steps close to the ground and seemed to go deeper as he went along, but his rhythms were contained and smooth rather than jumpy or explosive. Ben Hosig, another talker, started with a time step and went on with a loose, swingy bounce. He produced an array of amusing, almost gawky steps: articulations with the sides of his feet, stiff gallops, stuttering runs, slides and skips, his wrists loose and his hands clutching the air. Andrew Nemr, wearing a bright orange bowling shirt with Japanese characters on it, seemed to have no body at all. It looked as if only his feet were holding him together as he slid, turned, trundled backwards.

Slyde’s partner, Paris-based Sarah Petronio, launched a repertory of patter, song, and conversational foot riffs. Suddenly she’d snap into a quick pose and you’d see some street character or dancer — an apache, a zoot-suiter, maybe even a fond Jimmy Slyde caricature. She and drummer Ron Savage improvised a challenge duet where one laid down a phrase and the other either imitated it or embroidered on it. This is a familiar tap maneuver, except that Savage was kneeling and rapping his sticks on the floor.

Tapestry, now in its ninth year, is partly a showcase for the students at Thelma Goldberg’s Dance Inn, and it’s the highlight of a big weekend of classes and partying for the Lexington studio. A jovial mixture of professionals and students, affectionate tributes, set choreography and improvisation, jazz and rhythm in many styles, the Tapestry show is a true community event. It not only reflects the way tap has survived through inclusiveness and adaptability, it actually puts that process on display.

Community art seems to bring out the upbeat side of things, perhaps because it’s based in the idea that every individual is worth celebrating. Performance artist/choreographer Ann Carlson and videographer Mary Ellen Strom returned to town last week to develop an extended series of everyday " portraits " under the auspices of the Institute of Contemporary Art. Using the overall title Remedy, they worked with teachers and health-care professionals to make small but polished video segments that were surprisingly personal.

In three impromptu public sessions, Carlson would chat with a volunteer and quickly access a few of the person’s natural gestures or rhythms, then implant them in a formal sequence. After 10 or 15 minutes of rehearsal, the volunteer would perform the phrase, with Strom’s video projected alongside on a huge screen.

In Copley Square on Wednesday, watching this for a couple of hours, I was struck by how well Carlson and Strom captured things you’d never notice in your fellow passers-by: the beauty, the charm, the earnestness and curiosity about trying something different. " Is that a dance? " one woman asked me. Then she went up and proved that it was.