Tap : Keep the beat in your feet!
By Alison Moss
Flap-heel-heel…Brush-heel-toe-heel…STOMP! Did you ever get a rhythm stuck in your head and suddenly find yourself tapping it on your legs or moving your whole body to keep the beat? If you answered yes, then perhaps, tap dancing is a new exercise to try for you. Tap dancing is made possible by shoes that have metal plates nailed into the bottom of them. You could call tap dancers “percussive musicians”, because they make the music they dance to with their own two feet.
The best tap dances are those done without musical accompaniment, or a cappella. The beauty of tap dance is that it plays with the beat, sometimes syncopating music and not making each section sound even, but more interesting and complex for your ears. Lots of times, tap dance is improvised. The dancer may start with one common rhythm and then experiment with new combinations of sound and return back to the main theme.
Tap dancing isn’t new to our generation. It is an extension of Irish step dancing and clogging. Those types of shoes are also specialized in that they have a harder toe and materials to accent sound, when the shoes strike a surface. As shoes have developed and improved over time, dancers from many decades have created and changed tap as we know it today.
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers come to mind from the 1940s-1950s. Their ballroom style of tap and partnership graced many classic movies like Top Hat and Swing Time. Surely you can picture Fred in his tuxedo and Ginger in her long, flowing dresses that continue the lines of each turn that she makes. Watching them make movie magic with their feet adding to the soundtrack still makes me want to get up and dance.
Gene Kelley had extensive ballet training that added to his Broadway style of tap. I think back to Singin’ in the Rain and his famous scene splashing through the puddles. I look forward to the parts, when he doesn’t sing, so I can concentrate on his tap rhythms and watch his feet attack each sound.
Steve Condos had a love of jazz music that helped him develop percussion tap. He, too, was a great tap improviser. Steve Condos influenced Gregory Hines and Savion Glover. Does Savion Glover’s name ring a bell to you? He is a contemporary tapper best known to kids as the guy who choreographed Happy Feet. I like to credit Savion Glover as “the guy who brought tap dance back to life for young dancers”. My students look at me with blurry eyes as I talk about great tap dancers of days old, but when I mention a more current movie like Happy Feet and Savion Glover, their eyes light up and suddenly dance is alive again.
One of the secrets to tap dance that I tell students and parents is that it is basically a handful of steps that are shuffled into hundreds of combinations to create new steps. Knowing the basics and perfecting those shuffles, flaps, stomps, and brushes will take you far in this genre. It’s a tricky style to master the flexion of your ankle, knowing just how much to loosen your hold, and what part of your foot to strike the floor, but its rhythmic possibilities are endless. I love the mathematical aspect of it too. You need to understand time signatures and how to arrange the beats within a measure of music, so even the most cerebral dances that struggle with the performance part can enjoy and thrive on the musical aspect. So, when your feet can’t seem to let go of the beat, shuffle your way into a tap dance class and experience musical bliss and syncopated twists!
Posted in: Moves That Groove
