Tap Dance Research Articles

Step type is associated with loading and ankle motion in tap dance.

Tap dance generates forces and joint motions that can lead to injury; however, little is known about the magnitude of load across different tap steps. The purpose of this study was to calculate peak vertical forces, average vertical foot velocities, and maximum/minimum ankle angles produced by tap dancers with different levels of experience performing the toe cannon, heel cannon, flap, and cramp roll. This prospective cross-sectional study included 14 female tap dancers aged ≥18 years with varying tap experience. Participants were recorded by three cameras while performing a choreographed tap combination containing four steps of interest on a force platform. Adjusting for experience and dancer-level clustering, we identified the steps-cramp roll and toe cannon-that had the highest peak vertical ground reaction force, angles, and velocities compared to flap and heel cannon. There was no effect of experience. The results supported our hypothesis and provide new insights into step production. Over time, the larger forces associated with these steps could pose an increased risk of injury to bones and joints when compared to smaller forces, which may suggest the importance of adjusting routines to reduce or avoid injury.

Tapping the Margins: Feminist Research in Tap Dance History

The research project Tapping the Margins was undertaken by Ann Kilkelly and Mary Neth from 1999 through 2005 and focused on women in tap dance. Their scope was unprecedented: to analyze constructions of gender, race, class, and sexuality in tap history. This article has a dual purpose: to detail the project’s materials, which will be accessible at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and include notes for a never-completed book, archival video footage of dancers, film analyses, oral histories, plus stage and film production records; and to examine Kilkelly’s feminist, personal, and embodied explorations of tap dance history.

Behind the Screen: Tap Dance, Race, and Invisibility During Hollywood’s Golden Age by Brynn W. Shiovitz (review)

Behind the Screen: Tap Dance, Race, and Invisibility During Hollywood’s Golden Age by Brynn W. Shiovitz (review)

Tap Dance in the Private-Sector Dance Studio

The experience of the tap dance educator in the private-sector studio was studied using a mixed methods approach that included a survey and individual interviews. Three hundred thirty-eight tap teachers responded to 25 survey questions about enrollment and hiring, training and curriculum, dance competitions and social media, and challenges and benefits. Interviews with nine tap educators collected in-depth descriptive data that expanded on the topics explored in the survey. Key findings include the following: tap enrollment is inconsistent; teachers teach the way they were taught; classroom content is focused on choreography with tap history, music theory, and improvisation listed eighth through tenth in importance; tap is fusing with other dance forms; and tap dance competitions lack qualified judges, appropriate flooring, and proper amplification. For tap dance to become more relevant in today’s dance scene, improved teacher training programs are needed.

Black and Blue: The women who reclaimed tap

When Black and Blue opened on Broadway in 1989, it brought together some of the greatest names in tap dance: Henry LeTang, Cholly Atkins, Fayard Nicholas, Jimmy Slyde, and Savion Glover: men who had defined the art form and would continue to do so. But there were also nearly a dozen women, including Deborah Mitchell, Dianne Walker, and Germaine Goodson. “Chorus girls” have long been the unsung heroes of tap and published histories typically obscure the contributions of Black women to the art form. Furthermore, professional networks that advocate for Black concert dance have largely ignored tap, due in part to theories of racial uplift, respectability politics, and the historical associations between tap and blackface minstrelsy. In this article, I argue that the careers of Mitchell, Walker, and Goodson offer an alternative. Analysis of their performances in Black and Blue reveals how they used their dancing bodies to reclaim tap as a source of pride, while simultaneously reasserting the role of women within the form for future generations.

Synergy of porous and air-gap structures for pressure sensing arrays with high sensitivity and wide detection range towards machine learning-assisted gait analysis

A smart insole based on pressure sensing arrays is a simple and effective means of gait analysis assist in the assessment of human movement and neurological health. However, these smart insoles usually fail to combine high sensitivity with a wide detection range, making them only suitable for people within a certain body weight range. Here, based on the synergy of porous and air-gap structures, we develop a high-performance and high stability smart insole, which has a sensitivity of up to 16.064 kPa−1 in a wide pressure range of 0.170 Pa to 248 kPa. After combined with Decision Tree machine learning model, gait classification and recognition can be as high as 99.96%. Based on these, a tap dance game was designed, which proves its ability to identify individual activities, and demonstrates its potential of application in the field of human-computer interaction and medical engineering.

Stanley’s Secret by John Sullivan

Reviewed by: Stanley’s Secret by John Sullivan Sarah Sahn Sullivan, John Stanley’s Secret; illus. by Zach Manbeck. Wiseman/Simon, 2023 [48p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781534487833 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781534487840 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R 4-8 yrs Stanley is a quiet boy with a not-so-quiet dream: he wants to tap dance on a big stage. He’s too shy to tap dance in front of anyone except his pet mice, but he dances any time he gets some time alone. After school, he helps the janitor and then happily tap dances through the empty halls and classrooms, only for Principal Reynolds to see him and insist he sign up for the talent show. (“Talent should be shared,” she declares.) He’s cheered on by his friend Tom when he musters up the courage to dance for him, and Stanley’s first onstage performance is a happy accident—he goes to the auditorium to practice on the stage and doesn’t realize he’s arrived just in time for auditions until applause breaks out. Manbeck’s bright gouache and colored pencil illustrations are populated with a multicultural cast of children and teachers, but they center on brown-skinned Stanley, rendering his inner life with vibrant whimsy, whether he’s a tiny figure spotlit in front of an enormous blackboard while giving a book report or a tap-dancing dynamo trailing star as he leaps across the stage (and page). Stanley is a kindred spirit for shy, artistic kids everywhere, and his story of overcoming his stage fright to perform in the talent show hits just right, letting him come out of his shell to share his talent and speak up for himself without demanding he give up being a quiet boy who would rather play with his pets than go to a party. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A Study of Choreography Courses for Musical Theater Majors

Musical theater education in Chinese universities is generally focused on training musical performance talents, and the dance courses involved are also set up to enhance dance performance. The dance styles learned are mainly ballet, modern dance, jazz dance and tap dance, which are common in European and American musicals. However, in the actual musical rehearsal process, the use of dance to create dramatic characters, develop dramatic events, and show dramatic emotions and conflicts requires the skilled creative ability of the musical choreographer. The educational process of musical choreography is a multi-faceted process, which requires the choreographer to have a solid theoretical basis and flexible creative skills. By comparing with universities in Europe, America and South Korea that have musical theater major, this paper studies the advantages and disadvantages of musical theater major courses in Chinese universities in terms of choreography training. Based on the actual situation of China, this study finds the curriculum that conforms to musical choreography through multi-angle analysis of practice, creation, and theory.

Training Load, Pain Intensity, and Functioning Can Explain Injuries in Dancers: A Classification and Regression Tree (CART) Analysis.

To identify the biopsychosocial factors that explain injuries in dancers through use of a Classification and Regression Tree (CART) analysis. Cross-sectional study performed with dancers over 18 years of age from dance schools in Brazil. Sociodemographic factors, pain intensity (numerical pain rating scale, NPRS), anxiety (Beck anxiety inventory, BAI), and functioning (WHO Disability Assessment Schedule 2.0, WHODAS) were assessed. We used a classification and regression tree (CART) analysis considering the occurrence of injury as a dependent variable, and the independent variables included age, training load, BAI, pain level, and WHODAS 2.0 score, adjusted for body mass index. The sample included 61 dancers (ballet, jazz, contemporary, tap, and urban dance), and they were mainly women (72.1%) with a mean age of 25.6 (± 5.79) years. Thirty-three percent presented dance-related musculoskeletal injuries in the last 12 months. The CART analysis showed that training load was the main associated factor, explaining 52.4% of injuries in dancers with a workload > 11.5 hrs/wk (p=0.05). When NPRS > 6.5 is added to the high load of training, these two variables explain 100% of the cases of injury (p=0.02). Training load < 11.5 hrs/wk and WHODAS 2.0 score < 68.0 were associated factors for no injury in dancers (80%; p=0.03). Our results demonstrated that training load, functioning, and pain intensity were factors associated with injury in dancers, and we established cutoff points. The inclusion of functioning in the algorithm suggests the influence of structure, function, activity, and social participation on injury in dancers and strengthens the patient-centered care.

Race and Performance After Repetition ed. by Soyica Diggs Colbert et al.

Reviewed by: Race and Performance After Repetition ed. by Soyica Diggs Colbert et al. Ariel Nereson Race and Performance After Repetition. Edited by Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., and Shane Vogel. Duke University Press, 2020. Cloth $104.95, Paper $28.95. 344 pages. 34 illustrations. The new collection Race and Performance After Repetition moves several fields forward, among them theatre, dance, and performance studies, Black studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and American studies. That it does so is a testament to the richness and interdisciplinarity of the animating impulse behind the collection, the thought of José Esteban Muñoz. The editors of the collection—Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., and Shane Vogel—first convened a Targeted Research Working Session in Muñoz's name at the 2016 American Society for Theatre Research conference. Race and Performance After Repetition testifies to the ongoing resonance of Muñoz's thought as well as the complexity, energy, and gracefulness of the thinking inspired by three years of these gatherings. Colbert, Jones, and Vogel do tremendous service to the field in their introduction, "Tidying Up After Repetition." I have taught this introduction in seminars on Black performance and historiography, and its offerings are many, including a primer on the centrality of the concept of temporality to theories of performance and the formation of performance studies as a discipline. In describing performance practices that cannot be accounted for by the "grammar of repetition" (4), including Simone Leigh's Free People's Medical Clinic (2014), the editors provide the key insight that we might understand performance "not only as restored behavior, but as behaved restoration" (5). In this understanding, we twice-behave (following Richard Schechner) not in order to repeat but to repair, a stepping aside of repetition that allows for greater nuance in discussion of race, performance, time, and representation. The editors usefully characterize repetition as a "time signature," and curate a collection of essays that answer the question, posed in Muñoz's terms, "what other time signatures organize minoritarian performance?" (15). The [End Page 109] introduction closes with a reading of Theaster Gates's ongoing Dorchester Projects and the artist's performance of sweeping—tidying up—therein. Their reading insists on the necessity for developing "a more nuanced lexicon" for apprehending time, race, and performance, one that does not exclude repetition, but neither does it take repetition as an a priori condition of performance's temporality (24). Refusing this condition leads the collection's authors down much needed paths for understanding minoritarian performance. Three sections comprise the collection: "Toggling Time: Metatheaters of Race," focused on the reimagining of performance genres and their histories; "Choreo-Chronographies," which centers movement beyond the proscenium and its play with temporality; and "Temporal (Im)mobilities: Dwelling Out of Time," a set of offerings on the liberatory potentialities of stillness, silence, and stasis. Space precludes detailed discussion of every author's chapter, each of which, if they appeared in another volume, would likely be the strongest essay in the collection. The first section reads three dramatic forms and the implications of live performance's play with time for genre formation. Tavia Nyong'o turns a critical and measured eye to melodrama in his analysis of Afro-fabulation and dark reparation in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's An Octoroon. Catherine M. Young investigates the concurrent temporalities of the Black musical (transtemporalities across times, gestational time, racial time, and the time signatures of tap dance) in the 2016 Shuffle Along. The section ends fittingly with Patricia Herrera's formulation of the loop in hip hop theatre as a "sonic-temporal strategy" (71) used by Latinx and Black performers and activists to articulate relationships with the historical past that disrupt hegemonic temporal logics in Universes' Party People (2016). Taken as a section, these chapters speak to one another in powerful ways as they demonstrate the necessity of enlarging our critical vocabulary of interpreting minoritarian performance in order to account for its complexities. In the second section, Tina Post's compelling chapter addresses the "glitch" in time performed by boxer Joe Louis's movement archive that resonates with the practices of Louis's contemporary, Earl "Snake Hips" Tucker. Jasmine Johnson also...

Independent beats to global feet: the evolution of English tap jams

This article maps the evolution of early tap jams in twenty-first century England from twentieth century tap jams in the United States. Tap jams are informal performance events featuring improvised tap dance and live music. Historically, tap jams in the United States provided tap dancers the opportunity to train with mentors and cultivate improvisation skills within a social context to enhance their employability. This article explores how the English tap jams evolved, and how English tap dancers use improvisation at the tap jams to develop their performance skills outside of a Western dance studio environment. While the format of English tap jams reflects the American events, the intention has shifted. Utilising a symbolic interactionist approach, the English tap jams showcase how improvisation is a process of physical and musical interactions that produce constantly evolving relationships between community members, musicians, and the audience. The English tap jams act as both a performance opportunity and social event that allows individuals to shape their onstage identity and their role within the tap community. The article also investigates how the English tap jams are adapting to digital platforms in the current global pandemic.

She Put Her Foot In It

She Put Her Foot In It

Digital Lectures Round-Up Introduction

At the beginning of this volume year, we gave introductory space in the Field Notes section to digital lectures, the online style of conference presentation that COVID-19 foisted on us. As I wrote then:One effect of the Covid crisis has been to highlight digital lectures: the recorded combination of a speaking voice, a PowerPoint, and perhaps an on-camera presence. As “asynchronous presentations,” these works have substituted for in-person teaching and also for in-person conference talks. They have the strong disadvantage of removing liveness from the equation: attention might be divided; consumption might be partial. But they do also put a somewhat new kind of voice into the world, which we can contemplate from the position of popular music studies. Digital lectures, often about 15 minutes long in their conference form, can be seen as podcasts with visuals, or off-the-cuff moments you can subsequently share with those unable to attend in person. Ideas about music, presented and received in this way, can take shapes that other formats don’t as easily afford.Now, to conclude the volume year (though not the crisis, alas), we present a fuller survey of the form, drawing in particular on work presented at the two gatherings most closely tied to JPMS: the IASPM-US annual conference and the Pop Conference.Alexandria Arrieta uses the immediacy of video to interpret the endless reusing of certain sounds in that most addictive of formats these days: TikTok. Mike D’Errico saturates us with EDM’s excessive vices, even as he dissects them. Dan DiPiero posits a feminist affect, Big Feelings, he thinks has taken indie music from riot grrrl into our present: the digital lecture format lets us reach for meaning with him. DeAngela Duff romps through the archives to show Prince blowing smoke at us: conjuring mystique to establish a persona. Beza Fekade makes the relationship between Minnie Riperton and a manipulated sample of her by A Tribe Called Quest a model for resisting the easy celebrations of digital utopianism. Zalika U. Ibaorimi makes dizzying fusion of the “ho ontologies” of Summer Walker and 1973 film, Ganja & Hess–“daylight and night bleed together” as the digital lecture encourages experiments in prose. Pil Ho Kim and Wonseok Lee turn to XXX, a Korean industrial hip-hop duo working a space of resistance against a nationalist entertainment sector. James Denis Mc Glynn creates a taxonomy of one episode of HBO’s Watchmen revamp to talk us through the ways musical cues convey trauma, droplet by sonic droplet. John McGrath explores Laurie Anderson’s “transmedial storytelling” as a fractured form of communication that he tracks via hints he detects in her oeuvre. Kwabena Slaughter makes an African American saying, “She put her foot in it,” the springboard for a take on tap dance that uses the digital lecture’s nimbleness to do just what the phrase says, formally−motion as glyph. Finally, Sarah Suhadolnik makes the “hype videos” used by sports teams in Detroit and New Orleans a soundscape of strategic urbanity.The text provided here is meant as a transcript and captioning aid only. Please make the digital lectures themselves your focus: the works in their intended format.

Imported Sophistication: The Ballets Russes Tours of the 1930s–50s and Toronto's Quest for Cultural Significance

Imported Sophistication: The Ballets Russes Tours of the 1930s–50s and Toronto's Quest for Cultural Significance

A rare blood disorder that created a watercolour storytelling movement

Hereditary elliptocytosis; those are the two words that echoed through the room of St Jude Children's Research Hospital (Memphis, TN, USA) in the mid 80s to my parents. I was diagnosed with hereditary elliptocytosis after a few short years of genetic blood tests throughout my family. I was always an artsy child growing up—active in ballet, painting, and tap dance. My mother, who was a nurse at the time, noticed reoccurring jaundice in my eyes as well as unusual fatigue for a newborn. With a low haematocrit at just 1 month of age, my paediatrician immediately started mentioning options for a blood transfusion.

Context‐sensitive dance–vocal displays affect song patterns and partner responses in a socially monogamous songbird

AbstractMultimodal signaling contributes to efficient communication by improving signal efficacy and increasing signal information. Songbirds often combine dance displays with songs according to the socio‐sexual context; therefore, the song is assumed to function differently depending on dance displays. In this study, we tested how dance displays affect song patterns and the responses of paired partners using male and female blue‐capped cordon‐bleus (Uraeginthus cyanocephalus). Blue‐capped cordon‐bleus are a socially monogamous estrildid finch, and both males and females perform songs and distinct “tap dance”‐like displays. Songs with dance displays were longer and more stereotyped than songs without dance displays in both males and females. Furthermore, both male and female paired partners showed more gestural responses to songs with dance displays than those without dance displays. Songs without dance displays were performed under both isolated and paired conditions, whereas songs with dance displays were only performed when the focal bird was housed with a paired partner. These results suggest that songs had different functions depending on dance displays and social contexts. The multimodal display of blue‐capped cordon‐bleus seems to draw the attention of paired partners to the physical abilities of the performer.

Tap Dancing Boosts Mood and Energy

Tap Dancing Boosts Mood and Energy

Surmising synchrony of sound and sight: Factors explaining variance of audiovisual integration in hurdling, tap dancing and drumming.

Auditory and visual percepts are integrated even when they are not perfectly temporally aligned with each other, especially when the visual signal precedes the auditory signal. This window of temporal integration for asynchronous audiovisual stimuli is relatively well examined in the case of speech, while other natural action-induced sounds have been widely neglected. Here, we studied the detection of audiovisual asynchrony in three different whole-body actions with natural action-induced sounds-hurdling, tap dancing and drumming. In Study 1, we examined whether audiovisual asynchrony detection, assessed by a simultaneity judgment task, differs as a function of sound production intentionality. Based on previous findings, we expected that auditory and visual signals should be integrated over a wider temporal window for actions creating sounds intentionally (tap dancing), compared to actions creating sounds incidentally (hurdling). While percentages of perceived synchrony differed in the expected way, we identified two further factors, namely high event density and low rhythmicity, to induce higher synchrony ratings as well. Therefore, we systematically varied event density and rhythmicity in Study 2, this time using drumming stimuli to exert full control over these variables, and the same simultaneity judgment tasks. Results suggest that high event density leads to a bias to integrate rather than segregate auditory and visual signals, even at relatively large asynchronies. Rhythmicity had a similar, albeit weaker effect, when event density was low. Our findings demonstrate that shorter asynchronies and visual-first asynchronies lead to higher synchrony ratings of whole-body action, pointing to clear parallels with audiovisual integration in speech perception. Overconfidence in the naturally expected, that is, synchrony of sound and sight, was stronger for intentional (vs. incidental) sound production and for movements with high (vs. low) rhythmicity, presumably because both encourage predictive processes. In contrast, high event density appears to increase synchronicity judgments simply because it makes the detection of audiovisual asynchrony more difficult. More studies using real-life audiovisual stimuli with varying event densities and rhythmicities are needed to fully uncover the general mechanisms of audiovisual integration.

RIFFS: A Theory of Instruction and Reference for Step Progression in Tap Dance

This article analyzes how dance educators and tap dance experts can break down teaching riffs for students of all ages. Riffs are defined, explained, and are presented in three layers: the steps, the counts, and the footing. Skills are presented in small numbers initially. This allows large riffs to be accessible through stacking what was obtained in the previous knowledge base. Challenges such as changing dynamics, patterns, and rhythms are also suggested for further learning and providing creativity to lesson plans. Results reveal tap students are able to transfer skills from math classes to dance classes. This emphasizes dance as an interdisciplinary art form.

Mix(tap)ing: A method for sampling the past to envision the future

This article outlines the theoretical and aesthetic considerations of Love’s performance-as-research method for developing interdisciplinary tap dance work – a method he identifies as Mix(tap)ing. By first narrating how he arrived to his current practice as a dancemaker and artistic researcher, Love is able to show the ways in which his method samples strategies, voices and traditions from the cultural past to imagine and work towards futuristic locations of liberation and possibility. Ultimately, Mix(tap)ing allows Love to layer intellectual concepts and theatrical conventions in order to design an approach to rhythm tap dance improvisation and choreography that is expressly Black and queer. This article is, in itself, a demonstration of Love’s method as it joins written analysis with a performed lecture script to evidence how Love has previously presented one of his Mix(tap)es.