Tap’s second act

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, September 24th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: a uniquely American art form.

MAST: When most of us think of tap dancing, we probably picture black and white movies from the golden age of Hollywood. Singin’ in the Rain. Ziegfeld Follies. Stars in shiny black shoes on elaborate sets.

Or more recently, the animated penguins from the kids’ movie Happy Feet.

EICHER: Tap dancing may not be center stage anymore. But is it dying out—or just hiding in plain sight?

WORLD’s Elizabeth Russell reports.

AUDIO: [Scene from Happy Feet]

ELIZABETH RUSSELL: When Happy Feet came out in 2006, it sent a wave of aspiring young dancers flocking to classes across the country. Even without the animated incentive, tap dancing is a rite of passage for most young dancers.

STEPHEY: All right, so that's going to be a brush, step, brush, step, brush, step, brush…

About 30 students take tap dancing classes at Adagio Academy of the Performing Arts. But about 80% of Adagio students focus on learning more popular styles like ballet and hip-hop.

STEPHEY: I think sometimes they just think you're just shuffling your feet around really fast, and how hard could that be? And then you get them into a tap class, and they're like, oh, wait a second, it actually is kind of hard.

Jes Stephey owns the studio in Charles Town, West Virginia. She said most people don’t appreciate the skill that goes into tap dancing. Most dance styles are more about the visual aspect. But in tap, the sound is most important. Metal plates on a dancer’s shoes click and tap along with the music or layer other rhythms on top of it.

STEPHEY: I think what people don't understand is that tap isn't just dance, but it's music at the same time, like your feet are literally a percussion instrument.

The term “tap dancing” didn’t become popular until the 1920s, but the style itself began to form even before the United States was a country.

SIEBERT: Basically, it's the dance and music that originated when enslaved Africans were brought to the U.S. and deprived of their drums and how that music and dance interacted with the music and dance of other immigrant groups, especially the Irish.

Brian Siebert is a dance critic, historian, and author of What The Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing. He’s also an amateur tap dancer. He said tap formed a huge part of early American entertainment, from minstrel shows to vaudeville. It hit its heyday in the 1930s and 40s, when just about every movie and Broadway show boasted some kind of big tap number.

AUDIO: Good mornin’, Good mornin’ (sounds of tap dancing) etc…

But that popularity in the past might have a downside today.

SEIBERT: In movies and most Broadway shows now, the only time they use tap dancing is when they're referencing that era. Even though tap can be done and is done to every kind of music, and it is developed alongside jazz and funk and hip hop and all of the different rhythms of the African diaspora around the world, all of that has been incorporated by tap dancers and is. But in the popular imagination, it's mostly still associated with a certain time, a certain kind of music.

But Seibert doesn’t think tap is dying. Although professional tap performances are still rare compared to other styles, he’s seen more of them hit theaters and festivals in the last decade.

SEIBERT: Actually, I think tap is in better shape than it has been in recent decades. I think it's on an upswing recently.

Even though professional dancing is a much smaller pool than students and amateur dancers, a 2020 survey of dance teachers reached a similar conclusion. All 338 teachers who participated said their tap class enrollment was holding steady or increasing.

But because tap is less popular than other styles, Jes Stephey said dance schools have a hard time finding qualified teachers. Over half the teachers from the survey agreed with her.

STEPHEY: It's definitely harder to find tap teachers than it is a lot of other styles, contemporary jazz, hip hop, things like that you can find.

To draw students in, Stephey and her teachers at Adagio use a lot of popular music and focus more on rhythm tap. It’s less choreographed and formal than a Broadway style.

STEPHEY: Rhythm tap is really about the rhythm of it and what kinds of sounds you can make with your feet, more than the whole body style of it, right? And so I feel like that pulled a lot of kids from like jazz and hip hop and those kids that were really into that kind of started getting into rhythm tap.

The night I visited the studio, an adult tap class warmed up to “September.”

AUDIO: We’ll start flap heel. 56, 5678…

Later in the class, they danced to songs by Beyoncé and from the Newsies musical.

Popular music can help tap reach a new audience. But Stephey said seeing more examples of the dance in media might be the best way to revitalize it.

STEPHEY: So when Happy Feet came out, for sure, there were a lot of kids that wanted to tap and be just like the penguins in Happy Feet. I think the more they're exposed to it, the more they're willing to try it.

AUDIO: [Sound of class tapping]

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Elizabeth Russell.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.