In honor of National Tap Dance Day (May 25th), it is time to start talking about my life before taking off with technology and my career. I will leave the overall story of my dance life for another day, but for today, just focus on tap!
Tap dance has been a big part of my life, start off learning how to do it at 11 years old. I was playing piano from an early age (again a story for another day) and I grew up in a hispanic family where we would always bring our instruments to family reunions and camping to play into the night, so the rhythm and music was always in me. Tap Dance came as another avenue for me to express the music within me. I was never into rap music or beat boxing to express the music in my head, but Tap gave me that path to do that.
A group of my friends and I start taking more advanced tap classes at a early age, getting more technique in, and focusing more on learning the history and heritage of Tap Dance. We learned about Gregory Hines, Sammy Davis Jr, Jimmy Slyde, all of the great tap masters. We would take tap classes from guest artists who had learned some of the famous tap dances from the masters and try and spread their knowledge and style of tap. We would go off to far away workshops to take classes with other students pursuing that knowledge as well.
Tap gave me the ability to truly express myself and my feelings when ever I needed to do so. Whether it was with my friends, improving to new music and styles, or by myself in the studio, it was always something I enjoyed doing. Tap was an easy escape from the world, even if I didn’t have a studio handy. I would make sure I always buy hard sole shoes so I can tap at the store in the isle when no one was looking, tap at school down the hallway to my next class, anywhere where the rhythm called. I remember one time for a fundraiser, actually putting on my tap shoes and tapping around a grocery store to bring shoppers to our booth.
Tap became my main focus as a dancer. Starting at the end of middle school, going into high school, my best friend and I wanted to do more with Tap so we would choreograph our own duets together. Our teachers found out and asked if we wanted to perform them. That is when the passion really started to hit when we could perform like that. Express ourselves in our own styles and have the feedback from the audience to fuel our fire. We did 2 duets together for different shows and to this day, those were 2 of the best dances I remember doing in my tap life.
From that point on, all of my friends and I were begging to get more advanced with tap itself, and helping push each other to get better and learn more advanced steps. We would try new tricks and try adding more sounds into complex steps already, to see how fast our feet could go. Our teachers would have us throw in some of these steps into pieces because they knew we could do them!
My first class I began to teach myself was for younger students. My dance program asked me to teach for some summer internships some basic classes. I give such great respect to teachers because a lot of work has to go in to planning and helping students learn what they need to learn before moving on up in the world. That was my responsibility for these beginners classes, teach them the basic steps of tap, the basic syntax/words of the language that they can expand into more complex sentences after those summers. Having the basic steps in seared into my brain, I thought it would be easy to pass on, but having a room full of 30x 9 year olds, all with tap shoes and banging them on the floor of the studio, I knew it was going to be much harder.
A few summers went by in high school and I was finally asked to take on some of the more advanced classes with peers closer to my age. That was more scary because I knew these students personally, they were only a year or 2 younger than me, but I was able to help push them and start passing off some of the knowledge I had gotten from other workshops I had taken.
Towards the end of high school, I also started dancing with the NM Rhythm Tap Ensemble, something my tap teacher at the time was a part of. She invited me to join in on some of their tap pieces since she had taught them to us already. These dancers would meet on weekends to pass on dances from their mentors and create new pieces for a yearly Tap Jam show. They would make cool new arrangements out of them and perform them for the general audience. I was so glad to be apart of a group like that, a team focused on keeping the rhythm of tap alive and sharing previous knowledge to others.
Once high school ended and I went onto college, I had to stop most of my dancing career, but I did not want to give up Tap. I continued to teach some tap classes and I stayed with that ensemble throughout college, taking classes with them and performing new pieces that we worked on. We would bring in different guest artists to perform with for those shows and they would give us classes to pass on their knowledge. It truly is a remarkable community to be able to do that and have each give their own flavor and style of tap to pass on at the same time.
Once college ended though and work life began, I had to move to a different town for work and I couldn’t dance as often with the Ensemble. I had to make the difficult choice to leave that life behind and focus on my career. As much as I loved Tap Dance, I knew I couldn’t put the effort into it to make a career out of. And without many tappers around me now, I didn’t really have any more strive to continue on. That is one of my regrets in life, letting that part of myself die out. I still have my tap shoes, I still put them on every now and then to take with friends or when I can visit a studio.
The music and rhythm will always be a part of me though, and I still find myself tapping in the stores, singing rhythms with my voice, beating to the music at work, recalling all those memories. To that end:
Hello World! Live long and prosper 🖖and keep the rhythm alive!
