Adult tap

Now that I'm getting the hang of teaching children, I've got another market I need to learn to cater to.

About one month after our regular dance year starts, we start two adult tap classes. I've been very  excited to teach these classes because tap is my specialty and my passion. I've been encountering a few problems though, in that running these classes is very different than running a class for children. For a few reasons.

• They can already count to 8 and have rhythm. 
• They are perfectionists, we go over steps a lot more than I normally would because they are much more worried about what they'll look like on stage. (Understandable)
• My pre-teen playlists don't really fly with them...
• I have to work much harder to gain their trust since I am half their age and some of them have probably been tapping as long as I've been alive. 

I teach two levels of tap, a beginning and an intermediate class. Each class has a whole range of levels within it, some in the beginning are truly beginning (their very first dancing experience) and others have been in the class for 10 or more years. In the intermediate class they range from late beginning tappers to super advanced tappers. Catering to large ranges of skills is easier for me with kids because, once more, it is easier to have authority with a class that is much younger than you. 

Another difficult thing for me with these classes is the fact that I, at heart, am not a broadway tapper. I connect much more with the hoofer style. So I decided since a majority of my intermediate class is more like a super advanced class, that there was basically no broadway steps I could teach them that would challenge them. 

So I am going to experiment and teach them some hoofer tap, we'll see how it goes. My worry is that the drills I want them to do (from Anita Feldman's amazing book Inside Tap) will seem boring to them. But I am going to try to get them to explore tap outside of the fancy steps and rhythms and hopefully we can look for the beauty of tap. I'm hoping they can see that tap is just jazz with your feet, that you could do a whole dance with two steps and it could be fantastic. Heck, there is a one note samba so why not a one step tap dance? I spent about two hours doing almost exclusively shuffles the other day and experimenting with those and I was tickled pink! 

I will let you know how this experiment goes. I really hope that it not only opens their understanding, but that they enjoy it and we'll all become a little closer. 

Because I can only do so much broadway tap.