More tap drills

Clearly tap is my favorite to teach, just because I am so passionate about it and it is so rarely found in studios these days.

I started doing something with my pre-teen dance team the other day that seemed to really help them clean up and even out their sounds. In a circle, we did a basic call and response with something we have been workign on: paddle & rolls. With no music, I would do a paddle & roll combination then the girl to my left would repeat it back to me. Then I would do it again, and the next girl would do it, and so on around the circle. We did it twice with one combination, and then once again with a slight variation. Even by the end of the third time I saw improvement.

But the real treat came the next week. My girls came in saying they had been doing paddle & rolls everywhere, in the lunchroom, in their houses, driving their families crazy. I was so proud. Especially because last week even with our drill we had worked on tap the least amont of time we ever have.

Tickled pink is what I am. This is my new favorite exercise. It's fun, seems like a game, but also gets the girls to hear their sounds individually.

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. 

Making tap cool.

I have had to step down from my high tap horse and realize something. Drills simply won't work on girls who already think tap is lame.

I have had a few posts about this because my journey teaching tap to my pre-teen class has been difficult. Their skills were less than I expected, and nothing seemed to be helping.

However, now that we are a couple of months into the dance year, I have seen some things that are working.

• Consistency and patience. I just have to realize that the first day I teach them a step, they are not going to get it. We learned shim-shams week 1 (the shim-sham shimmy version versus the shuffle version) and I thought oh no, they can't even get this. But let me tell you, by now, their shim shams are fantastic. Top notch. 
• Instead of drills, I make up basic combos to cool songs (our current combo is to Gangnam Style). So really they are doing the same thing I do in drills. They are just doing it to cool songs that they love. 
• GAMES. There are some awesome tap improv games that can totally be used as basic tools of rhythm and understanding for beginning tap dancers. For my girls, we started out with tapping a melody of a popular song, then everyone guessing. That proved a little too difficult, so we are now doing nursery rhymes. I have been stressing one sound/syllable of the nursery rhyme and each week we get closer. As they begin to understand that concept with their feet and sounds, their sounds clean up and become much more controlled. 

Tapping a melody

I have a tap class for pre-teens and I started the class with quite high expectations. They not only didn't have as much ability as I'd expected, but they weren't even making even sounds. I had no idea what to do, how to go back to the basics without completely boring them because of their age.

Tap can get a pretty bad rap with competition jazz girls. They often think of shiny shoes and dancing to oldies or cutesy songs. But to me, tap is...

And. 

And...a little bit of...

But I digress (more than you know, I watched tap dance videos for about 20 minutes after finding these, it's like a drug!). 

So I wanted to make tap fun for my girls while still getting them the basics, because they sure won't be motivated to get the basics if they can't catch the vision. So I did two things differently today. 

1. Tap out a melody. I had the girls get into pairs, pick a popular song, and try to tap out the melody so the other girls could guess. I knew they wouldn't be very good at it the first time (heck, I was pretty bad at it). So they would tap it out, the girls would guess, then we usually had to get 3-4 clues about the song before anyone would get it. Then after they got it, I would have the girls tap it out again so they could feel the rhythms in there. There were a few good outcomes for this activity. We are going to do this activity I think almost every week for a good while. 
1. They had to work together in groups. 
2. They had to have even sounds (which was my primary reason for doing it)
3. They had to perform for each other
4. They had to root for each other and come together as a class. 
2. The next thing I did was a trick I picked up  from my old clogging teacher Greg Tucker. After the class has known a step for a couple of days, and you're practicing it as a class, have the students do it individually so that a) they can hear their own sounds and b) they are suddenly hyper-sensitive and pressured. I was amazed, I could tell when my girls were doing their shim-shams that their sounds were not even close to even. But when they all had to do it alone and only their taps were making a sound, nearly every girl had a perfect shim-sham. Miracles.