Last September, my daughter announced that she would like to take tap dancing lessons. It came completely out of the blue, and immediately made me wonder if there was some new teen Netflix show featuring tap dancers or some teen novel about a despondent student who finds happiness only while tap dancing. But nope.
I will admit that my first response was ‘What? You want to take tap dancing? Why?’ My daughter was insistent. I thought, ‘Wonderful. Just another loud activity to go along with the viola she brings home.’ I also thought, ‘My child is so weird!’ And, I also thought, ‘Are you going to ask to learn to play the accordion next?’ (Not that there is anything wrong with that!)
So I signed my daughter up for tap lessons, so she’d shut up, and for the next ten months my daughter learned to tap, every Thursday for two hours a week. She would come home exhausted, but oh-so-happy, her face flushed with the look of someone who had accomplished something utterly amazing. She seemed to be in a happy dream-like state when she came home. I wanted to bottle her happiness.
I admit, I still didn’t get my daughter’s sudden interest in tap dancing. I honestly didn’t think my daughter would last more than a couple lessons, but she fell in love with it immediately, without any prior knowledge of tap dancing. Suddenly, I had become the mother of a tapper!
When I attended the year-end performance, I wasn’t expecting much. After all, my daughter had only been at it for a handful of months and started lessons at age 13. But I was stunned to see just how amazing my daughter and her tap dancing group was, as they tapped danced their little hearts out in a somewhat sexy black sequenced costume with fishnet stockings. They looked adorable. And they were good. So very good.
I was also amazed at the sheer number of tap dancing groups who also performed, from all ages and genders. When the hell did tap dancing become so popular among young children and pre-teens?
There were more tap-dancing performances than any other kind of dance, including modern, jazz, hip hop, and ballet. Tap is apparently where it’s at.
The truth is, I know barely anything about tap dancing. I just know that suddenly tap dancing is all the rage and my daughter is obsessed. Even at her overnight camp, they offered tap dancing lessons and, yes, my daughter brought her tap shoes and learned even more complex steps.
And forget about all the music festivals this summer. There are also a number of Tap Dancing Festivals, including Vancouver’s Tap Festival, which kicks off on August 25th. Even Toronto hosted an International Tap Dance Festival in early June. (Who knew? I would have been there!)
And then I, too, became obsessed with how it actually felt to be a tap dancer. I wanted to know why my daughter wanted to tap dance and why she loved it so much.
I found this wonderful article in Dance Magazine, written by tap dancer Melinda Sullivan, on how it feels to tap dance and why she got into it. And guess what? She sounds an awful lot like my daughter.
Sullivan writes, ‘When I’m asked why tap dance matters, why it’s a worthy skill to learn, I always come back to the same answer: freedom.’ Her words, like watching my tapper daughter, made me surprisingly emotional.
If you’re like me and want to know why your child chooses tap dancing, as opposed to say, ballet, I think Sullivan sums it up perfectly. ‘As a young girl, I found the freedom to be loud. To be brash. To be different than my family. Tap dancing allows me to express my artistic side, my creative side, my funny side, my rebellious side.’
All of this is so true, My daughter is fantastically original, is super funny, and, now that she is officially a teen, maybe tap dancing symbolizes freedom and a little bit of rebellion. And I’m all okay with this. Sullivan writes that, ‘As tap dancers, we learn quickly that, just like jazz music, tap dance has that undeniable spirit, the spirit of freedom of speech. And as a woman, being angry or having different ideas isn’t always encouraged in us. But it’s our job as artists to fight through that, or at least it has been mine.’
Although tap dancing routines are usually choreographed, I didn’t know that improvising plays a large part in tap dancing. ‘I improvise with my feet because I believe I have something exciting to say. In that very moment, it is my chance to share,’ writes Sullivan.
As I watched my daughter dance, I couldn’t figure out if tap dancing was so complex in it’s simplicity or looked so simply fun because it really is so complex. As Sullivan writes, tap dancing is about ‘The freedom to try not to repeat oneself. Then try to repeat oneself.’
Tap dancing, apparently, is not for the faint of heart. And yet when a colleague showed off her tap dancing skills from when she was a child and took tap, it was all I could do to stop myself from taking her home with me. Tap dancing is fabulous.
Like seeing a unicycle or enjoying an ice cream come on a hot summer’s day, having a tap dancing daughter has introduced me to what true freedom and spirit really is.
Also, it just makes me so damn happy to watch.
Tagged under: children,dancing,arts,joy in dance,dance mom,tap dancing
Category: mom-101
