Descriptive Tap

Some of you bloggers who were in Visual and Verbal Rhetoric last semester might remember that I "performed" a little tap dance on the first day of class as part of my introduction. I grew up dancing, and tap was my favorite type of dance, because it involved so much intricate detail and rhythm. Getting a step right felt like solving a mathematical equation (something I've never been very good at). I liked solving the puzzle of the steps and making every piece fit so well together. Hearing the metal clicks tap on the floor or stage sounded better than any song ever could.

I found some descriptive text about tap dancing that I really love—you can almost hear the tapping...

Tap dancing is an amazing musical accident of the human body. It is a natural magic trick originally discovered by untrained people with relaxed feet and comfortable shoes.

Some of the many steps in tap dancing include flap, flap heel, cramp roll, buffalo, Maxie Ford, time steps, pullbacks, wings, cincinnati, the shim sham shimmy, Irish, Waltz Clog, shuffle hop step, running flaps, running shuffles, sugar, and the paddle and roll, slap, stomp, running slaps, brushes, and scuffs.

The goal in tap dancing is to produce clear, clean sounds, with various levels of tone. Body weight should be held slightly forward, allowing most of the dancing to be done on the balls of the feet. The knees and ankles should be relaxed at all times. Beginning tap dancers are sometimes told to dance as if they were dancing on a glass floor.

Since Lindy Hop is such a grounded swing dance with knees bend and the body tilted in a “ready-set-go” position. This athleticism is essential for Lindy Hop because it is such a fast-paced whirl-winded style of dance. With this grounded style, hoofing—a style of tap dance that uses the legs only, creating louder noises with the shoe itself (not necessarily a shoe with taps)—has become quite popular in Lindy Hop. The stomping between steps as a break from the basic Lindy swing out creates an energetic and typical Lindy persona to the dance itself.