The floor at Lincoln Center's Damrosch Park shuddered in July 2023—not from amplification, but from the collective force of twenty dancers executing synchronized heel-toe rolls at blistering speed. Michelle Dorrance's Soundspace marked another evolution in what critics have called tap's "perpetual renaissance," a decades-long transformation that has pushed the form far beyond its vaudeville and Broadway roots.
This evolution isn't new. Since the 1990s resurgence sparked by Savion Glover's Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk (1996), tap choreographers have systematically dismantled the genre's conventions. What follows is not a catalogue of fleeting trends but an examination of how specific artists and techniques have expanded tap's technical vocabulary, sonic possibilities, and cultural boundaries.
Reconstructing Technique: From Foundation to Fracture
The Accelerated Paradiddle
What the article draft calls "heel-toe tapping" has deeper roots and greater complexity than its simple description suggests. The technique accelerates the traditional paddle and roll—alternating toe and heel strikes that date to early twentieth-century hoofers—into 16th-note and even 32nd-note subdivisions.
Jason Samuels Smith's A.C.G.I. (Anybody Can Get It) demonstrates the physical demand: ankle stability developed through years of calisthenic training, calf muscles conditioned to fire with piston-like precision. The sound produced isn't merely rapid; it's architectural, with each strike's decay carefully controlled to prevent muddiness at high velocities.
Flamenco's Percussive Dialogue
The incorporation of flamenco footwork—zapateado—into tap represents more than stylistic borrowing. Choreographer and dancer Chloe Arnold, co-founder of the Syncopated Ladies, has developed what she terms "percussive conversation," where flamenco's vertical, grounded strikes (using the entire foot ball for golpe) contrast with tap's preference for metatarsal and toe articulation.
The distinction matters sonically. Flamenco strikes on a wooden floor produce a drier, more immediate attack; tap's metal taps create sustained overtones. When combined, as in Arnold's 2019 work ¡Fémina!, the result is timbral layering previously unavailable to either form alone.
The Physics of Slide
Slide and drag steps—where the foot maintains floor contact throughout movement—require specific material conditions largely absent from dance writing. These techniques are impossible on traditional tap floors (wood over air space) and demand instead Marley surfaces over wood, or specially treated "slide floors" developed by companies like Dorrance Dance for their touring productions.
The sound is equally specific: leather sole against synthetic surface produces a friction-based tone, a gradual decrescendo as momentum decreases, fundamentally different from tap's characteristic percussive attack. Dancer and historian Brenda Bufalino, whose American Tap Dance Orchestra pioneered contemporary tap in the 1980s, has described this as "the drag that sings"—a sustained pitch where traditional tap offers only rhythm.
Style as Strategy: Three Case Studies in Innovation
African-Infused Tap: The Polyrhythmic Turn
The description of "African-infused tap" as emerging misses its documented history by at least three decades. Michelle Dorrance's 2013 Bessie Award-winning ETM: Double Down—created with Nicholas Van Young—explicitly layers West African djembe rhythms onto tap's traditional time-step structure. The work uses electronic trigger boards that convert tap strikes into synthesized sounds, allowing a single dancer to perform what would otherwise require an ensemble.
More recently, Brazilian tap dancer Leonardo Sandoval has integrated samba and maracatu rhythms into his choreography, reflecting tap's internationalization. Sandoval's Malandragem (2022), developed during his residency at Harvard's Dance Center, demonstrates how polyrhythmic complexity—three simultaneous rhythmic layers in the feet, with upper body isolations drawn from capoeira—expands tap's kinetic vocabulary beyond its Irish and African-American origins.
Contemporary Tap: The Post-Glover Synthesis
The fusion of tap with contemporary dance techniques began with Bufalino's ensemble work in the 1980s but achieved mainstream recognition through Glover's Broadway success. Contemporary practitioners like Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards have pushed further, incorporating release technique and contact improvisation into tap's traditionally upright, vertical orientation.
Sumbry-Edwards's And Still You Must Swing (2016) includes sequences where dancers execute tap phrases while descending to and rising from the floor—a technical challenge requiring recalibration of weight distribution and strike mechanics. The work asks: can tap's rhythmic precision survive the destabilization of its foundational posture?
