On a rainy Thursday night in Brooklyn, the Gowanus Arts Warehouse is filling up fast. By 7:30 p.m., more than eighty people have squeezed onto folding chairs and beer crates arranged around a scuffed plywood floor. The room smells like damp coats and rosin. Then the lights dim, six dancers in worn-soled tap shoes step forward, and the floor explodes into sound—amplified by contact microphones, sharp as snare drums, syncopated like a jazz quartet gone electric.
This is a Tap Jam, New Hartford City's weekly open gathering for tap dancers. And nights like this one, say the regulars, didn't happen here five years ago.
The New Wave of Tap
Tap dance in New Hartford City is undergoing a marked revival, driven largely by dancers under thirty who are treating the form less as a heritage artifact and more as a living instrument. They blend traditional tap with contemporary styles—hip-hop, jazz, even electronic music. The result is a hybrid sound that has sold out two consecutive runs at the Orpheum Theatre and attracted international visitors to local showcases.
The most visible engine of this shift is Jazzy Feet, a collective of seven dancers who met as students at the Eleanor Burke Dance Studio. Their breakthrough came in March, when a TikTok routine set to a remixed Billie Eilish track garnered 4.2 million views. Since then, they have performed at Lincoln Center's outdoor plaza and opened for jazz drummer Makaya McCraven at the Blue Note.
"We're not trying to preserve tap," said Mari Okonkwo, 24, a founding member of Jazzy Feet. "We're trying to push it somewhere it hasn't been yet. The floor is our drum machine."
The group's choreography borrows from house dance and Afro-Brazilian movement, but the execution is strictly tap—clear rhythmic phrasing, precise weight shifts, and improvisation traded between dancers like soloists in a bebop band.
Community Impact
The ripple effects are measurable at the neighborhood level. The Eleanor Burke Dance Studio reported a 34% increase in tap enrollment since 2022, with the bulk of new students between ages 16 and 28. Two other local schools, Rhythm Works and the Downtown Dance Collective, confirmed similar double-digit growth in their tap programs over the same period.
"Five years ago, we were canceling tap classes for lack of interest," said Damon Reeves, director of Rhythm Works. "Now we have a waitlist for our beginner adult tap course. These kids are walking in and saying, 'I saw it on TikTok.'"
The weekly Tap Jams, launched in 2021 by Jazzy Feet and hosted at rotating venues including the Gowanus Arts Warehouse and the Brooklyn Ballet studio, have become a fixed point in the city's dance calendar. Admission is pay-what-you-can. The format is simple: an opening set by a featured group, followed by an open floor where dancers of all levels trade four-bar phrases.
"It's not a class, it's not a competition," said regular attendee Sofia Chen, a 32-year-old software engineer who started tapping in 2023. "It's a conversation. You learn more in one Jam than in a month of classes."
Challenges and Questions
Not everyone is convinced the surge is sustainable. Some veteran tap instructors worry that social-media visibility is emphasizing flash over fundamentals.
"You can go viral with thirty seconds of fast footwork," said Louise Goldstein, a tap teacher with forty years of experience who now mentors several Jazzy Feet members. "But the real art is in the listening, the timekeeping, the conversation with musicians. I tell my students: don't let the algorithm rewrite the grammar."
There is also the question of infrastructure. While local government initiatives have provided small grants for arts programming—New Hartford City's Cultural Affairs Office awarded Jazzy Feet $15,000 in 2023 for youth workshops—dancers say affordable rehearsal space remains scarce. Several members of Jazzy Feet work service-industry jobs to subsidize their careers.
The Future of Tap
Still, the coming calendar is crowded. The first annual New Hartford Rhythm Festival, organized by the city's tourism board and a consortium of private sponsors, is scheduled for October. Organizers expect dancers from Toronto, São Paulo, and London to attend. A city-sanctioned tap competition with a $10,000 top prize will debut in spring 2025.
For Okonkwo, the goal is less about trophies than about permanence.
"We want tap to be something you stumble on in this city the way you stumble on a jazz quartet in the subway," she said. "Not special occasion. Just here."
The rising stars of New Hartford City's tap scene are not merely entertainers. They are evidence that an art form once relegated to nostalgia can be remade by the young people who claim it—provided they have a floor
