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A Different Kind of Freedom
There's a video from my early tap days that I cringe to watch now. I'm seventeen, dressed in a borrowed costume two sizes too big, executing every step my teacher showed me with mechanical precision. The rhythm is clean. The timing is perfect. And there's absolutely nothing memorable about it.
That's the thing nobody tells you about learning tap dance: once you've mastered the steps, you're actually just getting started.
I'm thirty-four now, and I've spent the last seventeen years unlearning the instinct to copy what I've been taught and learning instead to speak my own language through my feet. The transformation didn't happen overnight. It took failed experiments, embarrassing performances, collaborations that scared me, and a whole lot of listening—really listening—to music and myself.
Here's what actually worked.
The Foundation Isn't a Cage
Let me be clear: I'm not saying to skip your fundamentals. You need them like a architect needs to understand load-bearing walls. My first two years of tap were spent in a windowless basement studio with fluorescent lights and a sprung floor that squeaked like crazy. I hashed my shins, busted my ankles, and learned to lock my knees at exactly the right moment. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
But here's what nobody explained to me: the basics aren't the destination. They're the toolbox. When I finally stopped treating every step I'd learned as sacred and started treating them as raw materials, everything changed. That time you spent on maxtrax? That's not a prison sentence. That's your vocabulary. The day I realized I could break apart any combination and rebuild it in new ways was the day tap started being fun.
What Happens When You Actually Listen
I used to pick one style of music and stick to it. Jazz, mostly. Bill Robinson recordings. Maybe some Fred Astaire if I was feeling wild.
Then my roommate, who'd never taken a single tap lesson, played me a Miles Davis album late one night when I couldn't sleep. I wasn't looking to choreograph anything. I was just lying there in the dark, listening. And somewhere around the fourth track, I started tapping along—not performing, not practicing, just responding to what I heard.
The next day, I went to the studio and tried to translate what I'd felt. It was messy. Wrong, even, by any traditional standard. But it was the first time I'd ever made something that felt like it came from inside me rather than from a YouTube tutorial.
Now I listen to everything. Hozier. Daft Punk. Nigerian highlife from the 1970s. I once spent three weeks choreographing a solo to the sound of rain on a tin roof because it made me feel something. The point isn't to make your tap acceptable to purists. The point is to make it speak from your actual experience.
Making Noise on Purpose
There's an older dancer in my city named Gerald who teaches out of a community center in the Bronx. He has a trick: he makes everyone take off their tap shoes and dance in socks on linoleum. Then he has them dance on hardwood. Then tile. Then concrete.
"You think tap is about your shoes?" he told me once. "Tap is about whatever sound you can make with whatever you've got."
That conversation changed how I approach performance. Now I experiment with surfaces constantly. I've tap-danced on stages, sidewalks, kitchen tiles, and once on a loading dock at four in the morning because the rhythm of the metal under my feet was too good to ignore. I've incorporated stomps, claps, and body percussion into routines when it felt right—the sound wasn't about shoes, it was about motion.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying abandon your taps. I'm saying they're not the only tool in your kit.
The Stories We Carry
My mother died when I was twenty-three. For months afterward, I couldn't tap. The joy had gone out of it—everything reminded me of a door that had closed.
Then one day, almost a year later, I found myself shuffling in the kitchen while waiting for coffee to brew. Just messing around. And without meaning to, I'd fallen into a rhythm that felt like grief—not the crushing weight of it, but the way grief moves when you've started to accept it. Not resolved, but moving.
I wrote a solo that night. Performed it three months later at a showcase nobody important attended. The woman who choreographed the show afterwards told me it was the most honest thing she'd seen on that stage in years. I almost laughed. It was the most honest thing I'd ever done, too.
Here's what I mean: your life isn't just background for your art. Your fears, your joys, the fights you've had, the places you've failed—these aren't obstacles to overcome. They're the raw material. When you figure out how to let them into your work, that's when you stop being a dancer doing steps and start being an artist with something to say.
The Collisions That Count
I've had my best ideas in three situations: late at night when I'm half-asleep, in conversation with people who don't dance, and in studios that weren't mine.
My favorite collaboration was with a cellist named Marcus who played in a classical orchestra but listened to nothing but Afrobeat. We spent six weeks creating a piece that neither of us could have made alone. His sense of rhythm was completely different from mine—his subdivisions came in places I'd never considered, his pauses lasted longer than I could stand. Learning to weave our patterns together taught me more than any workshop I've ever taken.
Find people whose instincts are different from yours. Not better, not worse—just different. Let those differences collide. The sparks will show you things you couldn't see alone.
The Mistakes That Stuck
There's a video from a competition when I was nineteen. I was supposed to do a double-time shuffle into a ball change, but my weight was wrong and I stumbled. Instead of recovering cleanly, I turned the stumble into a deliberate-looking three-step pivot, finished the combination, and walked off stage like I'd planned it that way all along.
It was the best thing that ever happened to me as a dancer.
Not because falling is good. But because I learned in real time that the audience can't tell the difference between intention and accident. What they see is motion—if you commit to it, it belongs in the piece.
Now I keep half my choreography intentionally rough. Controlled chaos looks more interesting than perfect execution to most audiences, anyway. And sometimes the ugliest moments become the most memorable.
What I'd Tell My Younger Self
If I could go back and talk to that kid in the too-big costume, I'd say one thing: stop trying to be good. Start trying to be honest.
The best tap dancers I know aren't the cleanest or the fastest. They're the ones who've figured out how to let you see who they are through their feet. That takes time. It takes failure. It takes playing with sounds that don't work and rhythms that feel wrong and collaborations that don't make sense and sitting with music you don't understand until something clicks.
There is no secret. There's just you, some shoes, a floor, and whatever you're willing to feel.
Go make noise.
