A Walker in the Suburbs

Advanced beginners’ tap is, at least for me, more about the advanced than the beginners. There’s a lot of fancy footwork, quickly executed. Balance is required. The kind of balance you have in your 20s or 30s but not — ahem — later in life.

Relax your toes, teacher Candy said last night. You need to relax your toes inside your shoes and then you’ll be able to move more smoothly. She broke one complicated step down into its components, told us the movement was like a ribbon unfurling.

There were other suggestions —jump down not up, take smaller steps. But the one said most often was “keep smiling.” That wasn’t hard. The woman next to me was wearing dance tights with skeleton bones. Suddenly I saw a parade of dancing, prancing skeletons, out for a night on the town.

“Up the steep and very narrow stairway. To the voice like a metronome. Up the steep and very narrow stairway. It wasn’t paradise, it wasn’t paradise, it wasn’t paradise, but it was home.”

                                         “At the Ballet” from “A Chorus Line”

I missed International Dance Day (April 29) and National Tap Dance Day (May 25), so … happy National Dance Day!

Ballet Nova is offering free classes and there’s a big event at the Kennedy Center. But I’ll stay home, practice my buffaloes and think about the dance classes I’ve taken through the years: the very first when I was five, then adult beginning ballet at 18, folk dance and modern dance in college, and a series of classes as a young adult.

At Joy of Motion in Chicago the teacher actually advanced us to pointe work. For a few precious, foot-cramped weeks I felt like a real ballerina. Later, in New York City, I took ballet uptown and midtown — once even in a studio above Carnegie Hall. I was earnest, tight, worried about my turn out.

Now … it’s all for fun. Tap is loose and joyful. It’s difficult to take myself seriously doing it. It’s a happy dance for happy National Dance Day.

“Tap is easy,” Candy says. “But shifting your weight, that’s hard.” This is not the first bit of life wisdom I’ve learned from my tap teacher. But it’s the most recent.

“It’s like gymnastics,” she continues. “Gymnastics is easy. Landing is hard.”

Well, I don’t know about that. But I do know that hopping on my left foot, flapping with my right (or as my tap buddy Denise would say, “falapping,” since we give it two beats), landing on the ball of that foot before transferring weight to my left ball, heel and right ball, heel — yes, that is difficult.

In fact, balance is the most challenging part of tap class, apart from the traffic I must drive through to get there. And what makes balance tricky is letting go. To transfer weight from one foot to the other, one must, for a single terrifying moment, not have weight anywhere. One must leap into the void.

It’s not unlike a trapeze artist or a mid-life career changer. Yes, there is practice, preparation, mastery. But there is also the hand off, the letting go.

I’m thinking there’s a point where shifting my weight will cease to frustrate and begin to exhilarate. I’m still waiting for that to happen.

(A tap class in Iowa, 1942, courtesy Wikipedia)

We practiced brush back down, shuffle ball change, time steps and breaks (single, double and triple). I continue to marvel at the many ways a foot can touch the floor.

But last night’s dance class was different. It was my last basic beginning tap. After a two-week break I’ll move up to … drum roll, please … advanced beginning tap!

Which makes me think of Winston Churchill: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” 

I looked it up. This from the Churchill Society: “After a series of defeats from Dunkirk to Singapore, Churchill could finally tell the House of Commons that ‘we have a new experience. We have victory — a remarkable and definite victory.” It was the Battle of Egypt.

Less than two weeks since the D Day anniversary and I’m comparing my tap dance class to the Allied victory in Europe. What can I say? It’s early; that’s all.

We are all shapes and sizes. All ages, too. Some of us are in high school. A couple of us don’t even have kids in high school anymore.

But for one hour every Wednesday, we are one. Slapping, flapping, bouncing, turning. We are the beginning tappers at Ballet Nova.

It dawned on me tonight, driving home from class, that we are a company. OK, we’re not Alvin Ailey or the New York City Ballet. Fame and fortune have so far eluded us. But we are a group, a troupe. We “work together to perform dances as a spectacle or entertainment.”

The spectacle is what we’re making of ourselves and the entertainment is how much we laugh when we can’t execute a perfect buffalo. We look nothing like this picture, but we have fun just the same.

Yeah, I’d say we’re a company. Earnest, ragtag, trying hard. But a company just the same.

(Photo from “A Chorus Line” Timeout.com)

Years ago, when I lived in Manhattan, I drug some friends to 34th Street, where a record number of tappers were dancing along the pot-holed streets in front of Macy’s. I remember wanting to join in.

It’s taken several decades, but yesterday my feet were two among 80 others with metal-plated shoes flapping, slapping, digging, brushing,
scuffing, shuffling — tapping away. The sound alone altered reality.

Add to that the hopping and twirling, the sheer exhilaration of moving the body through choreographed steps in unison — and fortissimo — and, well, it’s impossible not to be happy when tapping.

It’s been almost six months since I started taking dance lessons. Life hasn’t been especially easy since then. But tapping has been.

(Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and the late Shirley Temple in the famous stairway tap-dancing scene from “The Little Colonel.” Photo: Cinewiki.)