You Can Tap With Christa!

There are pages and pages of quotes for dancers out there, but fewer focused entirely on tap dancing and the joy of tap. So, here are some of my personal favorite tap dance quotes: I'm going to tap until I can't: I'll be so old, all I can do is walk out from the wings to stage center. But I'll be there. ~ Gregory Hines I'm basically a hoofer, a tap dancer . I was always very good from the waist down, moving with the feet... I became what's known as a total dancer, using the entire body in order to express what you want to express in tap dancing and line. ~ Donald O'Connor  Tap is still the central driving force of my life. I think and talk in dance. ~ Savion Glover   Once you're on stage you can't go back, even when things go wrong people expect you to stay there and entertain them. When all else fails, you've got to try tap dancing. ~ Angus Young When I first saw tap dancing, I immediately got it: the righteousness of being abl...

A long, time ago, in a master class for tap dancers near me, I got some information that just plain blew my mind. The standard 4-count paradiddle is just one of many. That's right, it turns out that paradiddles come in different flavors. Er, different numbers of counts. I made this short video to show my tap dancers how to do the 5-count riff and the 6-count riff, but if you're a tap dancer interested in riffs, I hope you'll click play! As you may have guessed right now - especially if you're one of my tap students or you've read my post about how to do a back essence - there are different flavors of LOTS of tap steps and combos and different names, too. Maybe you're familiar with the double and triple back essence . Consider the riff. How many can you think of off of the top of your head? And then think about this: the number of counts in a riff is limited only by a tap dancer's ability to fit in the various sounds. A lot of people learn something ...

You know I think tap dance is the best dance, so today let's talk about how to know you're a tap dancer. I'd argue that if you tap, you're a tap dancer, but maybe that's not good enough. Maybe you're taking different types of dance classes and don't "feel" like a tapper. Or maybe you're a grownup student who doesn't really feel like a part of our big friendly tap fam. How do you know if you're a tap dancer? Here are some signs you're a true tapper. You know you're a tap dancer when... 1. You know tap shoes aren't necessary to tap. You're happy to tap anywhere in any shoes - or no shoes at all. 2. Fact: Once you’re a tap dancer, you can never stop moving your feet. If you're in school, your teacher has to tell you to stop tap dancing under your desk. If you're a grownup, you tap dance while waiting in line - basically any time other adults are standing still. 3. When someone says buffalo you don’t thin...

As much as I love tap dance, I'm not above procrastinating when it comes to learning new steps, tricks, and combos. Case in point: I've had various BS Chorus tutorials bookmarked pretty much forever, and I've been ignoring them for just as long. Why? I've been reading up on procrastination, and it turns out that procrastination is not a laziness issue. It's actually a confidence issue! The BS Chorus is one of those funny things that you find more often in tap dance than in other forms of dance. No one knows who created and performed the BS Chorus, and there are a ton of variations of the BS Chorus floating around. Here's what we do know. The variation most tap dancers are familiar with comes from The Copasetics, who would perform the BS Chorus at speeds that were pretty insane. Crazy, right? We also know that it's called the BS Chorus because inexperienced tappers have tried to fake their way through it for about a hundred years. Here's Charles Ho...