Learning the BS Chorus

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 Honi Coles doing it - possibly even faster. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's just a little bit intimidating to see a tap dancer busting out the BS Chorus that fast, but hey, I'm ready to work my way up to it 😁

So let's talk about the different variations of the BS Chorus. According to what I've seen, a lot of the variations happen on the break. The tutorial I used had a break with spanks, heels, and steps before the maxia ford, but this summer I'll be doing a variation with a series of hop shuffles before the maxie ford instead.

As to WHY I've been working on learning and then speeding up the BS Chorus, I guess the answer is that I want to dive deeper into tap dance history. I love the fact that tap dance is so fluid and that it's easier to make tap your own than, say, ballet, but I want to learn more about tap dance's roots and improve my own skills along the way. If you're up for it, why don't you join me?

Happy tapping!

Want to tap dance? Christa Terry teaches kid, teen, and adult tap classes at Dance Enthusiasm in Salem, MA! More info on her upcoming summer schedule: http://www.danceenthusiasm.org/summer/
Whether you've never put on a pair of tap shoes or you want to get back into tap dancing, whether you're 8 or 80, Christa knows you can do it!

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About Christa Terry

Christa Terry has been dancing since age six, and while she has danced in studio and on stage in ballet and en pointe, jazz, and just about every other form of dance you can think of, tap has always been her passion. That passion grew into a love of musical theater, and she has been blessed to dance in productions of shows from Anything Goes to Sweet Charity. She got her first taste of teaching at the Levittown Public Schools Dance and Gymnastics program. A multi-year alumnus of Dance Olympus in NY, Beantown Tapfest in Boston, and many other conventions, Christa Terry studied extensively under Julia Boynton and took classes with Michelle Dorrance (founder and artistic director of Dorrance Dance) and Josh Hilberman before moving to the North Shore and jumping back into teaching tap classes. As the lead tap teacher at RDX in Beverly, MA, she taught beginner, advanced beginner tap, and fast intermediate tap dance classes to kids, teens, and grownups, and perfor

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