How to Choreograph a Tap Dance Routine

Tap is an art form that requires balance and coordination and it's a completely different technical feat from ballet or jazz. Learning tap is challenging, especially at the more advanced levels, but teaching and choreographing is even more challenging. You need to focus on the sounds and the sights to get an exciting routine.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

1. Find a starting point. This is either a theme, a rhythm or a step but it must be something upon which you can build. Everything else springs from this idea.

2. Choose complimentary music. Listen to it at least once per day. Pay attention to the words, the rhythms and the musical themes.

3. Decide on rhythm ideas that you like. Incorporate them into the dance by matching them to rhythms in the music or as counterpoint to them. To avoid boring the audience, you need some of both.

4. Pick areas in the music where it works best to move quickly and areas to move slowly and places to be still. Tap is a visual and audio dance, so it needs to look as exciting as it sounds. There needs to be variety.

5. Form your dancers around shapes from the top and sides and move them from formation to formation using the moving places in the music.

6. Add some showier steps to the dance to excite the audience and be sure to finish it with a great pose.

Tips & Warnings

• Relax and keep your focus. Practice the routine in your mind often and ideas will suddenly come to you out of nowhere.
• Watch lots of videos from all different kinds of dancing and use ideas from everything you see. Reflection of everything is the soul of dance.
• Don't attempt a big choreography project as a beginning tap dancer. Begin as soon as possible putting together combinations and playing with rhythms in a solo situation. But a large project is overwhelming to a beginner. Take it slow and practice.