Tap Dancing Warmups: Ball Taps

Series Summary

The rhythmic foot stomping we call tap dancing emerged in the 1830s from a blend of cultures in Manhattan’s original melting pot, the Five Points neighborhood (recently depicted in Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York.) Essentially a blend of African shuffle and Irish jig, tap dance became extremely popular in the first half of the 20th century. The metal plates attached to the bottom of the dancer’s shoes create a percussive rhythm which could either accompany music, or be used as an instrument itself. This popular form of entertainment soon found its way from amateur street performances to vaudeville, Broadway, and eventually film and television, where millions were inspired by the moves of Sammy Davis, Jr., Gregory Hines, Fred Astaire, and Gene Kelly.

If you want to participate in tap dancing, it's important to warm up beforehand. In this free video series, a dance teacher will show you how to do a number of exercises to properly warm up for tap dancing. You'll learn how to do ball taps, scuffles, hop steps in different syncopations, and jumping jacks. You'll also learn how to do stomp steps, step heels, and Suzy Q steps, among many other sequences that are not only great for warming up, but great for tap dancing practice. With these warmup tips and techniques, you'll be ready to go out and tear up the dance floor.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Emily Larew and we are going to start our tap warm up today with ball taps. Now while we are doing these ball taps, you can do them at various speeds depending on how advanced your tapper is or how beginning they are. So, I'm going to turn around and we're going to just keep our knees light and bent, we are going to keep our weight over our balls of our feet. You just want to make sure that they're focusing on moving the ankle up and down. Make sure they're not using the whole leg as you are doing the ball taps. Again you want to remember to point out to your beginning tapper, that we have three parts of our tap shoe. We got our heel, we got our ball and we have our top of our toe. Okay, we're going to use the ball right now. So, keeping our knees bent, you're just going to do a straight forward, keeping your ankle parallel, one, two, three, four, side, six, seven, eight, front, two, three, four, five, six, seven, together. One, two, three, four, just the ankle is moving, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Then you can get faster as well and tap them, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. One, two, three, four. As well to get it flappy and really warmed up, you're going to let it relax and go as fast as you can. Again, those were ball tap for your warm up for your tap."