History of Tap Dancing

Series Summary

The rhythmic foot stomping we call tap dancing emerged in the 1830’s 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. A recent resurgence of tap enthusiasm came in the 90’s with the infusion of new dancers, such as Savion Glover, who began to incorporate a more personal style into their performances, and essentially made tap dancing “cool” again.

In this free video clip series our expert, Sarah McLellan, walks you through the basic steps of advanced tap dancing. Each step is explained from beginning to end in detail so you'll never feel lost or left behind. Lessons include trebles, pull backs, wings, turns, combination shuffle moves, and much more. So watch these free dance videos and take your dancing to the next level!

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Sarah McLellan in New York City. We are at June Parody's Dance Studio and on behalf of Expert Village; today I'm going to teach some advanced tap moves. Follow me. So today, I'm talking about advanced tap dancing. If you are an advanced tapper, you've probably already found out about the history of tap dancing. It's probably something you're familiar with. But if you're tuning into this video and you don't know already, tap dancing as we know it in the United States today, is a very popular form of dance. It's found on Broadway, it's found in films, animated films today in 2007, 2008. But back in the day, with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, it was very popular in the kind of MGM movie musicals. But where it actually came from, is kind of, it's derived from the dance forms of Northern England, the jigs, the kind of club dancing. They used to put copper pennies on the top of their shoes to kind of make sounds and that's kind of where today?s world, when we put the metal tap plates on our shoes, that's kind of where that came from. It's also derived from Irish jigs and even from African kind of stamping and stomping tribal dances. So what happens today in tap dancing is definitely based from all different kinds of roots."