Give me your fun and funny tap dances!

November 2, 2017 12:38 AM

We are a dozen women of mixed beginner/intermediate skill in a weekly tap dance class. We want to develop a fun routine to do in the spring show, and we need inspiration! Video searches come up short. Help us make people laugh.

We range in age from 35-75 in all shapes. We don’t have any uber-talented actors or dancers in the group, so no spotlights on any individuals—unless it’s for pure silliness. We should be able to do a solid intermediate routine, not too fast-paced, by spring. The show is a couple of hours featuring all classes at a dance school. Ours is the only adult class. The routine should be the length of your average song.

What I’ve found on YouTube thus far is either really dumb, way too long, too dependent on serious acting talent in order to be funny, or too advanced. Please point me to fun, entertaining silliness in tap shoes that can both show off intermediate talent and elicit laughs. Or just articulate your fabulous idea!

We each can spend up to $50 on costume items or props. We have some costume/performance items at our disposal. Brainstorming has us bringing up ideas that involve tutus, walkers, drumsticks, medical garb (scrubs, white coats), pirates. Open to everything...go!

posted by AnOrigamiLife to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (2 answers total)

All of my examples are well beyond intermediate, but I just wanted to share some of my favorite tap dances from a pure entertainment standpoint. I love all of these for their joyful (and often silly) performances: Cups, Gene Kelly in Summer Stock with his newspaper, and Moses Supposes. I could post tap dance links all day, but I'm trying to stick to ones with pure crowd-pleasing ability instead of just technical prowess (though these have that too). I'm also assuming (wrongly?) that your crew has no desire to do leap-splits on stairs like the Nicholas Brothers. :) While I don't think any here are necessarily a good fit for recreating choreography (maybe some from the Cups routine?), I hope they inspire some ideas for staging and feel. FWIW, I'm a tap teacher too... and I think fun, intermediate-level stuff is hard to come by online. Most of what you find on YouTube is either way too basic or far too advanced. While they have tons of stuff behind subscription paywalls, I'd also recommend a couple of fantastic facebook feeds that regularly offer fun ideas for choreography and technique that I use a lot for my own classes. If you haven't found them yet, be sure to check out Operation Tap and tap dance tutorials-bringing tap to the people (Kaelyn Gray). And, if nothing else, perform the shim sham!
posted by hessie at 9:32 AM on November 2, 2017

Back in the dark ages when I studied tap, my instructor choreographed some pretty funny sequences doing increasingly-complicated (and increasingly fast) versions of Falling Off A Log.
posted by workerant at 12:48 PM on November 2, 2017