Last week saw my final rhythm tap class before breaking for the summer holidays…but not before I attended two great summer workshops:

The Shim Sham 

On Wednesday evening our rhythm tap teacher ran her one hour ‘Tap Shim Sham‘ summer workshop online. I was really looking forward to this because I didn’t get to take part last year due to other commitments (a friend’s BBQ!) and I’ve never quite picked up the razzmatazz ending of this famous tap dance standard. I was able to run an extra long cable from the broadband router in the house, down to my laptop in the garage so that I wouldn’t have to rely on intermittent Wi-Fi. Problem solved and no interruptions – apart from my cat poking her arm through the window and meowing at me through most of it! Even though I know the steps of the Shim Sham and have taken part in a few of these dances at various festivals (and even recorded myself for a lockdown video collab in May), it was just so helpful to go through it slowly, sort out my Tack Annies and just clean up the steps a bit, before speeding up. Fun!

Improvisation & Choreography

At 7pm on Thursday our teacher ran her two hour ‘Tap Improvisation & Choreography’ workshop on Microsoft Teams. As I’ve mentioned previously, public improvisation can be quite nerve-wracking, but with it being online this year, I emailed our teacher a few weeks earlier to ask how it would work this time. She said the session would focus more on using improvisation to create choreography, as opposed to just working on improv for improv’s sake. (When we have this workshop in person we usually work in a big circle doing call-and-response, exercises where we copy and then add our own ending, and nearer the end of the session we improvise in the middle of the circle, one at a time, before tagging someone else to take over – eek!)

For our online workshop there were only 5 of us, and we began by sitting on the floor to do some call-and-response clapping, including one exercise where if a certain rhythm was given, you were not supposed to clap (a bit like Simon Says)! We then moved onto doing the same exercises, but using our feet. We then moved onto using only 2 or 3 types of tap step to dance to a piece of music (e.g. only shuffles, flaps and stomps). We were then asked to choose a nursery rhyme, and come up with some choreography using those rhythms, being sure to sing while you did it. I chose Humpty Dumpty:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

OR

1-a-2-a-3-&-a-4

1-a-2-a-3-&-a-4

1-&-a-2-&-a-3-&-a-4

1-&-a-2-&-a-3-&-a-4

Then we had to demonstrate it to the rest of the class who had to guess which nursery rhyme it was – which they did quite quickly! I found it a really useful exercise with which to come up with some basic choreography, to which you can add more challenge by throwing in, say, a change of direction, or by crossing your feet. It’s definitely worth trying out at home – go on, do it!

Finally our teacher got us to pick a song and have a go at improvising in our very own Microsoft Teams breakout room, where she was able to ‘pop in’ and give each of us some feedback. After swiping frantically through my phone and pausing over Prince and Incognito a few times, I chose Duffy’s Rain on Your Parade, which worked very well for not being complicated. We had the task of focusing on different aspects of the song, such as the downbeat, the upbeat or the melody. I started off fixated on paddles and eventually got more creative, but then we ran out of time, so we didn’t get to demonstrate what we’d come up with – not that I minded on that occasion! Our teacher has asked us to send her a video of us jamming to our chosen song if we wish to…I’m thinking about it!

I have to say I was pretty done after two workshops, plus my usual rhythm tap class and Tap & Tea session all in the space of 2 days, but I got so much out of each of them, especially the improvisation & choreography class, and it really did take the stigma and fear out of having a go.