Tap class

I went to Intermediate Tap with Jared Grimes, 7.30-9pm. Bloooody nora!

It was vair vair vair challenging. On the walk there my knee went as well which was not too nice, it was doing lots of horrible painful twisty things. It did wear off though through the class so not too bad.

Class was inteeense. As we've discussed many times, the difference between American and English tap is mad. There are things that are just literally not in our tap vocabulary.

Example: (best to try this if you're a tapper...but hey, even if you're not, go nuts!)

Shuffle warm up exercise. Standard shuffles, only in America they tend to do them sort of more on the spot...like, really teeny so there's very little back-and-forth action and therefore little room to make 2 sounds which makes them harder. So -
Right foot. Straight shuffle x4, shuffle diagonally forwards x4, shuffle diagonally backwards x4, now cross your right foot behind your left foot, keeping them both parallel and shuffle x4. Sounds simple. Now make them 3-beat shuffles. Now do it all at an insane speed and on the left. So, the first 3 rounds of shuffles are fine but the ones at the back with the foot crossed behind are frickin hard to get a good sound! Because there's even less room to move your shuffling foot. You have to literally put your right leg behind your left leg, but keep both feet totally straight, no turning out. So we did that for ages, and loads of other exercises going through what I would call ripples, pull backs, wings, paddles, toe taps, ball and heel beats...but lord knows what they're called here. OH YEAH and we were doing wing sequences with ball and heel beats in between on different rhythms, Jared improvised and we copied straight away, and he started doing these kind of half wing things...your feet nearly leave the floor but don't quite, and then some where one foot does leave the floor completely but the other doesn't. And then he stopped and was like 'yeah so I just made them up, let's call them scuffles.' Hang on but scuffles are something else completely! AAAIII. Pheeeew it was a hard class for me to follow..I got by but the actual quality of tap sounds definitely suffered from sheer trying to keep up. Plus he did everything at like triple speed. Had to concentrate sooooo hard.
We just don't learn tap like that at home, I think there's huge merits for both though cos this teaches you hardcore rhythm and English teaches you dance quality and more complex steps - the American style is really improv-based (copyright Em Golborn) and consists largely of basic steps - the aforementioned shuffles, beats, toes, wings, pullbacks and the odd maxi ford. But put together in sequences that focus on making rhythms, really percussive. English style also does rhythms of course, but it concentrates more on how your body is involved with your feet and how the basic steps get put together into bigger more fancy steps, i.e. you learn a maxi ford and then you'll learn the turning variations, different breaks etc and it's actually part of the syllabus, whereas America you don't get taught how to put them together so much as just pick it up as you go along. Essentially English tap has more formality in how we learn it, which means I think my brain is adapted to needed to watch it, break it down then do it rather than just do it!

I think next time I will go down a stage, as there may be more technique-focused classes at a lower level and I think here I need to start from the ground up.

Hmm that was a super long rambling analysis of my hour and a half long tap class.

I hope you all really really enjoyed it! Ahahahahaa hmm. Then I came home and ate a bagel with cheese and tomato and some fruit salad, and am now talking rubbish in a multi-dialect conversation in the 3rd floor living room.

Sunday Monday happy days...Tuesday Wednesday happy days...Thursday FRIDAY happy days Saturday, what a day, groovin' all week with you dadadumdum

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