Tap dance has never stood still. From the street corners of 19th-century Five Points to Broadway stages and viral TikTok videos, this uniquely American art form continues to reinvent itself. Today's tap landscape bears little resemblance to the golden age of Hollywood musicals—and that's precisely what makes it thrilling.
For dancers who have mastered the fundamentals, the current evolution of tap offers unprecedented creative territory. New techniques are expanding the sonic palette of the form, while contemporary artists are dissolving the boundaries between tap and other movement disciplines. Whether you're preparing for professional auditions or seeking fresh inspiration for your practice, understanding these developments is essential to staying current in the field.
Redefining Classic Techniques: What's Actually "Advanced" Now
The term "advanced" in tap has shifted dramatically. Where once it meant executing faster versions of standard steps, today's cutting-edge technique requires reimagining how the body generates sound and rhythm.
Heel Work: From Foundation to Virtuosity
Basic heel drops remain entry-level vocabulary, but advanced practitioners have transformed this element into something far more sophisticated. Heel clicks—jumping to strike the heels together mid-air while maintaining rhythmic continuity—demand precise timing and core control. Heel turns require dancers to pivot on one heel while the opposite foot executes complex counter-rhythms, creating polyrhythmic textures that challenge even seasoned professionals.
The true difficulty lies in weight distribution. Unlike toe taps, which allow for quick rebounds, sustained heel work requires committing significant body mass to each strike while preserving the capacity for immediate directional shifts. Dancers like Michelle Dorrance have built entire choreographic sequences around this tension between groundedness and agility.
Brushes: Precision in Motion
Brushes do not, contrary to common misconception, involve sliding the foot across the floor. Rather, they are striking movements executed with the ball, heel, or toe in sweeping arcs that create crisp, accented sounds. The ball brush—striking with the metatarsal area in a forward or sideward motion—serves as the connective tissue between steps, enabling fluid sequences that would sound choppy if articulated through discrete taps alone.
Advanced brush technique incorporates press rolls and flaps at velocities that blur individual sounds into continuous sonic textures. Mastery requires ankle isolation and the ability to modulate force precisely; too much pressure creates drag, too little produces anemic sound.
Pattern Density and Velocity
The misspelled "patters" in earlier drafts points to a larger issue: many dancers conflate speed with complexity. Genuine rhythmic sophistication emerges not from accelerating simple patterns but from layering contrasting meters within the same phrase.
Consider the "Shim Sham Shimmy," tap's universal language. At standard tempo, it functions as a social dance. Accelerated beyond 180 beats per minute with added syncopation and subdivision, it becomes a technical showcase requiring cardiovascular endurance comparable to sprinting while maintaining the ankle control necessary for clear articulation. Contemporary artists like Sarah Reich have pushed this further, incorporating odd time signatures and metric modulation that would have been unthinkable in earlier eras.
Contemporary Styles: Three Paths Forward
African-Infused Tap: Recovering and Extending Roots
The description "African-infused" would have puzzled tap's earliest practitioners, who understood the form as inherently African-derived. Yet contemporary artists are making this connection explicit and exploratory rather than assumed. Jason Samuels Smith's "A.C.G.I." framework—African, Caribbean, Gospel, Irish—acknowledges tap's hybrid genealogy while creating space for deliberate, studied integration of West African dance principles.
This manifests physically in lowered centers of gravity, increased use of torso and hip articulation, and rhythmic approaches that prioritize downbeat emphasis and call-and-response structures over tap's traditional offbeat orientation. Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, whose career bridges Broadway and concert dance, exemplifies how this fusion operates at the highest technical level without sacrificing either tradition's integrity.
The significance extends beyond aesthetics. As tap education has historically emphasized Euro-American lineages, this reclamation addresses representational gaps while expanding movement possibilities for all practitioners.
Contemporary Tap: The Dorrance Effect
If one production signaled tap's arrival in contemporary dance's mainstream, it was Dorrance Dance's "ETM: Double Down" (2016). Michelle Dorrance's company has systematically dismantled assumptions about what tap can do onstage: dancing in silence, incorporating electronic music interfaces, partnering with classically trained modern dancers, and treating the floor as a variable rather than constant.
Contemporary tap differs from jazz tap in its choreographic ambition—full-evening works with narrative or conceptual through-lines—and from Broadway tap in its rejection of presentational, front-facing performance. The body in contemporary tap twists, falls, and contacts the floor in
