On the Georgia side of Lookout Mountain, population 1,247, Marcella Owens unpacked a stack of plywood boards in the fellowship hall of Lookout Mountain Presbyterian Church on a Saturday morning in January 2016. She had trained at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts in Chicago, burned out on city life, and moved home with $400 in savings and an idea that the mountain kids she grew up among might take to tap dance. Six students showed up. She charged $10 each—barely enough to cover the temporary floor she laid herself.
Eight years later, those plywood boards have been replaced by sprung maple at the Mountain Rhythm Dance Academy, the 2,400-square-foot studio Owens opened on Lula Lake Road in 2019. Her intermediate teen ensemble, the Lookout Mountain Tap Collective, took first place in the youth division at the 2023 Chicago Human Rhythm Project's Rhythm World competition, beating groups from New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto. Since that win, Collective members have performed at the Joyce Theater in New York, collaborated with choreographer Michelle Dorrance on a works-in-progress showing, and will spend three weeks this summer at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts.
"The judges kept asking, 'Where is Lookout Mountain?'" said Owens, 38, sitting in her studio's waiting room on a February afternoon while a beginner class thumped through the wall behind her. "I think they expected us to say we were from Atlanta. When we said Georgia, right on the Tennessee border, there was this pause. Then they started paying attention."
From One Class to a Regional Hub
Owens's first students were mostly homeschool families and one retired BellSouth technician named Harold Vance, now 71, who had seen 42nd Street on a Chattanooga bus tour in 1987 and never forgot it. Vance still takes class twice weekly and performed in the Collective's winning Rhythm World piece, a five-minute routine set to field recordings of Appalachian folk songs reimagined with body percussion.
The studio now enrolls 140 students across age groups, with another 40 on a waitlist. About a third commute from Chattanooga or northern Alabama. Owens has hired three additional instructors, including Dorian Bell, a Juilliard-trained tapper who relocated from Brooklyn in 2022, and Lookout Mountain native Patrice Coker, 26, a former Collective member who spent four years with the Chicago-based ensemble M.A.D.D. Rhythms before returning home.
"There's no pretending here," Bell said. "The closest major airport is an hour away. The closest full-time professional tap company is probably in Chicago or D.C. So if you're serious, you're serious. The distractions are goats and hiking trails."
The growth has not been without friction. Some longtime residents grumble about traffic on narrow mountain roads and the noise from outdoor rehearsals Owens occasionally holds at Covenant College's quad. The Walker County Planning Commission rejected her first application for studio expansion in 2021, citing inadequate parking, before approving a revised plan the following year.
A Measurable Economic Footprint
The tap scene's economic impact, once anecdotal, now shows up in local ledgers. The Lookout Mountain Chamber of Commerce estimates that dance tourism generated roughly $890,000 in direct spending in 2023, up from approximately $210,000 in 2019. The annual Lula Lake Tap Festival, launched in 2021 and named for a nearby waterfall preserve, drew 2,400 attendees last September, filling the mountain's 34 available short-term rental units and spilling overflow into Chattanooga hotels.
"We've started getting calls specifically from people who say, 'We're coming for the tap festival,' or 'We want a place near the dance studio,'" said Clara Hendricks, a Realtor with Keller Williams Realty in Chickamauga, Georgia, who has sold 12 properties to relocating dance families since 2021. According to Walker County assessor records, median home sale prices within a five-mile radius of the studio rose 34 percent between 2019 and 2023, compared with a 22 percent increase countywide.
The town itself has begun investing in the identity. In 2022, Walker County allocated $175,000 in American Rescue Plan funds to restore the historic Lookout Mountain Fairyland Club's outdoor amphitheater, with the explicit goal of hosting tap performances. The first full season is scheduled for June through September 2024. Owens is consulting on a separate, privately funded proposal for a 15,000-square-foot "tap center" near the Georgia Welcome Center, though fundraising remains $2.1 million short of its $4 million goal.
Who Gets to Dance?
The Appalachian Folk Dance Project, a nonprofit Owens founded in 2020, now provides full scholarships for 28 students from Walker, Catoosa, and Dade counties. The
