Age requirements 8.0 and up
Length 1 hour
At Charlotte Klein Dance Centers, tap class helps our students develop musicality and rhythm in their dancing. Tap dance was developed in the United States from a fusion of several ethnic percussive dance styles, including African tribal dances and Scottish, English and Irish jigs and clog dances. This style is most notable for the sounds made by the tap shoes worn by the dancer, which have metal taps fitted to the heel and toes of the shoe sole. Dancers use their feet to make percussive sound and rhythm as they move to the music, and will often make a secondary rhythm to the music as they accent a normally weak beat or rest on a typically accented beat.
Our tap program reinforces this percussive dance style and how to make rhythmical sounds with the feet in dance. In this class, our dancers learn the structure of tap including the mathematics, tempo and patterns specific to tap style. This includes such steps as the Shuffle, Shuffle Ball Change, Running Flap and Pullback. Tap is a dynamic style of dance. As movements are combined, new steps emerge with complex rhythms. Learning tap helps our students with their musicality which they can carry over to other dance styles.