Tap as Home, Tap as Source

In my new work, Worship/Home, we are exploring ideas about home, creating home, finding home, or being without a home. As I was thinking about my own relationship to home and its meaning for me I began thinking about how dance is a type of home for me - a place I feel comfortable, accepted, at ease. This lead me think of how when I was younger my mother would say she most enjoyed watching me dance when I was tap dancing because she thought I was most myself when tapping - or, most at home. I began to wonder how to include some tap into this new piece. I decided to us some classic tap steps (buck time step and others) as a base for developing some of the movement by recording when there was a shift of weight from one foot to another, or when there was a hop. From these weight shifts we ended up with specific rhythms (1&2, 3&4, 5&6&7&8, or &2, &4, &6 7&8, etc..). Each dancer used these rhythms to create movement phrases, mostly for the legs, that moved through space. At the end of this process we ended up with movement phrases where the movements are different, but the timing of the shifts of weight are in unison. It creates an interesting tension between being in and not being in unison. We then took these phrases and layered them, combined them, and juxtaposed them to create sections of the new work. The below video is a rough draft of one such section. In performance we will not be dancing to a metronome, but were using one to keep time in rehearsal. Find out more about the performance here.