The Tap Dance Blog

photo credit: greefus groinks

Maintaining multiple tap websites takes a lot of time. Add in tap performances, a part time job, and family responsibilities and very little is left for one of the most important ingredients in tap success…

I think Jay-Z said it best: “Where is the love?”

It’s easy to become so caught up in all of the “work” of being a tap dancer that I fail to express my love for tap by actually doing it.

It’s then that I have to escape the 3 P’s…

Promotion

Often when I perform, I am doing so with an eye toward self-promotion. Whether I am auditioning or just trying to put tap in front of people, promotional performances are a big part of what I do.

Profit:

This is the one everybody loves. I show up, perform, and get paid! It really doesn’t get anymore simple than that. The need to support my family motivates me to seek out gigs and to perform at my very best.

Practice:

Of course, this is when I am either working on my technique or generating choreography. The focus is on becoming a better dancer…

Whenever I lace up my tap shoes, some mixture of these 3 motivators is in play. But I recently rediscovered that tap dancing in the absence of these three things is also important…

After a very productive day I was getting ready to head upstairs and go to bed. But as I sat there, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I needed to do more before concluding my day. It was an odd feeling for me to have as I had completed all of my scheduled tasks for that day.

I decided to post a note to Twitter about it.

When I did, one of my Twitter “followers” said that it sounded to her like I was experiencing anxiety and encouraged me to go tap dance for a while. That’s when I realized how long it had been since I had just tapped for the fun of it.

I immediately went out into my garage, set up a small dance floor (find out about portable tap floors here), put on my iPod, and started a “personal tap jam”; spending time playing different songs and improvising to them freely in the darkness of my garage.

It was amazing!

In the absence of promotion, or profit, or a desire to practice I experienced the joy of the fourth P, the #1 reason I tap dance….

Passion!

Your turn! What happens when you focus on the 4th P?

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