Taipei 101

In an attempt to make my life include something other than studying, I have joined National Taiwan University’s Tap Club. Yes.. that’s right, Tap dance. You might ask, “there are tap dancers in Taiwan?” While there may not be many, I can say with certainty that there is one speedy tap instructor with Asian mullet-dreadlocks that proves Taiwanese tap does exist. Believe it or not, he is in the more Afro-American school of tap, instead of my Broadway style training.

Upon my arrival to the club’s call out meeting, I was instantly introduced to about 30 people, one by one. They were thrilled, to say the least, about meeting an American tap dancer with 11 years of experience. These students (sophmore undergrads through grad students) have no more than 2 years of tap experience. What a shame I failed to meet their expectations… boy did they give me a run for my money! I must be really out of practice or something, because they are FAST learners!

The tap instructor doesn’t even use a lot of dance terminology to teach- more of the ‘repeat after me’ approach where he just kind of beat boxes the rhythm instead of reciting the steps. Needless to say, this is not how I learned to dance. Not to mention the issue that there are 30 people in the class all tapping at different times, or that he doesn’t ever explain the order of steps in English, so sometimes I’ll think I’m caught up but when everyone starts dancing, I’m totally off. Not sure how much more memorization my brain can handle in one day.

Here’s the ‘combination’ (more like a whole dance) that we learned last class.. and that most people had down pretty well. In this video Taipei Tap the teacher is dancing nice and slow so we could all record him and use it to practice, but trust me, the full speed version is insane!