Latest news with #tapdance
BBC News
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Barnsley care home dance class tapping into memories
A seated tap dance class introduced at a care home has helped to improve wellbeing for residents, staff said. Deangate Care Home in Barnsley has been holding monthly sessions from 21-year-old dance teacher Alicia Bembridge, with the class inspired by an ex-professional performer and current resident. The sessions, supported by the Donna Pressley Dance Academy and Grassroots Sports Academy Yorkshire, focus on simplified footwork and arm Bembridge said: "The elderly quite often get pushed aside, so it's great that they're getting the opportunity to learn something new - because it's not too late. "I look forward to this session every single time it happens, it gives me a lot of happiness."Rachael Addy, Deangate events coordinator, said staff introduced tap dancing to the care home after being joined by 79-year-old resident Margaret Cooper, who has early-onset dementia, was a professional dancer who started performing with Sunderland's Rosslyn Babes from the age of 10. "She would come to us and she was a little bit down - I think she was missing home," Ms Addy said."At that point it's a case of grabbing on to something that they enjoy or something that makes them happy."She continued: "It is quite difficult to tap in and get full engagement, but as long as we've got a little bit of a flicker and she's enjoying it, that's all that matters to us."Ms Cooper said she had "always loved dancing"."I used to be in pantomimes and I used to do acrobatics," she said. "I'm still pretty supple for my age - I can still touch my toes." Ms Cooper had become "much more sociable and a lot happier when she gets up in the morning" since dancing again, Ms Addy dance to music by artists including Queen and Elvis, the care home said, with the songs said to be key to unlocking memories. "It's important to grab the right era and work around what it triggers," Ms Addy said."If we can give them the best possible life and everyone can see how amazing they are, it leaves both them and their families with the best memories." Listen to highlights from South Yorkshire on BBC Sounds or catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
Vogue
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Vogue
‘I'm Always Fighting Myself to Be Better, Better, Better': Boop! Star Jasmine Amy Rogers Looks Ahead to the Tonys
After a two-year stint at the Manhattan College of Music, she dropped out and quickly landed a role in a new musical, Becoming Nancy, directed by Jerry Mitchell that premiered in Atlanta in 2019. Following a tour as Gretchen Wieners in Mean Girls, she was brought in by Mitchell to audition for Betty in the Chicago try-out of Boop! in 2023. (She had played a different, supporting character in an earlier workshop of the show.) She was not prepared for the tap-heavy choreography involved in that first audition. 'It was horrifying!' A competitive dancer as a child, she stopped training when she moved to Texas at 11, but figured enough of the skill would come back for her to wing it; she was wrong. 'It was soul-crushing, I went home and sobbed,' she recalls, the cringe still visible in her eyes. She did not get the part then. Later that spring, she happened to be in a rehearsal space in Manhattan, helping a friend with another show, when she heard the Boop! music wafting down the hallway. Rogers did some digging and discovered the production still had not cast Betty. She describes pacing around midtown that day, contemplating what she should do before finally calling her agent. 'I was like, 'I don't know what we need to do, but I need to get back in there.' I'd never done anything like that before.' It worked, and for two weeks she crammed in as many tap classes at Broadway Dance Center as she could before her second chance at the role. The rest is history, and the performance she delivers is a brilliant hat trick: a disarmingly human portrayal of a famously one-dimensional character. 'The tricky part about her,' Rogers says of Betty, 'is combining the larger-than-life energy of a cartoon with a real person.' Her standout 11 o'clock number, 'Something to Shout About,' a towering David Foster Ballad, brings down the house. Rogers describes herself as bubbly and larger-than-life, which made building Betty a natural process. 'There is a lot of her that also belongs to Jasmine.' And she relished recreating Betty's signature hour-glass look with costume designer Gregg Barnes, who is also up for a Tony. 'I'm in a corset the whole show; it's great and terrible at the same time. But the shape it creates is so beautiful, I wouldn't feel like her without it.' For Betty's iconic bob and curls, Rogers and hair stylist Sabana Majeed looked to Dorothy Dandridge and other old Hollywood references to make it recognizable but elevated.
New York Times
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Ayodele Casel Links Tap to Her Hip-Hop Beginnings
Ayodele Casel knows how to pull viewers toward her when she's onstage. She's a magnet. 'There she is,' someone behind me whispered in excited awe as Casel casually stepped onto the stage of the Joyce Theater, dropping a backpack on the floor. Applause, the kind that often greets musicians, followed, which was correct: Casel makes music with her feet. 'What's up, y'all?' she said, flashing an irrepressible smile. With a feathery touch, Casel waved her hips and then caressed the floor with her feet as though strumming it. She is always pleasing to the ear and to the eye, but in 'Ayodele Casel: The Remix,' her latest evening of tap at the Joyce — a most impressive mood lifter — she has a new level of ease. She turns 50 next week, as she mentioned more than once, but she has never been more in her body than now. For all of its jubilance, 'The Remix' is a serious show, one that celebrates the intimacy of friendship and specifically artist friendships — here, among dancers and musicians. But it unspools with a casualness, too, mirroring Casel's mix of easygoing and grand. In 'The Remix,' directed and cocreated by Torya Beard, Casel shows that she can always be relied on to balance a light touch with heartfelt urgency. In this swift 70 minutes featuring her dances and those of others, she pays homage to a slice of time when she was finding her way. 'The Remix' is a trip back to the music, dance and soul of the 1990s, when Casel fell in love with tap and when it had a resurgence. During her early days, she practiced. And in those sessions, she was drawn to the music of the day, the music that she loved — the Fugees, Craig Mack, Nas. She experimented with finding, through tap, the groove and the swing in hip-hop. 'I wrote a poem, like the '90s,' Casel said in a nod to the poetry slams of the era while opening a notebook at the start of 'Q-Tap' (2025), a vivid introduction to her theme: 'I've got my backpack and everything.' The setting is laid-back, with the stage reimagined as something between a living room and a lounge, neither precious nor sleek. There are chairs and a sofa scattered along its sides; a television set has the title of the show drawn on its screen. There's even a piece, one of 13 numbers in the show, that leans into relaxation: Ryan K. Johnson's 'Sofa Vibes.' As she described her early days — rollerblading to Fazil's, the Times Square studio that shuttered in 2008 — she sang a few bars from Ahmad's 'Back in the Day,' which led into the story of how she found her path to dance, to her dance expression. 'Heavy D, Mary J., wanting to be a part of what I was hearing on the radio,' she said, 'but in my way.' As a 'Black and Puerto Rican kid raised on rhythm and rhyme,' she said, her dancing grew with her love of hip-hop, not despite it: 'It's a groove, it's a flow, sophisticated and bold.' She slipped in a lyric by the Notorious B.I.G.: 'If you don't know, now you know.' Throughout 'The Remix,' more of a living entity than a backward-looking retrospective, dancers mix and mingle with a poet, a freestyle artist and a pair of musicians along with Liberty Styles, a D.J. and dancer. Jared Alexander created the hip-hop-inflected score. As dancers cross the stage gliding in and out of formations, music references appear and disappear, giving the work the feel of a before times free-form radio station. As one piece slides into the next, bite-size dances build in complexity and elegance — Ginger Rogers was an early love, and that influence is present, too — to show Casel's lineage. For 'Push/Pull,' with choreography by Casel, John Manzari sings Cole Porter's 'Begin the Beguine' while Alexander, Naomi Funaki and Funmi Sofola cross the stage in airy unison. In 'Quicksand,' Quynn L. Johnson, its choreographer, starts by brushing her shoes in trails of sand. 'Little Things,' by Funaki and Caleb Teicher, is gentle and commanding, as Casel and Funaki dance with such lightness that it makes the floor seem like a cloud. In 'Unmuted,' Kate Louissaint delivers a rousing rendition of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,' considered the Black national anthem, as dancers build a percussive wall that starts quietly but grows to match her towering voice. It was a political statement, but a subtle one: 'If you don't know, now you know.' Casel's 'Audrey,' a 20-year-old work set to Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, is understated and chic — an ode to Audrey Hepburn's grace, with punctuated finger snaps and the smooth swirl of a wrist. This led to a stirring finale, 'Speak Your Name,' which showed off the entire cast, buoyed by the ever-smiling Casel, into a vessel of swinging, swaying bodies. This remix is more than a look at the past, it's a promise of a future.
