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Dancer Jackie Oliver said tap dancers not only dance to the rhythm of music, but also to the rhythms of life.
“Rhythm is something that you see through your whole life — your heartbeat, the blood pumping through your body, that’s rhythm,” said Oliver, artistic director of New Mexico’s National Dance Institute. “There’s music in everything, and when you’re able to create rhythm and music through your body, that’s just something that you can’t top.”
Oliver directs and coordinates this year’s 14th annual New Mexico Tap Jam, sponsored by the National Dance Institute of New Mexico. The event features teen and adult tap classes for beginning and advanced dancers, leading into a one-night performance from local tap performers. Featured dancers include Jason Samuels Smith, whose dance company recently appeared on the television show “So You Think You Can Dance?,” and Bill Evans, the event’s creator.
Oliver said she looks forward to working with Evans, the New York performer who once taught and mentored her in tap dance.
“I’m excited to share the stage with him again; he was such a big deal when I was a kid, and he still is,” she said. “I enjoy being on stage myself, but more than that, I enjoy seeing kids feel the way that I do when I’m performing. There’s nothing better than having an audience applaud for you when you’re on stage, there’s no better feeling.”
Evans said he created the New Mexico Tap Jam in 1999 while he was the head of UNM’s theater and dance department to try to spread word of the state’s growing attraction to tap dance. Evans directed the annual tap-dance celebration until 2004, when he left to direct a studio of his own and perform in New York. Evans said he is excited to return to the New Mexico event and happy that the state’s NDI program is thriving, with 1,800 listed students in Albuquerque.
“When people go to NDI, it’s not about winning or losing; it’s about developing their own personal creativity, and so their physical self, cognitive and emotional self are all fully invested,” Evans said. “Children really excel and understand their own personal distinctness with dance.”
Evans’ interest in tap dance began when he was a child, after watching a film that starred a tap-dancing actor.
“I was so young I wasn’t thinking about it; I just sat, and I liked it,” he said. “I guess you could say it was the first time I had seen anyone dance, and I guess without knowing or putting words to it, I knew dancing was my calling; it just moved me.”
Evans assembled local dance troupes while in New Mexico, like the Albuquerque Youth Tap Troupe and the New Mexico Dance Ensemble, to help tap artists develop and create new work for events like New Mexico’s Tap Jam. Local dancer Jessie Martinez got his start in Santa Fe’s NDI program before joining the New Mexico Dance Ensemble, and said that events like Tap Jam help attract new people to tap dance.
“I think there are so many organizations trying to bring dance back into people’s lives,” Martinez said. “It’s easier now to express everyone’s involvement with dance. Kids are realizing that there are now different ways to express themselves, and NDI is trying to have a place for those kids.”
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Martinez will perform at this year’s event alongside numerous other local dance companies. He said that each company brings its own take on tap dance, and that he is excited to show what he’s learned to the local tap community.
“Any new performance is just another part of life that keeps encouraging dancers to keep going and going,” he said. “Tap dance is all about history, passing things on and learning what they’ve done before passing it along eventually.”
NM Tap Jam
Saturday, June 16th
at 7:30 p.m.
$10 Students and Seniors
$15 Adults
Highland Theater
Lessons
June 14-17
More information at
ndi-nm.org/news_and_press/detail/82
