‘Happy Feet’ or ‘Broadway,’ heel and toe sounding off

Northwest resident Cathy Newman was standing in line one day waiting to buy coffee at the office cafeteria when a woman behind her wondered aloud: “What’s that sound?”

Ms. Newman was practicing her tap-dancing skills out of habit and the clickety-clack of her shoes gave her away.

“It’s an infectious thing, a happy thing,” Ms. Newman says.

Tap dancing isn’t just for modern masters like Savion Glover of “Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring In ‘Da Funk” fame. Plenty of District dwellers are taking tap classes to step a little livelier.

Budding tappers can find classes at the D.C. Dance Collective, Joy of Motion, the Dance Place and the Knock On Wood Tap Studio in Silver Spring.

Ms. Newman, 56, says she took ballet and tap lessons as a child but “didn’t go near a pair of tap shoes for 40 years or so.”

She took a 12-week beginner class “as a lark” and found she was one of the older students in the session.

“I didn’t care,” she says, describing the lessons as “liberating.”

“I didn’t have any illusions of being Gregory Hines,” she says of the late tap dancing great.

Heidi Schultz, a tap instructor with the District’s Joy of Motion dance studio, says tap breaks down into two camps: rhythm tap, and Broadway or show tap.

Mr. Glover is a proponent of rhythm tap, the kind moviegoers can see now in the popular animated film “Happy Feet.” It’s a complex dance form, which Ms. Schultz describes as more jazz than pop. Earlier practitioners once called this type of tap “hoofing.”

Broadway tap, by comparison, involves more of the body, sometimes including choreographed arm movements. Think of a musical with chorus girls tapping in harmony.

A Broadway tapper might shoot his or her arms outward during a performance like a pair of wings, Ms. Schultz says.

She says tap peaked in popularity during the 1950s but since then has secured a small but steady following stateside that’s impervious to pop cultural whims.

Her tap classes attract students who wouldn’t call themselves great dancers.

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