Ayodele Casel’s Diary of a Tap Dancer Returns With a New Format and New Perspectives
Tap artist Ayodele Casel has been inviting audiences to read her diary for almost two decades. This winter, she’s sharing a new entry at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The premiere of Diary of a Tap Dancer, which runs from December 12 through January 4, is the latest iteration of a project Casel has performed since debuting a piece with the same title at the E-Moves festival in New York City in 2005.
“I was dissatisfied with the way I felt audiences were leaving tap dance performances,” she recalls. “They were talking about how impressive tap was, and nothing else. I wanted them to have another way into our art form, and the best way to do that was to reveal more of our humanity.”
In 2019, Casel delivered a public lecture about the history of tap and its intersection with her lived experience. In 2020, New York City Center commissioned her to create a series of video diaries that featured fellow hoofers singing, dancing, and discussing their individual dance journeys.
For this new offering, Casel will be back onstage, and she won’t be alone. The show features seven additional female and nonbinary dancer-actors and three musicians (“And a cacophony of sound!” says Casel gleefully). She proudly points out that the cast is both multicultural and multigenerational.
“It’s important to share the landscape of who we are now,” she says. “It’s nice to look around onstage and say, ‘I’ve known you since you were 15,’ or ‘I’ve worked with you for the last six years.’ That’s a real reflection of the tap dance life.”
The production explores themes Casel has mined before, such as culture, identity, expression, and language, but in a new format: Diary of a Tap Dancer is a play that incorporates music and dance.
“When you think about a diary, it tracks our evolution,” says the show’s director and Casel’s wife, Torya Beard, who has collaborated on full-length productions with her since 2017. “As our collaborations evolved, and as Ayo has evolved, it felt right to bring back the name ‘Diary.’ ”
While the title promises a peek at Casel’s inner monologue, don’t think the show is all about her. During her 2019–20 fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, she investigated the social context around the lives of women tap dancers from the 1930s through the 1950s, whose legacies she has long celebrated and amplified. Throughout her research, Casel imagined what the lives and dreams of those women would have been like. That personal and historical perspective influenced her creative process.
“One of the missions of my life and career is illuminating stories of tap dance artists,” she says. “This show is a culmination of my research and of the thoughts I’ve had throughout my career as a female tap dance artist of color.”
Since the project’s first solo venture, Casel’s career has included a Doris Duke Artist Award, a Broadway choreography gig, and an appearance on a USPS Forever Stamp. Preparing this new show has been an introspective experience on her own legacy.
“In searching for other people’s history, you realize you must tend to your own, as well,” she says. “Tap dancers deal with time in a very specific way artistically. This show is about how we deal with it on a larger continuum.”
Beard agrees that the production is Casel’s most ambitious to date in the way it blends the hoofer’s personal narratives with the histories of the female dancers she honors. “It encompasses everything,” she says.
“I’m nothing if not thorough,” adds Casel with a laugh.
