Tap Dance | Artist Faculty
August 3 – August 10
Heather Cornell is literally and metaphorically a mover and a shaker in the world of dance. An ensemble founder and sought-after solo artist, she is a choreographer, director, and producer. She has learned from and performed with giants of the tap dance genre. In a career that has spanned four decades, Heather has left an indelible mark on dance stages all over the world. She is an oral history fellow at the New York City Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and is currently a full time faculty member at Hope College. The Heather Cornell Legacy Project, now in its second year, is an initiative to pass to the next generations her archives, lineage, and concepts through working to create an active shift of understanding of the artform in today’s practitioners and current pedagogy.
Arriving in New York in the early 1980s as a modern dancer from Ontario, Canada, Heather found tap dance quite quickly. She worked with and was mentored by tap artists such as Buster Brown, Cookie Cook, Chuck Green, Eddie Brown, Steve Condos, and Harriet “Quicksand” Brown, and was the only tap dancer mentored by iconic jazz bassist, Ray Brown. She toured internationally with Jazz Tap Ensemble and worked in NYC with Gail Conrad, Anita Feldman, Andrea Levine, and as clown partner to Noel Parenti. Eventually, Heather co-founded Manhattan Tap, a leading American tap and music ensemble which would go on to garner international acclaim. For close to 20 years, Heather served as the group’s choreographer, director, and soloist, collaborating on a huge body of work with her main collaborator, Keith Saunders. In 2004, she launched a successful solo career, creating a number of projects internationally, including Finding Synesthesia in collaboration with Andy Milne and commissioned by the London Jazz Festival, CanTap, an all Canadian music dance ensemble, Taps and Traps in collaboration with Jesse Stewart, Conversations, recreated in five countries with local artists, and her music ensemble, Making Music Dance, international touring and CD release in 2015.
Heather has held workshops for 35 years where she has trained free-thinking improvisational music and dance artists focused on the magic of the community. She was a co-creator, with Thanos Daskalopolous and Max Pollak, of Tap Motif in Lefkada, Greece, an eight year music and dance summit focused on creating balanced multi-disciplinary pedagogy through the freedom of improvisation.
Heather calls herself a physical percussionist—someone whose rhythmic, precise foot movement adds to or creates the musicality of a piece—and she dances using different textures of sound, including wood, leather, and sand. And always, she dances only to live music, never music that is “canned.” For more info, check out her website: www.manhattantap.org.
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