Campus & Community

Life stories with a beat you can dance to

Photo by Kevin Grady/Harvard Radcliffe Institute

Anna Lamb

Harvard Staff Writer

December 10, 2024

5 min read

Renowned actress and tap dancer Ayodele Casel premieres her autobiographical musical at A.R.T.

For Ayodele Casel, tap dancing is like a second language — or third, for the woman who grew up both in the Bronx and Puerto Rico.

“It is a very improvisational form that is informed by your lived experience … where you grew up, the music you grew up listening to, the music that you respond to, the languages that you speak,” said Casel, 49, a renowned actress and dancer as well as a former Radcliffe fellow. “It’s power to communicate across like barriers of other languages or cultures.”

Casel’s new production, “Diary of a Tap Dancer,” will have its premiere run Dec. 12-Jan. 4 at the American Repertory Theater. The play weaves together Casel’s unique brand of rhythmic tap with song and a narrative that traces her career as well as those of often forgotten female dancers throughout history.

Casel recalls the first time she saw a tap performance. One of her high school teachers showed her video of a performance by Hollywood dancing legend Ginger Rogers alongside her equally famed partner Fred Astaire.

“I just remember tunnel vision, like all of a sudden everything went away. And I was just looking at them float through the screen,” she said. “I thought, ‘Man, that is so cool!’”

Casel was hooked. She began immersing herself in classic movies that featured the form.

But it wasn’t until she was at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts that she actually tried it. In her sophomore year, she began studying tap under veteran dancer Charles Goddertz. She also befriended Baakari Wilder, a hoofer who would become famous for his starring role in the Tony-nominated musical “Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk.”

As she watched hoofers like Wilder, she found herself increasingly drawn to it. Hoofing is a style of tap developed in African American communities that uses makes greater use of stomps and stamps to create unique and more expressive percussive rhythms.

Casel says she was so taken with hoofing that she took the advice of other dancers and went to a construction site to get a piece of discarded plywood to use as a dancing surface so she could hear her rhythms more distinctly. (Cassel still recalls the hassle of getting her board on the subway to take it home.)

The style still deeply influences Casel, who won the Hoofer Award from the American Tap Dance Foundation in 2017.

In 2019, Casel brought her talents to Cambridge for the first time, becoming the 2019–2020 Frances B. Cashin Fellow at Radcliffe. At Harvard, Casel worked to put together an earlier version of “Diary” — one that was a one-woman history of female tappers.

“The project I submitted was this idea of creating a theatrical work that centered the lives of the Black women tap dancers from the ’30s to the ’50s, whose stories aren’t widely known, and whose stories were almost really completely lost to history,” she said.

“I just felt like as a woman of color in these tap shoes, that it was my responsibility to bring them with me so that as folks get to learn about me, they also inevitably learn about them,” she added.

“I just felt like as a woman of color in these tap shoes, that it was my responsibility to bring them with me so that as folks get to learn about me, they also inevitably learn about them.” Ayodele Casel

Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, echoed the importance of uncovering the legacies of those history has forgotten.

“It was here at Radcliffe that an early version debuted in February 2020,” she said. “More than just a theatrical work, ‘Diary’ contributes to a more complete history of a remarkable American art form by centering the lives of unnamed women within a broader context. I am eager to join so many others in the audience at the A.R.T. to celebrate this history and Ayodele’s considerable talent.”

After seeing Casel’s Radcliffe presentation, A.R.T. Director of Artistic Programs Ryan McKittrick asked her to develop the project for their stage. Since then, it has come to include an ensemble cast of actors and dancers, directed by longtime Casel collaborator Torya Beard.

And although Beard herself has a history as a dancer and choreographer, she wants to be clear that the show’s story about the lives of Casel and the other women tappers lies at the heart of the project.

“‘Diary’ is really rooted in personal narrative, and there is embodied storytelling. [But] when we’re talking about like an Ayodele Casel project, I don’t think it exists without music, and perhaps, at least right now, it doesn’t exist without tap dancing, but this is not a dance concert.”

Find tickets and more information on “Diary of a Tap Dancer” online here.