Related Features
POSTCARDS: Tap City, the NYC Tap Festival, Now in its 22nd Year, Returns LIVE July 4-10th for the First Time since the Pandemic!
MOVING PEOPLE: Tony Waag on Misconceptions About Tap Dance, Underrated and Overrated Instruments, and TAP IT OUT 2021
IMPRESSIONS: The American Tap Dance Foundation's Tap City Awards 2025
By Robert Johnson
View Profile |
More From This Author
Published on September 23, 2025
Bril Barrett (center) & company. Photo: Lincoln Center Library
The American Tap Dance Foundation
Tony Waag, Founding Artistic Director and Producer
Musicians: Jess Jurkovic (piano), Joe Fonda (bass), Lou Grassi (drums)
For years the American Tap Dance Foundation has provided the tap community with a home: a place to gather and celebrate, to meet and renew valuable relationships, to study and perform. Though its studios succumbed to the evil Lockdown of the early ‘20s, the ATDF’s sponsored festivals and award ceremonies continue to bring together a collection of disparate and far-flung artists.
The ATDF’s services are badly needed — just how much became apparent on September 11, when, after a year’s hiatus, this organization presented the Tap City Awards at the Bruno Walter Auditorium of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, at Lincoln Center. The pent-up energy of the crowd was overwhelming; and this standing-room-only event, which was supposed to last an hour and a half, stretched to three hours without intermission. New York has never seen such a love-fest.
Hosted by the unsinkable Tony Waag, the ATDF’s founding artistic director and producer, the ceremony inducted artists into the Tap Dance Hall of Fame, and bestowed two years’ worth of Hoofer Awards and Tap Preservation Awards, amid a wealth of film clips, emotional tributes, and thrilling live performances.
Josh Hilberman presented the evening’s first award to his former teacher, inducting the late Joe Stirling (1913-1991) into the International Tap Dance Hall of Fame with a soft-shoe number learned from the master, and with a traditional “Buck & Wing.” Later, Brenda Bufalino would present a 2024 Hoofer Award to Hilberman himself, crediting this former member of the American Tap Dance Orchestra as a proselytizer who founded the Claquettes Club in Liège, Belgium. Videos recalled Hilberman’s varied appearances at the Tap City! Festival, covering ground in a lissome setting of Tea for Two, or rooted in place for Warrior, a body-percussion piece in which Hilberman wore taps on his chest and groin and scratched music out of a chain-mail shirt.
Illustrating the way that ties of blood and art make tap a family affair, Mercedes Ellington inducted her father, Duke Ellington's, most celebrated collaborator, the late Billy Strayhorn (1915-1967), into the International Tap Dance Hall of Fame. After the audience had swooned to the delicious melancholy of Strayhorn’s Lush Life, his great-niece, Rochelle Claerbaut, stepped up to accept the award. Though he was not a tap dancer, Strayhorn served as long-time president of the Copasetics.
Hilberman and Michelle Dorrance presented a 2024 Tap Preservation Award to loose-limbed Gene Medler, a celebrated teacher in Chapel Hill, NC, whom Dorrance described as, “an incredible legacy-bearer,” known for his passion and his generosity to his students.
Bril Barrett received a 2024 Hoofer Award acknowledging his influence as a community builder in his native Chicago. Barrett, founder of the MADD Rhythms tap academy, recalled how a chance encounter with the performer Mr. Taps, busking on the subway, had changed his life. “I can shuffle a little bit,” Barrett said modestly, “but what I do goes beyond the shuffle.” He explained that the purpose of MADD is “to create a home for young black men and give them a positive way to interact with the world.” Five of Barrett’s disciples, including the electric Sterling Harris, were on hand to demonstrate the power of unity. The ensemble also included Ja’bowen Dixon, Case Prime, and Timothy Wong.
After a 2025 Tap Preservation Award to Kurt Albert and Klaus Bleis, otherwise known as the platter-spinning duo Tap & Tray, a 2025 Hoofer Award went to Lisa La Touche. In a video compilation, she was seen bringing dance to the people in a variety of international venues, from swank to funky. Then the awardee performed live, settling into the rhythm to swing her hips, while a four-person ensemble performed her choreography, an intricate, layered dialogue alternating with breakout solos of fantastic originality. Sterling Harris, Jessee Robinson, Vernoca Simpson, and Funmi Sofola displayed explosive talents.
Introducing her long-time partner in The Rhythm Queens, Deborah Mitchell presented a 2025 Hoofer Award to Germaine Goodson. Mitchell, who is herself a legend as founder of The New Jersey Tap Ensemble, knows how to tell a story. Describing Goodson as “a faithful friend” and “a teacher who prepares her students to be the best in the business,” Mitchell went on to recall the moment when Goodson’s talent and sweet spirit first bowled her over, at an audition for Henry LeTang. Together with Parris Mann, Mitchell also offered a nostalgic rendition of Tap Your Troubles Away.
Tap & Tray demonstrated their twirling art and acknowledged the generosity of their colleagues, Bufalino and Fay Ray, when they received a 2025 Hoofer Award. Then the program moved on to another example of shameless schtick — debonair comedian Dick Van Dyke performing with an ensemble of cartoon penguins in a perennially charming excerpt from the 1964 film Mary Poppins.Tap historian Rusty Frank inducted Van Dyke into the International Tap Dance Hall of Fame in a ceremony videotaped in Los Angeles.
Broadway veteran Tommy Tune may not need any more awards, but perhaps being inducted into the International Tap Dance Hall of Fame has special meaning for this 10-time TONY winner. Accepting on his behalf, his sister Gracey Tune brought the spirit of the Lone Star State to Lincoln Center, while the audience was treated to films of Tune dancing. Most wonderful was a clip of Tune and Gregory Hines being coached in the art of nonchalance by “Honi” Coles, as Tune and Hines danced side by side in Taking a Chance on Love.
Nonchalance does not exactly describe flash dancer Skip Cunningham, whose stock-in-trade included toe dancing, splits, slides, and an acrobatic specialty — laying a handkerchief on the floor and picking it up with his teeth in mid-backflip. Inducting Cunningham into the International Tap Dance Hall of Fame, Jason Samuels Smith ruefully recalled how Cunningham used these stunts to upstage him at a Jerry Lewis Telethon (Samuels Smith won an Emmy award for choreography, anyway). Then the 89-year-old Cunningham produced a handkerchief, and, as the audience gasped, he attempted the feat again. Samuels Smith should know better than to share the stage with this man, but he managed to get in his own licks, before Cunningham demonstrated the first step he ever learned, and then embroidered on it.
For those who still haven’t had enough — and that includes all of us — Waag announced the ATDF and the Duke Ellington Center for the Arts will host a tribute to Duke Ellington featuring his Shakespearean suite, Such Sweet Thunder, at Symphony Space, on December 12, 2025, and that the beloved Tap City! Festival will return from May 19 to 24, 2026.
