There’s Trouble Right Here in Tap City

If Chicago, St. Louis and Rio de Janeiro all have annual festivals celebrating tap dancing, shouldn’t New York City? That’s the question Tony Waag asked in 2001, before he founded the New York City Tap Festival, or Tap City. And it’s the question he is asking again after deciding to cancel this year’s edition.

For almost 25 years, Tap City has been an important gathering each summer, a hub on a circuit of festivals that combine performances with classes. These festivals have been pivotal to the passing on of a tradition, largely left behind in popular and commercial culture, that might otherwise have been lost. For a major art lacking major institutions, festivals have served as the next best thing.

Tap City has been an incubator of talent, crucial to the early careers of now-prominent artists like Michelle Dorrance, Chloe Arnold and Caleb Teicher. It deserves some credit for the recent flourishing of tap in New York theaters like City Center and the Joyce, where Dorrance’s company returns this month. And it has maintained a footprint for the art in a town central enough to its history to warrant the title of Tap City.

Is Tap City dead? “It might be,” Waag, 66, said recently at the American Tap Dance Center, a training and rehearsal space that he opened in the West Village in 2009 — and closed on June 30. Along with the cancellation of the festival, this is a worrisome downsizing of his American Tap Dance Foundation. While never robust, it is not just the biggest such institution in the city, but the only one.

The immediate problem, unsurprisingly, is financial. The effects of the pandemic hit hard. This year, relief funds ran out and, for the first time in the festival’s history, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts was denied. Facing a six-figure deficit, Waag had few options, he said.