Tap Dance with Shelley Oliver

Shelley Oliver has toured throughout Europe, China, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States. She appeared internationally with some of the legends of the tap world, including Savion Glover, Jimmy Slide, Buster Brown, Steve Condos, and Chuck Green. She is a founding member of Manhattan Tap and was co-artistic director and choreographer with the company. Her television appearances include Tap Dance in America with Gregory Hines, and Star Search. She has also performed with many great jazz musicians, including Slide Hampton, David “Fathead” Newman, Robin Eubanks, and Kenny Washington. She has conducted lectures and demonstrations for the Lincoln Center and New York City Public Schools. Ms. Oliver is the producer of seven CDs, “Tap Music for Tap Dancers,” that have become a standard tool for dance classes, professional tappers, and students. She tours locally with the Muhlenberg Jazztap Ensemble at schools and facilities in the Allentown area.

Her professional company, The Shelley Oliver Tap Dancers, tours with the David Leonhardt Jazz Trio in concert halls and festivals around the country. In a recent review:

Shelley Oliver Tap Dancers display fine chemistry with David Leonhardt Jazz GroupPianist David Leonhardt began the final number of Saturday's program that his musical trio shared with the Shelley Oliver Tap Dancers at the Algonquin Arts Theater in Manasquan, Leonhardt's face turned serious. He slumped over his instrument, forehead resting heavily on the concert grand. What he was about to play seemed too terrible to contemplate.

By this point, however, the audience was used to his shenanigans. Leonhardt had been telling jokes all evening, buttering an already slick presentation of music and dancing with one-liners. Was anyone really surprised when the finale turned out NOT to be a dour, 12-tone composition, but instead a riff on the Flintstones theme song? The dancers played along, accompanying this silliness with an adaptation of the Copasetics' legendary "Chair Dance." Dancing while seated in a chair isn't as easy as it sounds, by the way, and in Oliver's version this piece was less a rest for footsore hoofers than a daredevil way to burn off whatever fumes remained, at that point, in their tanks.

 It had been a lively evening. It was a magical evening, too. Leonhardt, Oliver and their associates are serious artists. When they sink into a groove and let the music carry them away, the audience is transported, too. Inside the darkened theater, this music brightens the interior coastline of the heart like sunshine. In "Starlight Interlude," Oliver danced solo. She has a figure of elfin lightness, and as she tapped she unspooled threads of sound, running on deliciously and picking up speed. Oliver seemed an inexhaustible source of rhythm, until suddenly she laid her heels down hard. Then, from effortless monologue she switched to an exchange with drummer Paul Wells, trading intense bursts of percussion.

Like her second-act solo, "Ode to Bo" (as in "Bojangles"), much of the tapping on this program paid homage to the suave style of an earlier generation of masters. The more experimental numbers included an ensemble dance set to classical music -- Bach's "Prelude in G" will run away from them, if they're not careful -- and a richly textured piece called "Funk Monk," set to music by Thelonious Monk. In "Funk," dance company member Rebekkah Brown was a flashy standout, while the choreography teased viewers with bustling complexity that suddenly resolved into images of solidarity. Spectacularly, in the second half, the musicians improvised a new composition on the spot based on three notes supplied by the audience.

NJ Star Ledger, August 18, 2008

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Community Tap classes are designed to provide a unique dance experience that combines rhythmic expression and organic movement. The object of every class is for each student to have fun while learning and developing at their own pace in a supportive environment. Three levels of tap dance allow students to determine the degree of challenge that they enjoy while experiencing this American artform.

Click below for registration brochures:

FALL 2008 REGISTRATION BROCHURE (PDF)

Muhlenberg tap dancers perform "3 EZ Pieces" choreogrphed by Shelley Oliver
and appompanied by the David Leonhardt Trio in Master Choreographers 2008

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The Muhlenberg Community Dance Center. The Muhlenberg College Department of Theatre and Dance offers the Lehigh Valley Community a complete schedule of high quality, non-credit dance and movement education courses for people of all ages through three programs: Tap Dance with Shelley Oliver, The Pilates Center, and the Muhlenberg Community Dance Center. Classes are offered in state of the art facilities located in the Trexler Pavilion Dance Studios or the Pilates Center and Dance Clinic in the brand new Life Sports Center.