Tap Dance is a very unique dance style, it is one of the only dance genres that the audience is meant to hear. They get to dance while also creating music, using the taps on their shoes as an instrument! Registering your student for tap has many analytical and physical benefits. It improves their balance, coordination, control, cognitive thinking skills, teamwork skills, and the development of their musicality. Applying all of these elements will further aid and strengthen their ballet training.
Balance, Coordination, and Control
One large similarity between the dance forms of tap and ballet is the use of balance and posture. Tap dance is executed by keeping the weight over the balls of the feet. Your child will learn to explore where the body’s weight should be, and how and when to shift their weight back and forth. Training your child in this way will strengthen the muscles in their core, legs, and feet. This improves your child’s balance, coordination, and control. All of these elements are key to their ballet training, thus will only improve when continuing to practice in different ways.
Rhythm and Musicality
Ballet students who have tap experience end up having a better understanding of rhythm and musicality. Learning how to tap dance has the same benefits, and is similar to learning how to play a musical instrument. In tap class, you are learning about music, how to make music, and how to listen to music. Your child will explore how to dance in rhythms with different time signatures, adding a whole new dimension to the art of dance. Dancers will start to find their inner rhythm, creating a better sense of how to follow the music. This allows students to learn how to dance to the proper timing, how to count music, and how to accent their movement, which will all greater benefit their dance training.
Cognitive Thinking Skills
As mentioned, tap dancing is learning the concepts behind rhythm. Studying rhythm allows you to learn and memorize patterns which strengthens your brain and benefits your mind. Using tools like repeating, reversing, and counting the rhythmic patterns are all concepts younger students learn in math class. In addition, rhythm is just just like learning fractions, ratios, and proportions, but they are learning it in an artistic way. It stimulates your child’s mental processing and prompting their cognitive thinking skills, enhancing your child’s focus and memory.
Teamwork and Social Skills
Tap is perfect for your child who may be expressive, and outgoing. Throughout the history of tap dance, performers have participated in improvisation circles. Utilizing this tool in tap class, it is as if students are having conversations and expressing themselves through sound. Additionally, tap strives for uniformity. Just like ballet strives for uniform visually, tap dancers do the same, but in rhythmic harmony. The goal is to have everyone dancing at the same time to sound like one dancer. This develops their teamwork skills and teaches them how to be an individual member of a larger group.
Registering your child in a tap class has endless benefits and can only improve and assist your child's ballet training. BalletCNJ now offers tap classes for students ages 5-10!
Call or email us now to register your students for tap!
(609) 249-4066
info@balletcnj.org
