COSTA MESA : Dance Director Taps Into U.S. Funds

Linda Sohl-Donnell sees her life and work as part of a larger effort to keep tap-dance alive in America. For her efforts, the artistic director of the local dance troupe Rhapsody in Taps recently was awarded a $9,100 grant by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Though Sohl-Donnell had been tap-dancing since she was a child, her interest was rekindled when, as a student at UCLA, she attended a tap performance.

“I saw a kind of tap-dancing I had never seen before,” she said. “It was a group of older black male dancers, and what they were doing was so different from what I had learned at a tap studio in Cleveland.”

Sohl-Donnell and her company have been credited by some with elevating tap to a concert art form, a status that had eluded it because it was born in taverns.

The productions by Rhapsody in Taps are unusual in the tap world because they include live musicians. The troupe also has strayed from dance-only to traditional jazz, dancing to classical music and percussion bands at times.

“She has the idea of holding on to the tap tradition, but the concert form is going to change it,” UCI choreography professor Donald McKayle said. “She is very fine at what she does and the fact that this is her home base has been very exciting.”

This is the fifth individual fellowship she has received from the National Endowment for the Arts. It also will be her last, because next year the NEA will stop funding individual dancers.

Sohl-Donnell, who also teaches tap-dancing at Orange Coast College, will use the grant the same way she has used the previous ones, to pay for rehearsal space and to produce performances.