The Stepz performance at Brooklyn College was in my opinion, pretty boring.

The day before the actual performance I watched a short clip of one of their performances out of curiosity and I found that Stepz was a group that tap danced. I’ve never been much of a fan of tap dancing but I like dance in general so I was willing to give the group a chance to change my mind. For the most part, that did not happen. It wasn’t so much the tap dancing that bothered me about the performance as it was the fact that there seemed to be a separation between the performer and the audience. I believe the separation was caused by a combination of a poor choice of footwear and the performers inability to establish a relationship between himself and the song and himself and the audience.

I found that one of the main reasons I felt removed from the entire experience was that I couldn’t see the performers’ feet since most of them had on black shoes. Throughout the performance I found myself wondering if the little tapping noises were coming from someone’s feet or if they were just part of the song! I thought this was very unfortunate because if the audience can’t see your feet in a tap dancing performance than what is the point of performing?

Another thing that I found strange was that there were parts of certain performances where the performer’s feet weren’t following the beat of the music. As Victoria mentioned there seemed to be an out of sync effect created by the mismatched tapping coupled with the music playing. The ultimate sound created sounded rather cacophonous to me. I felt that this forced the audience to try to decipher the relationship between the song and the performer, something, which I always felt the performer should establish for themselves. Ultimately I felt the performance was more a display of skill rather than an experience which I always felt was a definitive feature of art.