Tap Dance Classes UK | 67 Cities

Tap Classes in Your City

Every class is taught by a working professional. Choose your city for the local class page: venue, day, time and how to book your first session.

Your First Tap Class

Warm-up: finding your feet

Ankles loosened, weight onto the balls of the feet, and the first sounds — single taps and shuffles, slowly, until they're clean. Clean beats fast, always.

Steps into rhythms

Flaps, ball changes and your first time step — the building blocks that stack into rhythmic phrases. You'll count, clap and probably laugh at your own feet. That's normal.

The combination

Everything joins up into a short routine to music by the end of class. It won't be Broadway yet, but it will be unmistakably tap — and entirely yours.

What Is Tap Dance?

Tap is the dance you can hear. Metal plates on the toe and heel turn your feet into percussion, and the dancer into a musician — every step is both a movement and a note. Class is as much about rhythm as it is about legs: you'll learn shuffles, flaps and time steps, then discover the strange joy of a room full of people landing a rhythm together.

It grew up in nineteenth-century America, where West African juba dancing and Irish and British step dance met and merged. Jazz gave it wings: Bill Robinson took it up onto the toes, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly took it to Hollywood, and Gregory Hines and Savion Glover drove the rhythm-tap revival that keeps it evolving today. Few dances carry a clearer line from street to stage.

Britain has its own claim on those roots — Lancashire clog dancing fed the same family tree — and tap remains a pillar of UK theatre training, examined by the ISTD and taught in every stage school in the country. Whenever 42nd Street or Singin' in the Rain returns to the West End, the nation's tap classes fill up within the fortnight. Book before the next revival.

In tap you learn an instrument like any musician — yours just happens to be strapped to your feet.

Rhythm Tap

Sound-first tap in the jazz tradition — low to the floor, improvisational, the dancer as drummer. The lineage of Hines and Glover.

Broadway Tap

The show style: big lines, travelling steps and choreography built for an audience. What you see in West End musicals.

Soft Shoe

Tap's smooth, unhurried cousin, originally danced without metal taps at all — all glide, ease and understatement.

Flash and Acrobatic

Splits, jumps and showstoppers in the spirit of the Nicholas Brothers — tap turned up to eleven.

Improvisation

Trading rhythms with the music or with other dancers, jazz-solo style — where tap stops being steps and becomes a language.

Clog and Roots

The British branch of the family — Lancashire clog and step dance traditions that fed into tap and still turn up at UK folk festivals.

Tap Facts Worth Repeating

Tap has its own day

National Tap Dance Day falls on 25 May — the birthday of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson — and was signed into US law in 1989. Plenty of UK studios mark it too.

The stair dance was real

Bill Robinson's signature routine tapped up and down a staircase, backwards and forwards — and his 1935 stair dance with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel made Hollywood history as a landmark interracial dance pairing.

Two traditions, one dance

Tap is a genuine fusion: West African juba rhythms and Irish and British step dance met in nineteenth-century America and made something neither had alone.

A penguin learned it

Mumble's dancing in Happy Feet was performed by tap great Savion Glover in a motion-capture suit — and the film won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Tap Questions, Answered

Do I need tap shoes for my first class?

Not for your first session — hard-soled shoes will get you through a taster perfectly well. If you carry on, entry-level tap shoes are among the cheapest kit in dance, and your teacher will point you to the right pair.

Am I too old to start tap?

No. Tap is one of the most popular styles for adult beginners — it's low-impact at beginner level, brilliant for coordination, balance and memory, and the classes skew friendly. Nobody is too old to make a good noise.

I have no rhythm — can I still learn?

Yes. Rhythm is a trained skill, not a birthright, and tap is literally the practice of it. We slow everything down until the sounds are clean, and speed arrives on its own. If you can clap along to a song, you have enough to start.

Will I have to perform?

Only if you want to. Classes are for the class; showcases exist for those who fancy them and are strictly optional. Plenty of our tap regulars have never performed for anyone but the studio mirror.

Quick Enquiry

Tell us what you need and we will reply within one working day — no phone tag required.

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Your City Has a Tap Floor

Somewhere near you this week, a class of beginners is making a magnificent racket. Join them.

67 cities

Find Your Class

Local venues, times and prices — everything is on your city's tap page.

Choose Your City Sister style

Jazz Dance Classes

Tap's Broadway sibling — the styles share a century of stage history.

See Jazz Classes

Questions? Call 07759 656300 or email info@dancecentreuk.co.uk

Tap Dance Classes

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