Don't Miss Ayodele Casel's Show at the ICA

Famed tap dancer and former Radcliffe Fellow, Ayodele Casel, returns to Boston with a show at the ICA.Ayodele Casel is one of the top tap dancers in the country.

Imagine being a dancer and taking the stage for a 26 minute performance with no choreography. From April 12 - 14, renowned tap dancer and choreographer Ayodele Casel (ayodelecasel.com) will improvise a theatrical solo at the ICA as part of a tribute to jazz pioneer, drummer, composer and activist Max Roach. Casel’s soundtrack will be the series of duets between Roach and jazz pianist Cecil Taylor that took place at the McMillin Theater in 1979. “That concert was actually an improvisation. They got together sight unseen without any agenda. As artists, they wanted to break convention, their art was resistance and protest. To choreograph something betrays the spirit of their artistry,” says Casel.

She’s working with director and choreographer Torya Beard, a frequent collaborator, who is helping to structure her dance, but there are no steps that will be the same from one night to the next. To help prepare, Casel has been listening to the historic recording over and over, as a way into the piece. “The more I listen to it, the more I hear possibility. It starts to shape what I may do in certain sections,” she says.

To be able to join a conversation with these two jazz legends takes a certain talent and confidence, which Casel has in spades. A trailblazer herself, she only began learning tap as an undergrad at NYU. Despite her late introduction to the art form, she’s enjoyed unparalleled success as one of the top tap dancers in the country. She was the first woman to join Savion Glover’s Not Your Ordinary Tappers group and performed with them at Carnegie Hall, the White House, Radio City Music Hall and all over the globe. Much of her work and her mission has been to elevate the voices of women in tap dancing. She’s had numerous solo shows, a documentary film, was the tap choreographer for the revival of Funny Girl on Broadway and was even put on a postage stamp in 2021, among other accolades.

In 2018, she was invited to teach a class at Harvard, she then became an artist-in-residence at the university and was the Frances B. Cashin Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2019 - 2020. She continues to be embedded in the Harvard community and is currently developing a work she began at Radcliffe.