Don’t Call Me a Tap Dancer
Being a person is enough
If you’ve been hear a while, you’ll have a sense of where this note might be going. Still, I’ll offer a little back story.
I began tap dancing at 3 ½ years old. I got my first paying gig at age seven. I don’t really remember a time in my life when dance, and tap dance in particular wasn’t part of the picture. From dance school, to youth tap ensembles, to being mentored by Gregory Hines, I experienced what becoming a tap dancer was like in the most profound ways. Having a professional career was never the central focus, becoming a tap dancer was.
You might ask, “What’s the difference?” Well, it’s something like the difference between being able to execute a series of behaviors, or trusting that those behaviors will come out naturally even without you having to think about them. Professional careers are based on execution. Identity is about being (or becoming). Of course there is an interaction here, however, there are signs as to which one someone is more concerned with.
Consider the question, “What are you working on?”
If someone immediately tells you about the next job or gig that is on the plate, they may be more focused on their professional career. If the first thing someone tells you about is a particular creative task they are endeavoring to achieve, something they’ve learned, or an interaction they are working through, they may be more wrapped up in the process of becoming.
After more than 40 years of actual tap dancing, the question of how to become a tap dancer began to feel limited. There is something deeper at work – who we are as creatives is directly tied to who we are as people. If we are frustrated, what we create will evoke frustration. If we are joyful, what we create will evoke joy. Whatever is at work in us will come out. No matter how hard we might try, we can’t escape ourselves.
Since realizing this connection, I closed down my tap dance company, Cats Paying Dues, and turned to pursuing a more general question.
How do we become particular kinds of people? And be extension, if what comes out of me is not something I’d like to come out of me, what can I do to change that?
Many will start with identity. While I think identity is an important part of answering this question – my first short film project was entitled IDENTITY: The Andrew Nemr Story – it is only one part of the answer. If identity is a snapshot (a static picture of who we are), formation is the ongoing process of becoming who we are.
To answer the earlier question of “how?” I have become captivated by the process of formation. How did I, the son of immigrants from Lebanon, living the suburbs, hardly athletic, and introverted, become a trusted keeper of the oral tradition of tap dance, performing on stages all over the world, and a trusted teacher guiding others in the way? Deeper still, if that happened to me as a tap dancer, could such a dramatic transformation happen in other areas of my life as well?
Could I become a different kind of person, regardless of my starting point? If my journey through Tap Dance Land is any witness, the answer must be yes. It might not be self-evident, and the journey might be fraught, but the possibility is there. Things can in fact be different.
While I have tap dance as an embodied practice in which I’ve been able to experience a metaphor for formation, we all have something even more potent – we have our lives. Our lives are the embodied experiences through which we can discover what is at work in us, work out any changes we pursue, and reap the rewards of the actions we sow. We all get a life – which really means we all get the opportunity to engage in becoming particular kinds of people. We can become the kind of people whose character is shaped in such a way that our experience of this world is filled and fueled with love.
To become such a person is the adventure of life. It is the thing we all are already a part of. Do I tap dance? Yes. But I’d rather just be a person. That is all anyone needs to be to take on the adventure of becoming. That is enough.