‘Diary’ puts forgotten dancers back in the spotlight

By Rich Fahey

CAMBRIDGE  — Passion projects often provide great insights and truths. And, along the way, can also provide great entertainment.

Ayodele Casel is a woman on a mission. She is using her own story – as a tap dancer and celebrated dance educator, choreographer, and performer – to bring forward the stories of forgotten female tappers from the 1920s-50s who scaled almost impossible heights just to take to the stage and dance.

Casel honors those women in the world premiere of  her new play “Diary of a Tap Dancer,” an American Repertory Theater production now onstage at the Loeb Drama Center through Jan. 4.

Casel is a compelling performer, both as a tap dancer – the tap icon Gregory Hines once called her “one of the top young tap dancers in the world” — and a storyteller with an interesting and inspiring backstory. She has written and choreographed “Diary,” with direction by her wife and longtime collaborator, Torya Beard.

Casel is backed by a cast of seven other female and non-binary tappers, who join in for some dazzling production numbers and who also take on characters who are part of the story.

This is the playwright’s second collaboration with the A.R.T. after 2021’s “Chasing Magic,” and she is again attuned to the plight of those trying to enter male-dominated worlds such as tap. In telling their stories, Casel has also been fearless in addressing the racism and misogyny that has been part and parcel of the story of tap dancing in the country.

Act I of “Diary” is largely her own story. The daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and a Black father whom she didn’t meet until she was 17, Casel grew up as a feisty sort, nicknamed “Ali” (for Muhammad Ali) for fights she had in the Bronx. She moved to Puerto Rico when she was nine, spending six years with her grandparents on the island before returning to New York, where she and her mother  — both fans of older movies —  fell in love with Fred Astaire and, especially, Ginger Rogers.

 She eventually enrolled at NYU as an acting student; then came the life-changing first tap dance class at a 19-year-old. From then on, whenever and wherever someone was tap dancing, she wanted to be there.

 Armed with those first set of tap shoes from a Payless store, she set sail on her career, looking for and finding opportunities, even unveiling in an audition an uncertain singing voice in an effort to find traction in her chosen field.

Casel was an artist in residence at the Harvard ArtsLab in 2018 and in 2019 was a fellow in the Radcliffe Institute, where she continued the research needed for “Diary of a Tap Dancer.”  In 2020 she delivered a lecture at Radcliffe, and the ART commissioned Casel to create a full-length work.

She did years of research in unearthing the stories of the forgotten women of tap, pursuing rare photos or clips, other little bits of information, perhaps just a paragraph or two. Casel knows her portrayals of the pioneers are incomplete, but she has the names and repeats them at every opportunity.

The show’s scenic design by Tatiana Kahvegian features a series of specially-designed wooden platforms across the stage, each one engineered to produce different sounds, making them instruments in the onstage ensemble of musicians.

Casel is also generous in sharing the stage with her fellow tappers, who bring plenty of their own personality and pizzazz to the stage. The cast includes Naomi Funaki, Afra Hines, Quynn L. Johnson, Funmi Sofola, Liberty Styles, Annaliese Wilbur, and Ki’leigh Williams. They are backed by Carlos Cippelletti on the piano, Raul Reyes Bueno on bass and Keisel Jimenez Leyva on drums.

Ktherine Freer’s projections are informative and provide a vivid background to what’s happening onstage, and there’s plenty happening onstage. Befitting someone who speaks fluent Spanish and has moved freely between two cultures, several musical genres have informed Casel’s work.

And while there is plenty of dancing, Casel was adamant that “Diary” would also be theatrical, and that words would be just as important to the piece.

There is no denying the emotion in Casel’s voice as she dramatically describes the women who blazed a trail, including the showgirls at the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem who went on strike, finally able to stop practices such as 17 hours of rehearsal in one day.

Take the story of Jeni Le Gon, a legendary dancer whose crime was simply outshining a white actress, Eleanor Powell, at an event promoting a film. She was then told there was room for only one tap dancer in the movie.  You guessed it. Casel found out Le Gon was alive and journeyed to Canada to see her and hear her story.

In the end, Casel restates that she and her fellow tappers have gotten where they are by “not dancing by the book” and that has made all the difference.

“We don’t dance like girls. We can do anything the boys do.”

“Diary of a Tap Dancer” is a testament to the power of a passion project, and the realization of one woman’s vow that those women whose shoulders she stands on not be forgotten.

The world premiere of the American Repertory Theater production of “Diary of a Tap Dancer.” Written and choreographed by Ayodele Casel. Directed by Torya Beard. Scenic design by Tatiana Kahvegian. Costume design by Camilla Dely. Lighting design by Brandon Stirling Baker. Sound design by Sharath Patel. Projection design by Katherine Freer. Hair, wig and make-up design by Earon Chew Healey. At the Loeb Drama Center through Jan. 4. AmericanRepertoryTheater.org