HEATHER CORNELL

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Heather Cornell is a dancer, choreographer, director, producer, and ensemble founder whose career spans more than five decades. As both a solo artist and collaborative creator, she has made significant contributions to tap dance and improvised music on international stages. Cornell has learned from and performed with many of the giants of the tap dance genre’s, and is widely recognized for her role in preserving and advancing tap dance as a rhythmic and musical art form.

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Cornell is an Oral History Fellow at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and until recently served on the full-time faculty at Hope College. The Heather Cornell Legacy Project, now entering its second phase, focuses on transmitting her archives, lineage, and artistic concepts to future generations, fostering a shift in contemporary understanding and pedagogy of the form.

Originally from Ontario, Canada, Cornell arrived in New York City in the early 1980s as a modern dancer and soon after returned to tap dance. There she was mentored by Buster Brown, Charles “Cookie” Cook, Chuck Green, Eddie Brown, Steve Condos, and Harriet “Quicksand” Brown, and was the only tap dancer mentored by jazz bassist Ray Brown. She toured internationally with Jazz Tap Ensemble and worked extensively in New York with Gail Conrad, Anita Feldman, Andrea Levine, as a clown partner to Noel Parenti, and with many of the early generation of jazz artists, dance and music.

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Cornell co-founded Manhattan Tap, an internationally acclaimed tap and music ensemble. For nearly 20 years, she served as its choreographer, director, and soloist, collaborating on an extensive body of work with composer Keith Saunders. In 2004, she launched a solo career, creating projects internationally including Finding Synesthesia (with Andy Milne, commissioned by the London Jazz Festival), CanTap (an all-Canadian ensemble), Taps and Traps (with Jesse Stewart), Conversations (premiered at Capilano University), and her ensemble Making Music Dance, which toured internationally and released a recording in 2015. Cornell has also choreographed for Broadway and theatre companies and continues to tour extensively as a soloist.

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Cornell has led her Tap Labs for 36 years, now based in Halifax, where she trains free-thinking improvisational music-dance artists grounded in community practice. She co-created Tap Motif in Lefkada, Greece with Thanos Daskalopolous and Max Pollak, founded Walk to the Beat, a community-based percussive arts festival in Nyack, NY, and is currently on faculty at the ImproJazz Workshop in Vamvakou, Greece.

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Cornell calls herself a physical percussionist - someone whose rhythmic, precise foot movement adds to or creates the musicality of a piece - and she dances using different textures of sound, including wood, leather and sand. And always, she dances only to live music, never music that is “canned.”

 

www.manhattantap.org