Heather Cornell
Heather Cornell is literally and metaphorically a mover and a shaker in the world of dance. She has been an ensemble founder and a sought-after solo artist. She is a choreographer, director, and producer. She has learned from and performed with giants of the tap dance genre. In a career that has spanned four decades, Cornell has left an indelible mark on dance stages all over the world. She is an oral history fellow at the New York City Library Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and currently is on full time faculty at Hope College. The Heather Cornell Legacy Project, now in its 2nd year, is an initiative to pass to the next generations her archives, her lineage, and her concepts through working to create an active shift of understanding of the artform in today’s practitioners and current pedagogy.
First arriving in New York in the early 1980s as a modern dancer from Ontario, Canada, Cornell found her first love, tap dance quite quickly. She worked with and was mentored by tap greats Buster Brown, Cookie Cook, Chuck Green, Eddie Brown, Steve Condos and Harriet “Quicksand” Brown, and was the only tap dancer mentored by iconic jazz bassist, Ray Brown. She toured internationally with Jazz Tap Ensemble and worked in NYC with Gail Conrad, Anita Feldman, Andrea Levine and as clown partner to Noel Parenti. She eventually co-founded Manhattan Tap, a leading American tap and music ensemble which would go on to garner international acclaim. For close to 20 years, Cornell served as the group’s choreographer, director, and soloist, collaborating on a huge body of work with her main collaborator Keith Saunders. In 2004, she launched a successful solo career, creating a number of projects internationally, including Finding Synesthesia, Andy Milne collaborator, commissioned by the London Jazz Festival; CanTap, an all Canadian music dance ensemble; Taps and Traps, Jesse Stewart,
collaborator; Conversations, recreated in 5 countries with local artists; and her music ensemble, Making Music Dance, international touring and CD release 2015.
She has held her Tap Labs for 35 years where she has trained free-thinking improvisational music/dance artists focused on the magic of community. She was a co-creator, with Thanos Daskalopolous and Max Pollak, of Tap Motif in Lefkada, Greece, an 8-year music/dance summit focused on creating balanced multi-disciplinary pedagogy through the freedom of improvisation. She is currently on faculty at ImprovJazz Workshop, in Vamvakou, Greece, where five tap dancers per year are chosen to play in the music ensembles.
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.” For more info – check out her website https://www.manhattantap.org
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