This is me.
So my entry point to it was Ginger Rogers, but really this is my legacy.
This art form is my legacy.
From futro media and pox. It's Latino Usa. I'm Maria nor Posa today, a yodel Cacil, the decorated Afro Latina tap dancer and how her art is part of her legacy. For Ayodelic Cascill, tap dancing is not just a series of steps, it's magic. It's when she feels the most free and is able to connect to her cultural heritage. The Bronx native was born to a Puerto Rican mother
and a Black father. She discovered tap through the silver screen at a young age, transfixed by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, so much so that she started recreating their move in her Bronx bedroom. But it wasn't until she was a sophomore at the NYU Tish School of the Arts that she took her first tap dancing class, and she's been dancing ever since. During her almost three decade long career, Ayodetta has received a number of accolades and awards,
despite the field being dominated by male dancers. Ayodette was the first woman to be invited to dance for Savion Glover's Not Your Ordinary Tap Dancers group, and she's performed in places like the White House, Radio City Music Hall, and Carnegie Hall. In twenty nineteen, she was featured in a series of forever stamps from the US Post Office, the Black Heritage Stamp Series. A documentary about Ayodeeda's development as an artist, titled Tapping Into Our Past Tapping Into
Our Future, premiered in twenty twenty two. In that same year, Ayodeeda's tap choreography in the Broadway revival of Funny Girl earned her a Drama Desque nomination. Her work calls attention to how tap dancing is an expression of identity, culture, language, and communication, but also to the forgotten history of black tap dancers. Here's Iodlica said as she taps us through her journey in a story we first aired in twenty twenty one.
My name is Iodele Cassell.
I am a tap dancer, choreographer, actor, lover of tesla and stake. My name means joy has arrived and it is Nigerian Yoruba.
My father named me. It's one of my favorite things.
I am a native New Yorker, proud Bronx native. When I was nine, my mom sent me to Puerto Rico to live with my grandparents.
What I do remember the most, at least for.
That initial landing, was feeling like, how am I going to communicate?
I didn't speak the language at all. I knew one word. I knew how to say ola, and that was it.
My grandparents didn't speak English that well, and my grandmother would teach me with like a letter stencil, who doosday squadro one thing at a time. While I remember struggling with the language, there was a seamless transition of when you just are speaking it fluently. And I was there until I was fifteen. I was supposed to be there for one year and ended up being six. At the age of seventeen, I was a senior in high school. My English teacher she started a course called history with
the movies. That's when I first saw FREDI standing Gerrogers.
You know, I think I was in lovely Van Hook.
I know, you were.
This world that seemed really interesting to me.
Like I thought Fred and Ginger were like magic, so graceful, and they had such great chemistry.
It was just like it was beautiful to watch.
There's something in the format of a musical that is sort of fantastical, and as somebody who just did not grow up seeing that, it was really intriguing. And then of course tap dancing, if you don't know what goes into it, it is a little bit like magic. It's like you see people like moving their feet and all of these sounds are coming out. I just wanted to be able to move my feet in the way that
they did. And I remember like I would go home after school and I'd go to the library to like rent their movies, and I just close the door and try to move like they were.
What if I could do that?
What if I could be Ginger fully knowing that there's no way that this black and Puerto Rican girl was gonna ever be considered anything like Ginger Rogers, because I didn't see people like me who were on screen like that, especially during those thirties and forties and fifties. So I
remember just sort of that being a fantasy. And then I was an acting major at YU and my sophomore year they offered two movement classes that the actors had to take, and it was tap dancing and tai chi, And I was like oh yeah, Oh my God, Like, finally, this is going to be my chance to really get to move my feet in the way that I saw Ginger Rogers doing. So I signed up for tap immediately, and I even got like some shoes that looked like
one of her shoes in the movie. I went to pay Less shoe source, because you know, the dance school has cheesy shoes. I got these really cool like heel suede shoess and I got them tapped up, and I felt like I walked into my first class in style.
And I was so happy to do my first shuffle. I was living my life.
About a year after that, I met someone who was a freshman and he was actually a real hood for His name is Bookarie Wilder.
He was like, yeah, you Tap dance. I was like yeah. He was like, oh, we should go jam. I was like, yeah, let's go.
Jam. He took me to that studio and I'm putting up my shoes with my shuffle hopstep for lap ball change, just all of the joy and the spirit in the world.
As I'm lacing up, he starts to warm up. I heard him go I had never heard that ever. I had heard Dad Dee d d day. So I realized very quickly that I did not know what I was doing.
It was a really formative time and really impactful because he was like, oh, wait a minute, you know Gregory Hines, right, And I was like, no, I don't know him.
Do you know, like Sammy Davis Junior. I'm like, god, I didn't know know the Nicholas Brothers. No, he said, tap dancing is.
Not just a series of steps, and it's not combinations that you do in dance class. This is a real form of expression because it comes from you. He's like, you don't even need music. He taught me that this art form was really rooted in the history of black people in this country, that it.
Is my legacy.
I think this art form of tap dancing speaks really directly to the history of this country and lands squarely at the intersection of race and gender and appropriation. And we talk about the development of the slave codes of seventeen forty, for example, born out of the rebellion that
black people in this country they knew rhythm. They were so connected to their power in that way that they could start revolts across plantations through communicating with specific rhythms and so when that was discovered, laws were enacted in this country to basically ban them.
What I love about that story.
Even though it's completely steeped in oppression and a dehumanization, is that the spirit of a human being, in the spirit of black people, that what happens when somebody attempts to take away your mode of expression and to take away your instrument, you find another way. You're not gonna give me a drama. I can make sound with my feet, I can make sound with my body, I can make.
Sound with my hands.
The one thing you learn very quickly as a tap dance student is that it thrives on your individual expression. If I could describe it for somebody who doesn't do it, is like if you have an impulse and then naturally something starts to build and you get ideas that are in rhythm form and your feet are able to communicate that. So we have steps that have a different number of notes. For example, a step is just one note. A shuffle has two sounds, shuffule one two. A cramp roll has
four sounds. It starts to boil up into a rhythmic pattern, and it's influenced by really your upbringing. I grew up listening to Hector Lavo to Ray Boretto, and I grew up listening to Orestis and Fania All Stars. And I also grew up in the nineties, which is like the height of hip hop. Everything that has entered your ear has become part of your makeup, is available to you when you get this impulse to move.
So if I had sad, Sad, dad, and then I can.
Go on and on and on. But all of these things just live there and they are available to you to come out in whichever way that.
You so choose.
I think it was the beginning of a journey of really getting to know myself as a human being. But what made me think I can do this forever as a career was when I saw Bringing the Noise in the Funk at the Public Theater in ninety five. Bringing the Noise, Bringing the Funk basically told the history of Black people in this country through tap dancing from the Middle Passage all the way through current times.
It was revolutionary because it was the.
First time that tap dancing was seen and heard in a way that was not common like the way that we think of tap dancing as like timesteps and everybody in Unison with arm choreography, kind of like forty second.
Street type thing.
It was really a true authentic representation of how the form was living in America. And when I went to that show and I saw young black actors, young black tap dancers really on stage like having a story that was told through them at a theater that was around the corner from my school, That's when I thought, Oh, I want to do that. And not only do I want to do that, but I want to do it to the best of my ability and I want to dance with the best. And that is when I first
saw a way to do this long term. When I started to dance professionally and I happened to come up at a time when the focus was on a lot of young men.
The audience members at.
The end of the show would say to me, I did not know that women's have danced, or they'd be like you, girl, you dance like a man. They would say this as though they were giving me compliments. So it was that moment of constantly hearing other people say those things that made me look for the women that look like me. Because I knew about ginger rogers and Eleanor Powell and Vooby Keeler, and I knew about all
those women, but I didn't know of Jenny Legan. I did not know of Lois Bright, I did not know about Juanita Pits. I started to call out these names just as I was learning them, and I would just say Cora La Red, Juanita Pits, Louise Madison. I feel like I can't change the past. What I can do is I can bring them into my experience so that when people see me tap dance, they understand that I didn't just get plopped here, and there is a legacy of women behind me who were doing it and who
should be named and recognized. It has become a practice for me over the last twenty five years. I hold them with me anytime that I'm dancing. Then we could talk about appropriation, how a lot of the white dancers were royalistic in these black communities and taking their work and performing it while black people did not have the
right and ability to perform themselves. Even when we talk about the silver Screen, we know Fredistang and Gerrogers, and we celebrate Freda Stair very easily, but we don't know that one of his teachers was John Bubbles, who was a black dancer who actually revolutionized the art form by dropping his heels into the ground and allowing more.
Notes to be played with his feet.
We don't know about Jenny Leaghan, a black tap dancer who's actually the first black woman to dance with Bill Robinson, who was a huge star at the time. But we know Shirley Temple, we know oh Sammy Davis Junior and Jimmy Slide and Buster Brown and Chuck Green and all wonderful, beautiful tap dancers, but we don't know the women that were their contemporaries, their colleagues who were also trying to
work in the same way. Really, the one of my missions is to really transform the way people view tap dancing. So I'm happy that Chasing Magic kind of allowed that window into that. We were invited by Aaron Maddox at the Joyce Theater. Aaron reached out and said, Hey, do you want to do something for our virtual season? And I was like, I haven't seen any of my friends, and I thought, well, how are we going to do this?
I sent tapes, just video recordings of some choreography, and we had one day of rehearsal and then two days of actual shooting and that was it.
So it came together like magic, actually very quickly.
But because we had really wonderful, committed and focused and generous dancers, we made it happen. And Chasing Magic, you'll see solos, duets, trios, You'll see full group numbers. We're gonna see numbers that are a cappella, numbers that swing Latin jazz.
You're gonna hear an African and six' eight rhythm just done with our.
Feet we're gonna dance to a soft shoe and a waltz and we're gonna like really hit it. Hard What i'm trying to do is just show really the depth of the art form and how much we.
Can accomplish with just two pieces of metal on our.
FEET i Think Chasing magic is a celebration of, collaboration, friendship, art, life honoring our, experiences honoring our, history and just like how all those elements sort of come together to really create these little magical. Moments i've read a lot of things lately about agism and, dance and one of the things That i'm really inspired by about tap dancing is that we dance until we no longer, can whether you're
into your eighties or your. NINETIES i grew up knowing that the older you, get the better you, get and So i've never felt, like, OH i got to get make sure that to get all my things Before i'm thirty or Before i'm. Forty IF i feel like tap dancing is one of those art forms that it's like, wine you get better with, AGE.
I think one of the.
Things THAT i have been building towards now is amplifying the. Message What i've been working so diligently and so many of my peers is for people to understand that tap is more than, entertainment that tap dancing is more than just people dancing in. UNISON i want people to know that tap dancing is a really sophisticated and beautiful, expression musical. Expression it thrives off of music and. Freedom you're connected to something else that nobody can really take away from.
You ayodeli hopes to keep expanding people's understanding of tap. Dancing she wants to bring the art form to a larger. Audience this episode was produced By Maria eskinka and edited By Met Trevlon. Shahi it was mixed By Julia, carusso
with engineering support From Jay. Grubin The LATINO usa team also Includes Roxanna, Guire Fernando, Chavari Jessica, Ellis Victoria, Strada, Dominiquinestrosa renaldo Leanoz, Junior Stephanie, Lebau Andrea Lopez, Grusado Luis, Luna Marta, Martinez Dasha, Sandoval Lor saudi And Nancy, Trujillo Benileei, Ramirez Marlon, Bishop Maria garcia and myself are co executive producers And i'm your. Host Marianno. Rossa join us again
on our next. Episode in the, Meantime i'll see you on social media and as, always notte Maa, yes Lunga.
Jao LATINO usa is made possible in part by The Ford, foundation working with visionaries on the front lines of social change, worldwide The JOHN.
D And CATHERINE.
T MacArthur, foundation and The Heising Simons foundation unlocking, knowledge opportunity and possibilities more at hsfoundation dot.
Org i've rarely, stretched And i'm not proud of. That and whoever's listening and wants to be a tab, answer don't take that. Advice please stretch and roll