So, a weird thing happened.  I was on a flight back from Atlanta and I looked diagonal from where I was sitting and there was a woman sitting there.  I couldn’t figure out where I had seen her from.  Then it hit me.  It was Chloe Arnold, who I had been researching for my blog for the last few weeks!  How crazy is that?  Anyway, if you don’t know who Chloe Arnold is, she is the founder of the Syncopated Ladies.  A tap group that dominated the television show So You Think You Can Dance as the winning crew of season 11.

Besides performing she is an inspirational teacher pushing all that she works with to the edge.  Her musicality is flawless where you can tell she listens to a lot of music and gets deep inside the beat formulating rhythms inside rhythms in her stepping and phrasing.  She is one of the first tap dancers that is female that I have seen in a long time.  She seems to be on a mission to raise awareness and respect for the tap art form and bring it back to a more global platform through film, television, and live theater.  Her all girl group shows that her squad goals are all about female empowerment.

Thinking about the top past tappers the people I think of are all male, such as Al Gilbert, Gregory Hines, Savion Glover, Buster Brown, and the Nicholas Brothers.  Arnold is bringing us into a new generation of tap dancing and she is doing it in style through female strength not only in dancers, but with the music she uses for her routines.  Her biggest work to go viral thus far is a piece she did with music by Beyoncé.  This young dancer continues to bring us into the next generation of tap dance compiled of style, rhythm, and a squad of women who continue to push boundaries!