Orange County tap legend Linda Sohl-Ellison has compiled over three decades of tap history and repertoire into “Rhapsody in Taps, The First 35 Years!” Video Anthology in honor of Rhapsody in Taps’ 45th anniversary. This eight-hour anthology has been divided into four separate two-hour segments to be screened at Cal State Long Beach’s Martha B. Knoebel Dance Theater.
The first two screenings took place Sept. 1 and 8, and the final two screenings will take place on Oct. 13 and 27. A live question-and-answer session with tap dance historian Steve Zee follows each screening.
The Beginning of Rhapsody in Taps
Before Sohl-Ellison’s long-enduring company, Rhapsody in Taps, existed as it does today, it was called LTD/Unlimited Dance Company. A graduate student at UCLA, Sohl-Ellison began working with fellow graduate student Toni Tack to create choreography. The two founded LTD/Unlimited in 1981, slowly inviting specific dancers to develop rhythmic and theatrical choreographic works without the obligation to sustain a company. After Sohl-Ellison’s mentor, Foster Johnson, passed away, she began working with tap icon Eddie Brown, who eventually ended up being one of Rhapsody in Taps’ soloists.
When Tack retired from dance in 1984, Sohl-Ellison was left with the company, which by then was moving toward mostly tap and rhythm-based dances, accompanied by live music. She didn’t set out with a master plan to create her company; Sohl-Ellison followed her creative instinct about what to make next.
Sohl-Ellison has always been primarily driven by her love of choreography and the process of making dances. In the beginning, she loved the creative process more than she cared about her pieces being performed on stage, but knew she needed to begin marketing what she was doing. Dancers want to perform, and Sohl-Ellison’s dances needed to be seen by others.
Some of Rhapsody in Taps’ music was original, some of it jazz standards arranged specifically for the company. After one of her performances with the company, pianist Phil Wright came to Sohl-Ellison to say she was talented and that he wanted to write music for her.
Wright was an established jazz musician, composer and arranger. Sohl-Ellison hadn’t expected him to offer himself to her in the way that he did, without expectations of hourly payment. She’d already been working with a flutist and a woodwind instrumentalist, but pianos weren’t easy to come by in a lot of theaters and studios. Wright said he would pay to rent one, so he’d rehearse with the company on his electric piano, and eventually became the music director of Rhapsody in Taps.
Wright would create arrangements and ask Sohl-Ellison what she thought. From there, she would make adjustments. As time progressed, she became more capable of stepping in and making notes on what she wanted to happen during the arrangements, such as adding bass solos to the second chorus of a piece or adding drums.
While the musicians weren’t in rehearsals, dancers would work in silence or use recordings of the same tempo or feel as the final piece. Once, practicing a piece in a room where a classical pianist played Bach, Sohl-Ellison was surprised to find how perfectly the taps fit with the music.
“It was like a light bulb went on. I went, ‘Oh, wow!’ That was just an accident that happened that blew my world wide open,” Sohl-Ellison said. “I could use all different kinds of music and do the same footwork, and it just takes on a different character.”
Sometimes the dance would develop first, with the music built around it; other times, dances would follow a musical arrangement. Sohl-Ellison was able to be so involved with the creation of her pieces, from the one-of-a-kind music to the choreographic development, because she saw Wright every day.
Rhapsody in Taps at Orange Coast College
Right out of graduate school in 1978, Sohl-Ellison began teaching at OCC. The campus quickly became instrumental in the development of Rhapsody in Taps as a company.
Sohl-Ellison wasn’t sure about taking a full-time job and signing her professional life over to OCC, but she was told that if she didn’t apply, she risked not receiving any classes. She was honest in her interviews, openly citing concerns about the quality of the floor in the dance rooms. Sohl-Ellison’s professionalism and raw honesty landed her the position, where she is now approaching 50 years of employment.
Sohl-Ellison had a full schedule. Over the years, she taught advanced modern, tap, repertoire, pedagogy, advanced jazz, choreography and improvisation, all while running her company. Luckily, this meant free rehearsal space. Half of the time, Rhapsody in Taps rehearsed in Los Angeles, and the other half of the time, they rehearsed on the OCC campus, sometimes in a classroom, and sometimes on stage.
“It was really great having all those years of rehearsals on the stage because that would have been very expensive,” Sohl-Ellison said. “It also helped us prepare for an audience, instead of always rehearsing in a studio where your projection is short. We had the advantage of being able to feel what it was going to feel like in a big theater.”
Rhapsody in Taps also produced the Southern California Tap Festival at OCC in 1993, 1995 and 1997.
Many of Sohl-Ellison’s Rhapsody in Taps company members were faculty at OCC, including Pauline Hagino, who was with the company for 25 years, Karol Ritz, Monie Adamson, Taryn Chavez, Aaron Pardini, Hailey Bundrant and Christy Hernandez.
In the case of Hernandez, Sohl-Ellison heard about her from tap legend Fred Strickler, and Hernandez moved down from the Bay Area to become part of Rhapsody in Taps. She never held large auditions for Rhapsody in Taps because she felt that people who attended auditions didn’t understand the company’s work. She didn’t want dancers for one show. She needed dancers who would commit for a long time.
“Anything less than five years is a waste of my time,” Sohl-Ellison said. “It’s going to take a couple years for (dancers) to learn the rep that we already have, and then, all the costumes had to be altered. The photos had to be taken.”
Sohl-Ellison valued consistency and dedication in her company, and she still cultivates that in her current Wednesday night tap class. She cares about each student’s progress so deeply that she will stop class to give one-on-one instruction to someone struggling with a step. From there, she may have the entire class work on that one correction to ensure that everyone understands before moving on. Some of the students in her class have been with her for over 30 years.
Her husband, Monti Ellison, an African dance and drumming instructor at OCC, learned early on how seriously Sohl-Ellison took her work.
Years ago, while directing a student dance concert at OCC’s Robert Moore Theater, Ellison was in a car accident. Though the car had been badly damaged, he drove to Sohl-Ellison and delivered the news while she was giving notes to students on stage. After checking him out and making sure he wasn’t harmed, she told him to have a seat and wait for her to finish working.
EVENT DETAILS
‘Rhapsody in Taps, The First 35 Years!’ Video Anthology
When
- Part 1 | 1981-1990: 6 p.m. Sept. 1
- Part 2 | 1990-1994: 6 p.m. Sept. 8
- Part 3 | 1995-2002: 6 p.m. Oct. 13
- Part 4 | 2003-2016: 6 p.m. Oct. 27
Where: Martha B. Knoebel Dance Theater, 6200 E. Atherton St., Long Beach
Cost: $20 per screening
Information: rhapsodyintaps.com/anthology
The Making of the Anthology
The Rhapsody in Taps anthology is a documentary of sorts, compiling all of Sohl-Ellison’s work with the company, along with guest artists, company dancers and musicians.
In 2016, Sohl-Ellison was given a grant from the city of Los Angeles to support Rhapsody in Taps’ 35th anniversary. She planned to host a concert in downtown Los Angeles at a theater that held just over 800 people. Sohl-Ellison moved the concert to El Camino College, which supported a much larger audience of 2,000, before being told that she couldn’t do so and still receive the grant’s funding.
It was too late. The Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (LADCA) told Sohl-Ellison it would support Rhapsody in Taps’ 35th anniversary showcase if the group performed a second show in the original theater. The only other option would be for Sohl-Ellison to create an anthology of her work, which turned out to be a much bigger project than Sohl-Ellison initially thought.
She began by putting all of her repertoire in chronological order, along with some footage of her mentor, Foster Johnson, Eddie Brown and other tap masters, whom she had produced in concert in the early ‘80s. With the intention of giving the anthology free to libraries across the United States, including the New York Public Library, the Smithsonian, Orange Coast College, Cal State Long Beach, the University of Southern California and many others, it became clear that a string of videos without context was not going to be a useful resource for anyone doing research.
Sohl-Ellison’s first draft included the title of the dance, the choreographer, the composer and arranger in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, information you might receive in a program at a show. In 2018, she realized the anthology needed to include interviews; at the time, it was just a collection of dance videos.
“Even though each dance kind of had its own character, there was no context and no history,” Sohl-Ellison said.
She incorporated interviews with herself, Strickler, Hagino, Hernandez and Zee to provide context and enhance the anthology’s value.
Sohl-Ellison thought the anthology would be done in a year, but being the perfectionist she is, she wasn’t willing to settle for anything less than stellar. While cycling through a few separate editors and narrators and dealing with social distancing during the pandemic, an ever-patient accompanist from OCC, Joe Lawrence, began helping her with the project. Lawrence helped align the narration over pictures and videos, then realigned it when the second narrator had different timing than the first.
“My life has just been on hold for this project,” Sohl-Ellison said. “I’m at the mercy of someone else’s technical knowledge and their schedule. It’s just been a very all-consuming project.”
As much work as Lawrence put into the anthology, certain things could not be fully fixed. When dealing with archival footage, originally on VHS tapes, there is only so much that can be repaired. On those tapes, it was sometimes the case that the audio of both the music and the taps was already mixed, making it too hard to separate one from the other.
In some versions, the dancing may not be perfect, but the lighting might be better. Some versions with great dancing may have poor-quality lighting. This decision-making became important in choosing which dance versions Sohl-Ellison selected for the final DVD cuts of the anthology.
“Because there are so many dances that I made and so many guest artists that we had, there is no way to show these dances in their entirety. We had to make decisions about how to give a sense of this dance without it just being the splashy highlights,” Sohl-Ellison said. “A lot of the time, when I made choreography where there’s a slow development … you miss out on that arc, you know, that journey.”
One experimental project in particular stands out to Sohl-Ellison. She created a Balinese gamelan piece with UCLA professor I Nyoman Wenten that became the entire second half of many Rhapsody in Taps shows.
She was first introduced to Gamelan music and Balinese dance as an undergraduate at Ohio University, and she was instantly mesmerized by the movement and quality of the music. After being humbled by Wenten’s UCLA course, she asked him to create this piece with her.
In the piece, Sohl-Ellison does a duet with Wenten. She wears a mask and tap shoes, while he flutters his fan like a butterfly. Their mysterious, slow-developing relationship unfolds in ways not seen in the anthology. Rhapsody in Taps toured this piece in California, New York and Canada, also performing in Bali, where the dance style originated. From a 42-minute piece, the anthology shows only about six minutes.
Sohl-Ellison promised something tangible to LADCA; she intended to turn over four separate DVDs, divided into two-hour segments by era. Though physical DVDs are not used now as often as they were, eight hours of tap dance history all at once would be overwhelming. Separating each era into four screenings allows for breathing and thinking room in between each.
The first anthology included rare archival footage of historic tap legends like Foster Johnson, the Nicholas Brothers, Jimmy “Slyde” Godbolt, Leon Collins, Eddie Brown and Howard “Sandman” Sims, among others. The second includes other well-known tap dancers, like Arthur Duncan, Gregory Hines and Leonard Reed, with solo performances alongside the company by Dianne Walker, Sam Weber and Bob Carroll.
The third, upcoming screening on Oct. 13 features more of Duncan, as well as James “Buster” Brown and Glenn Turnbull. Solos are by Walker, Brenda Bufalino, Strickler, Carroll, Zee, Sohl-Ellison and Hernandez, among others. This screening also features Monti Ellison’s African drumming and a snippet of the tap-and-Balinese gamelan fusion piece.
The fourth and final screening on Oct. 27 features Carroll, Sohl-Ellison, Zee, Mindy Copeland, classical pianist Althea Waites, and many other returning Rhapsody in Taps members. One of the pieces included in this screening is an original work by Sohl-Ellison, “Canadian Sunset,” featuring the music and percussive ball-bouncing of musician and tap dancer Aaron Williams.
Sohl-Ellison was thrilled when Williams joined the company because he was a musician and tap dancer, which opened up many possibilities. He wanted to work with a metronome all the time.
“It was like the military,” Sohl-Ellison said, “but he was right.”
The Question-and-Answer Portion
Each screening ends with a short break and a question-and-answer session led by Zee.
Hernandez met Zee at a tap festival in Southern California, when Hernandez was already in Sohl-Ellison’s company. In the late 1990s, after years of making choreography with Hernandez, Zee was offered a spot in Rhapsody in Taps. He was in the company for around two years.
Zee remembers his experience in Rhapsody in Taps fondly as a warm and supportive group of people that valued camaraderie, rather than competition.
“You would walk off stage after dancing, and some of the company was in the wings, actually watching you,” he said. “They would go, ‘Great Job! Oh, you sound good tonight! Really nice!’”
Zee has cultivated a reputation for being a reliable historian in tap dance over the years. At Cal State Long Beach, where he taught for 20 years, he had a course dedicated to tap history. When Sohl-Ellison expressed interest in using the theater at Long Beach to screen the anthology, Zee contacted the department chair on her behalf.
When Zee attends tap festivals, he often interviews well-known tap dancers in front of audiences. Because of his role as the tap history expert at Cal State Long Beach, it was a natural decision for him to lead the question-and-answer session after the screening.
Each week, he takes a different angle. At the first showing, he asked a lot about old-time tap dancers from the beginning of Sohl-Ellison’s tap career. At the second screening, he was able to ask about Sohl-Ellison’s choreographic development. Of course, everything often ends up becoming a tangent.
“Someone says something. You’re in the middle of the Q and A, and you ask a question, and someone makes a hard right turn or something, and you just have to go with them,” Zee said. “A few questions to have in my back pocket, and then everything else is a big improvisation.”
Being in the space and seeing people who have danced on the screen right in front of you after the screening allows for a better sense of who they are as human beings.
“It’s a compelling moment, and it’s nice to hear people speak spontaneously. Sometimes people surprise themselves with their raw honesty. They open their mouth, and something comes out, and even they can’t believe they just said it, and that is one of the things in a live interview session that I’m always looking to sort of discover,” Zee said. “What’s the question I can ask that gets someone to not just give the talking point they’ve given a hundred times. What do you ask to get someone to drop their armor, and drop their little PR bullet points, and say something that’s super human and true?”
Zee likens the Rhapsody in Taps screening to seeing a great old movie in a real movie theater. He spoke of a theater in San Francisco that showed old movies. Before the film, the theater played old cartoons and newsreels. He went to that theater for the experience. When the lights would dim, and he would see Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly on the big screen, he understood why they were superstars. Seeing archival footage on such a massive scale, with a great sound system, is the closest audience members will get to experiencing the original live performance. Watching something unfold among other people and bodies, followed by collective applause, heightens the energy of the moment.
Linda Sohl-Ellison performing “Wade.” Photo courtesy of Jack Hartin 
Linda Sohl-Ellison executing a wing. Photo courtesy of Jack Hartin 
Linda Sohl-Ellison performing an acapella number. Photo courtesy of Gregory RR Crosby
The Tap Dance Renaissance
Zee calls the late 1970s and early 1980s a renaissance for tap dance, especially for a handful of women who helped shape our current structure. These were the women who created the concept of tap companies, tap festivals, tap concerts and tap repertoire.
The Jazz Tap Ensemble was founded in 1979 by Lynn Dally, Camden Richman and Strickler. Manhattan Tap was created in 1985 by Heather Cornell. The American Tap Dance Foundation began in 1986 with Bufalino, Tony Waag and Charles “Honi” Coles. All of these companies were focused on rhythmic tap, orchestral and jazz music, and touring around the world to showcase their work. Sohl-Ellison was right at the epicenter of this movement with Rhapsody in Taps.
The tap dance renaissance lingers today in a second generation of dancers. Many well-known, active teachers and companies today are, in a sense, products of the tap renaissance. Michelle Dorrance of Dorance Dance, for example, was an artist-in-residence at the American Tap Dance Foundation. Sitting in on these anthology screenings is the closest thing to experiencing the tap renaissance as it was then. This anthology will also be useful to those researching tap dance history, especially in Southern California.
One of the most important aspects of this anthology is its emphasis on the richness of Southern California tap dance. When most people think about the history of tap dance, they’re often thinking of vaudeville or Broadway. Many books and documentaries about tap dance, as well as reviews of tap dance shows, demonstrate a bias toward the East Coast. The Five Points District in New York, jazz clubs and William Henry Lane all deserve their flowers for being instrumental in tap dance’s history, but they are not all that there is.
Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was a Broadway star who performed at the Cotton Club, but most of America knows him from his movies and his dancing with Shirley Temple. That was happening on the West Coast in Hollywood.
Rhapsody in Taps didn’t tour as often as other dance companies because Sohl-Ellison was insistent that if one of them was coming, all of them were, and traveling with a band is a big commitment. She is not as well-known on the East Coast as she is on the West Coast, but her anthology allows tap enthusiasts to see everything happening here.
Sohl-Ellison’s repertoire includes a massive amount of choreographic work. Even with all of her pieces, she tries her best to ensure that each dance has its own nature, so there’s no redundancy in her shows. Rhapsody in Taps has its own character as a company, keeping things interesting on stage with contrast. Sometimes the dancers wore soft shoes; other times, they danced fast and hard on wooden boxes to project their sound. Each dance has its own costume. Guest musicians often performed with Rhapsody in Taps. Sohl-Ellison employed a sound engineer, a lighting designer, a stage manager and a technical director. It was very expensive to tour, but she wasn’t willing to compromise the quality of her work to get recognition.
One of her mentors, Reed, who came from vaudeville, told Sohl-Ellison, “You know, if you would let me teach you to sing, I can make you a star. Nobody wants a whole program of tap. Nobody wants to come to a show, and it’s all tap.”
But Sohl-Ellison didn’t agree with that.
It wasn’t about just showing up to a gig. It was about cultivating the arc of an evening. Perhaps the thing Sohl-Ellison takes most seriously is leading her audience on a journey centered on rhythm, not necessarily on tap steps.
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