In this workshop, Michael J. Love will share both an oral and embodied history of The Shim Sham Shimmy—a routine known to tap dancers as the “national anthem” and a familiar collection of rhythmic phrases referenced by dancers in many other forms. A short, informal lecture and discussion will be followed by a breakdown of each of The Shim Sham’s four “time steps.”

Michael J. Love is an interdisciplinary tap dance artist—a choreographer, scholar, and educator. His embodied research intermixes Black queer feminist theory and aesthetics with a rigorous practice that critically engages the Black cultural past as it imagines Black futurity. Love is currently based in Austin, TX, where his work has been supported and presented by Fusebox Festival, ARCOS Dance, Ground Floor Theatre, and The Cohen New Works Festival. In 2016, he received an Austin Critics’ Table Award in dance. Love has also collaborated with transmedia artist Ariel René Jackson on video and performance projects which have been featured in or programmed by The New York Times Style Magazine’s #TBlackArtBlackLife series, the New Museum (New York), CUE Art Foundation (New York), the Galleries at the University of Northern Colorado, the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington, and the George Washington Carver Museum, Cultural, and Genealogy Center (Austin). Love’s performance credits include the Broadway laboratory for Savion Glover and George C. Wolfe’s “Shuffle Along” and roles in works by Baakari Wilder as well as Andrew Nemr’s New York-based company, Cats Paying Dues. Love holds an M.F.A. in Performance as Public Practice from The University of Texas at Austin and is an alumnus of Emerson College (Boston). dancermlove.com