Reviews

DIARY OF A TAP DANCER, OR BRING IN ’DA JOY

★★★★☆ Ayodele Casel's guide to great female tap dancers of yesterday and today makes for an unforgettable night at the theater

Review: American Repertory Theater's DIARY OF A TAP DANCER is Illuminating Look at Dance History

Remember the name Ayodele Casel. Get a ticket, if you still can, to her illuminating and immensely entertaining new play “Diary of a Tap Dancer” – being given its world premiere production by the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge through January 4, 2025 – and you’ll never forget it.

CRITIC’S PICK Review: A Tribute to the Jazz Great Max Roach Meets His Standards

Ayodele Casel leads a program celebrating Roach’s centenary that also includes works by Rennie Harris as well as by Ronald K. Brown and Arcell Cabuag.

Rhythmic Byways “Max Roach 100” at the Joyce

The most engrossing match was with tapper Ayodele Casel, who in “Freedom….In Progress” met Roach’s expansive and open-ended improvisations with the pianist Cecil Taylor (1979) with a tap improvisation that opened door after door to new rooms, each full of ideas.

Best Dance Performances of 2024

The highlight of “Max Roach 100” at the Joyce Theater was a performance by this silky, musical and generous tap dancer. In a daring improvisation — bordering on audacious — Casel danced to a duet Roach recorded with the pianist Cecil Taylor with such intuitive force that the three of them seemed to exist together in real time. She is always remarkable, but here she was a force of wit and wonder.

Best Dance Performances of 2022

Even in a crowded theater, some performances are intimate experiences, between you and the dancers onstage. The stage version of Casel’s “Chasing Magic” — first presented as an digital offering earlier in the pandemic — was about creating a community, an energetic exchange for everyone in the space. “We want to hear you, we want to feel you,” Casel, an extraordinary tap dancer, told the audience at the Joyce Theater. What did the two productions, online and live, both directed by Torya Beard, have in common, beyond great music and dance? Casel’s loose, funny banter, her remarkable feet up close, her transporting presence. She is air — as fresh as it comes.

CRITIC’S PICK Review: Reveling in the Tap Magic of Ayodele Casel

Casel’s joyful and generous spirit is as vivid as ever in a new virtual presentation by the Joyce Theater.

Best Dance of 2019

The effervescent Ms. Casel has been honing her expertise in tap dance since the 1990s. Her collaboration with the pianist and composer Mr. O’Farrill at the Joyce Theater was too long in coming — she should have been commissioned years earlier — but it was a spectacular display of technique and heart. Ms. Casel danced with the skill and spirit she is known for, but she also paid homage to the female tap dancers who came before her. She’s extraordinary.

Ayodele Casel + Arturo O'Farrill

Ayodele Casel has brought joy back into the Joyce Theater. Making a triumphant debut as a leader there on Tuesday, this tap dancer radiated joy and personified it. Joy, unsurprisingly, is the meaning of her name.

Ayodele Casel- The New Yorker

Ayodele Casel, a down-to-earth storyteller whose relaxed poise can belie the exceptional quickness and needlepoint intricacy of her footwork. For her début as a Joyce headliner, Sept. 24-29, this excellent musician is bringing along another: the pianist-composer Arturo O’Farrill. His deep, broad knowledge of Afro-Latin jazz is a given, but Casel, who was born in the Bronx and spent some of her childhood in her parents’ homeland of Puerto Rico, understands it, too. Playing together, she and O’Farrill communicate at advanced levels without showing off, following each other’s swerves, from groove to groove, as in a game between friends. A few other musicians and musician-dancers join them in the fun.

Ayodele Casel and Arturo O'Farrill team up at The Joyce

If you need any reason to be convinced that tap belongs in a bond with Afro-Latin jazz, buy a ticket to this show. As offered by O'Farrill and Casel, the combined music endlessly cascades like a crystalline stream over a long stretch of rocks, sparkling, glinting in sunlight. It gives life. Casel, in particular, finds innumerable delicate, exquisite facets to bring forth in sound--nothing expected or stale or slapdash; her discipline is steely--and she's joined by a diverse, talented young ensemble that includes Naomi Funaki, Dre Torres, Luke Hickey and Andre Imanishi.

Ayodele Casel + Arturo O'Farrill

When Casel took a pause to speak about her background in tap, you understand why her one-woman show While I Have the Floor was so successful. She has the emotional, dynamic, and rhythmic nuance of a storyteller, and she beams with such generosity that every heart melts.

BroadwayWorld

WAITING FOR GODOT shines at Spoleto, but surprisingly, the best one-woman show comes from tap dancer Ayodele Casel.

CHARLESTON CITY PAPER

Ayodele Casel taps into her past for her ovation-worthy 'While I Have the Floor'.

VOGUE

" Tap dancer extraordinaire Ayodele Casel gave a powerful performance, complete with a voiceover detailing the challenges she’s had to overcome as a woman working in a man’s world."

Ayodele Casel's Showstopper

One of the night’s biggest and most unexpected showstoppers came from one of the lesser known talents on the St. James stage that night. Casel, the rising Nuyorican tap dancer, grabbed the crowd with a display of virtuosic tapping, performed to a deeply personal spoken-word track she’d recorded. By the time she had finished, half the house was on its feet.

The New York Times

"Ayodele Casel's "Diary of a Tap Dancer," a suite of dances and reminiscences, should be on every tap festival program. It shines light, with humor and warmth, into the hearts and souls of a tired but idealistic tapper (Ms. Casel) and three tap artists (Maya Smullyan-Jenkins, Joseph Wiggan and a boy, Warren Craft) who give her hope."

NY TIMES FALL FOR DANCE

The program’s brightest spot was Ayodele Casel’s tribute to women in tap, “While I Have the Floor,”.

See Chicago Dance

“That leaves the middle generation, whose representatives on opening night were astounding, all in different ways. Ayodele Casel is a lightweight --- in terms of size, not talent. Small and slender and a little reserved (think Audrey Hepburn), she floats over the floor delivering taps so clean, light, and quick they're like a hummingbird's thrumming.”

Chicago Tribune

“...classy Ayodele Casel is all poetry and polish, her more restrained attack nevertheless fraught with intricacy and detail.”

Gia Kourlas for American Theater Magazine

"Casel dances with a strength most female dancers opt to camouflage with contrived styling. She is an ebullient performer, so full of life that for a little not to rub off on her audience is inconceivable."