Local dancer tappin’ in the New Year

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Local tap dancer Bill Evans has assembled a rhythm tap performance for the Key City Public Theatre stage to say goodbye to 2022 and welcome in 2023. The show is 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve.

Bill Evans first performed in Port Townsend in 1980 and has performed here about 50 times since then, often under the sponsorship of the Centrum Foundation, and became a permanent resident here in 2018.

He is internationally known as a modern dance choreographer, performer, company director, teacher, and writer, but he has had a parallel career as a rhythm tap artist.

In 2004, Dance Magazine named him one of the world’s favorite three tap artists.

He will be joined by a rising star in the rhythm tap world, Jessie Sawyers, and by pianist Linda Dowdell, who is well-known to Olympic Peninsula audiences as a performer, composer and director.

This will be the first time that Evans and Sawyers have worked together, but Evans and Dowdell first worked together in the late 70s when the Bill Evans Dance Company was based in Seattle and Dowdell accompanied classes and composed and performed works for performances, before she went on to an illustrious international touring career with Mark Morris and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Sawyers is a Seattle-based tap dancer, producer, entrepreneur, artist, educator, cultivator of community, believer in youth, life lover, and music maker. She began tap dancing at the age of eleven under the direction of Cheryl Johnson (who performed here in Port Townsend with Evans in June of 2022) and Anthony Peters. She has had the honor of studying with tap masters Arthur Duncan and Dianne Walker, and the late tap greats Cholly Atkins, Gregory Hines, Fayard Nicholas, and Jimmy Slyde.

“Tappin’ in the New Year” will consist of two sets with a 15-minute intermission.

The first set will include classic rhythm tap pieces choreographed by some of the iconic Black artists who developed the art form — “Honi” Coles, Leon Collins, “Buster” Brown, and Eddie Brown — as well as short solos created by Evans and Sawyers.

The second set will include two longer solos to the live jazz piano improvisation of Dowdell.

Evans will perform “Blues for My Father” and Sawyers will share her brilliant improvography.

The program will conclude with variations on the “Shim Sham,” the tap dancers’ international anthem, to “Auld Lang Syne.”