The Legacy Project : With Heather Cornell

About Heather Cornell

With a career that has spanned over 5 decades, Heather Cornell has had a tremendous impact on shaping the global tap dance community. A leading voice of her generation, that of  the Tap Dance Renaissance, she is Artistic Director and co-founder of Manhattan Tap – her critically acclaimed international touring company known for live music collaboration, as well as for  launching the careers of many of today’s leading tap artists. She continues to initiate and tour various  projects, as one of the world’s most in demand dance/music performers and educators.  Her 10-hour oral history was added to the Jerome Robbins collection at the NYC Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in 2015, where only a  handful of international tap artists have that honor. Having been mentored by giants of the tap dance genre, as well as by iconic bassist Ray Brown, Cornell’s calling is to break the rules of today’s traditional tap pedagogy, and reposition the artform equally in music and dance.  A recording artist, Cornell is a physical percussionist and she plays using different textures of sound – wood, leather and sand – always in collaboration with world and jazz musicians.  The Heather Cornell Legacy Project, now in its 2nd year, is an initiative to pass to the next generations her archives, her lineage and her concepts through working to create an active shift of understanding of the artform in today’s practitioners.