Review: Ayodele Casel Links Tap to Her Hip-Hop Beginnings
Ayodele Casel knows how to pull viewers toward her when she's onstage. She's a magnet. 'There she is,' someone behind me whispered in excited awe as Casel casually stepped onto the stage of the Joyce Theater, dropping a backpack on the floor. Applause, the kind that often greets musicians, followed, which was correct: Casel makes music with her feet.
'What's up, y'all?' she said, flashing an irrepressible smile.
With a feathery touch, Casel waved her hips and then caressed the floor with her feet as though strumming it. She is always pleasing to the ear and to the eye, but in 'Ayodele Casel: The Remix,' her latest evening of tap at the Joyce — a most impressive mood lifter — she has a new level of ease. She turns 50 next week, as she mentioned more than once, but she has never been more in her body than now.
For all of its jubilance, 'The Remix' is a serious show, one that celebrates the intimacy of friendship and specifically artist friendships — here, among dancers and musicians. But it unspools with a casualness, too, mirroring Casel's mix of easygoing and grand.
In 'The Remix,' directed and cocreated by Torya Beard, Casel shows that she can always be relied on to balance a light touch with heartfelt urgency. In this swift 70 minutes featuring her dances and those of others, she pays homage to a slice of time when she was finding her way.
'The Remix' is a trip back to the music, dance and soul of the 1990s, when Casel fell in love with tap and when it had a resurgence. During her early days, she practiced. And in those sessions, she was drawn to the music of the day, the music that she loved — the Fugees, Craig Mack, Nas. She experimented with finding, through tap, the groove and the swing in hip-hop.
'I wrote a poem, like the '90s,' Casel said in a nod to the poetry slams of the era while opening a notebook at the start of 'Q-Tap' (2025), a vivid introduction to her theme: 'I've got my backpack and everything.'
The setting is laid-back, with the stage reimagined as something between a living room and a lounge, neither precious nor sleek. There are chairs and a sofa scattered along its sides; a television set has the title of the show drawn on its screen. There's even a piece, one of 13 numbers in the show, that leans into relaxation: Ryan K. Johnson's 'Sofa Vibes.'
As she described her early days — rollerblading to Fazil's, the Times Square studio that shuttered in 2008 — she sang a few bars from Ahmad's 'Back in the Day,' which led into the story of how she found her path to dance, to her dance expression. 'Heavy D, Mary J., wanting to be a part of what I was hearing on the radio,' she said, 'but in my way.'
As a 'Black and Puerto Rican kid raised on rhythm and rhyme,' she said, her dancing grew with her love of hip-hop, not despite it: 'It's a groove, it's a flow, sophisticated and bold.' She slipped in a lyric by the Notorious B.I.G.: 'If you don't know, now you know.'
Throughout 'The Remix,' more of a living entity than a backward-looking retrospective, dancers mix and mingle with a poet, a freestyle artist and a pair of musicians along with Liberty Styles, a D.J. and dancer. Jared Alexander created the hip-hop-inflected score.
As dancers cross the stage gliding in and out of formations, music references appear and disappear, giving the work the feel of a before times free-form radio station. As one piece slides into the next, bite-size dances build in complexity and elegance — Ginger Rogers was an early love, and that influence is present, too — to show Casel's lineage.
For 'Push/Pull,' with choreography by Casel, John Manzari sings Cole Porter's 'Begin the Beguine' while Alexander, Naomi Funaki and Funmi Sofola cross the stage in airy unison. In 'Quicksand,' Quynn L. Johnson, its choreographer, starts by brushing her shoes in trails of sand. 'Little Things,' by Funaki and Caleb Teicher, is gentle and commanding, as Casel and Funaki dance with such lightness that it makes the floor seem like a cloud.
In 'Unmuted,' Kate Louissaint delivers a rousing rendition of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,' considered the Black national anthem, as dancers build a percussive wall that starts quietly but grows to match her towering voice. It was a political statement, but a subtle one: 'If you don't know, now you know.'
Casel's 'Audrey,' a 20-year-old work set to Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, is understated and chic — an ode to Audrey Hepburn's grace, with punctuated finger snaps and the smooth swirl of a wrist. This led to a stirring finale, 'Speak Your Name,' which showed off the entire cast, buoyed by the ever-smiling Casel, into a vessel of swinging, swaying bodies. This remix is more than a look at the past, it's a promise of a future.
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