UWSider’s Tap-Dance Journey Is a Hands-Down Success

By Abigael T. Sidi

Growing up in Dallas, Mary Six Rupert danced her heart out at every opportunity. She dreamed of being hired by anyone who could pay her to do what she loved the most, and she practiced for hours upon hours.

Her hard work paid off: Rupert went on to become a Radio City Rockette, first as a “regular” dancer, and later as the dance captain. She also taught at Wagner College, the Juilliard School, and the Broadway Dance Center, as well as internationally in Paris, Vienna, Germany, and Japan.

Today, she lives on the Upper West Side and runs her own company, Tap: On Tap. But it’s not just any dance company: Tap: On Tap includes both professional tap dancers and dancers in wheelchairs, who use special gloves of Rupert’s invention to tap with their hands instead of their feet.

“[It] was not anything that I had ever thought about until my mother,” Rupert told the West Side Rag. She explained that her mother, who had been a dance instructor herself, had a stroke in her eighties that landed her in a wheelchair. “She would still think about steps, but she could no longer execute them. So I was looking at her and thinking: What can I do to help her continue to use her knowledge and still enjoy tap dancing?” Then she realized: Her mother’s legs no longer worked, but her arms and hands were fine.

So Rupert got to work; she disassembled tap shoes, unscrewing the metal plates from the soles and attaching them to gloves, then trying to recreate traditional tap steps using her hands and a wooden cutting board that subbed for a “dance floor.” After two years of experimenting, she showed her mother, who caught on right away. “Mother and I were able to tap dance together using our hands for a while before she passed” in 2012, Rupert said.

Shortly afterward, Rupert mentioned the tap gloves while teaching at Bridge for Dance, a studio at 105th and Broadway that offers an array of adult classes. One of Rupert’s students worked at Mount Sinai Hospital and knew the recreational therapy department was looking for summer activities. He connected Rupert with the hospital, and soon she was sitting at a table with people with spinal cord injuries, amputations, and other physical issues for which they used wheelchairs. She passed out tap gloves, turned on some energetic music, and started a dance class. Though she’d been unsure of what to expect, “we all had a great time,” she recalled. So much so, in fact, that she began wondering what else she could do to open the world of dance to people with disabilities — and Tap: On Tap was born. Several members of her original Mt. Sinai class are in, or have been in, the company.

One of them is a dancer named Avni, who uses a wheelchair. “I saw Mary Six for the first time at Mount Sinai, and she was teaching a class, but no one had invited me!” explained Avni. “So I asked one of the ladies working for Mount Sinai if I could join the team and they said yes. After that I started going to every class.”

Avni has now been dancing with Rupert for almost 10 years, and he says “hand-tapping” has become one of his favorite activities. He attends every rehearsal, performs at every concert, and has built strong friendships with the other dancers.  “I love the classes, the tap dancing, so much. It’s so much fun,” he said.

Another member of the company, UWS resident Alina Silver, started taking tap classes with Rupert in 2015; at the time, Silver was a Rockette and needed to stay in shape during the dancers’ off season. When Rupert introduced her to “hand-tapping” and asked her to join Tap: On Tap, she was in awe. “Mary Six’s rhythms made perfect sense to me, and I loved this inventive, musical way of incorporating tap dancing with our hands,” Silver said. During performances, she and the other professional dancers in the company tap with their feet in some numbers, and with their hands in others; the dancers in wheelchairs sometimes tap with their hands, and other times participate in across-the-stage choreography in their chairs.

Rupert and the dancers work together to come up with choreography, formations, and costumes for every number, which can take months to plan and rehearse. When the group was getting ready to perform during the Tap City Rhythm in Motion Concert at Symphony Space in 2024, Silver recalled, “Mary Six rehearsed us the only way a Rockette would: with precision, repetition, and sharp attention to detail. The performance was electric.”

But the company also has faced a lot of challenges over the years, the most notable of which has been finding spaces with accessible stages; most have stairs, which make them extremely difficult for performers in wheelchairs. The one exception: Symphony Space at 95th and Broadway, where the troupe has performed twice.

 

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Rupert said that tap dancing with one’s hands is not nearly as easy as it might sound. She spent hours coming up with hand movements that mimicked traditional tap steps, and combining them into routines; she then spent more time turning it into an official program, which she copyrighted under the name Tap Dancing Hands Down® and teaches both in person and over Zoom.

Over the years, tap dancing with her hands has become second nature to Rupert, but she admits it’s still quite the brain exercise. “Tap is very specific. You can’t just have people improv-ing and waving their arms around.”

 

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Though Rupert continues to teach regular tap dancing — 10 to 15 classes a week — hand tapping has a special place in her heart.

“Right now, I am teaching a 14-year-old student [with a disability] whose mother found me online and who loves musical theater,” Rupert shared. “After about three months [of lessons], her high school was doing a production of Newsies and she auditioned as a [hand] tap dancer … and she got in! She and her mother were in tears.”

Moments like that make all the hard work worthwhile for Rupert. “I think [people] feel confidence. Even with the wheelchair classes that I taught at the hospital, we just had fun, and it was an equalizer. Whatever their disability didn’t matter.”

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