From ice cream aficionado to dance floor impresario, Mackenzie Adamson is putting his scoop away for the winter and taking out his tap shoes.
In the summer, Mackenzie and his wife Jasmine Brown dish out homemade ice cream from their SassyMacks Ice Cream booth in Lund and at local festivals.
This winter, Mackenzie will teach tap dancing at Laszlo Tamasik Dance Academy.
“I was hoping to get back into it at the University of Victoria, but then I had my motorcycle accident in my second year and never quite got back into it after that,” said Mackenzie. “It wasn’t until about two years ago that I actually had the ankle mobility to deal with it at all, so I kind of just dabbled a bit. Then this opportunity came up and it was an excuse to kick myself in the butt and get back into shape for it.”
According to the academy’s artistic director Paige Anderson, tap dancing is back in a big way.
“We only had one tap class last year,” said Anderson. “I wanted the program to grow and it has. We now have five tap classes, including an adult tap class.”
Anderson said Mackenzie was the first person she thought of to teach in the expanded program.
Mackenzie said he had forgotten how much he liked tapping until he started again. He was put into tap classes by his mother, Lyn Adamson, when he was seven because “she just really wanted to tire me out and tap dancing definitely tires you out,” he said.
According to Lyn, when they were living in Fort St. John there was a class that made dance fun for guys. Along with an interest in the movement of taekwondo and his noisemaking ability as a boy, Lyn said tap dancing was an easy choice.
“He’s been drumming his entire life so tapping is just drumming with his feet,” she said.
From the beginning, Mackenzie said he remembers liking the noise, rhythm and movement of tap.
“Probably around grade eight I started drumming as well, which is of course is a whole new regimen of rhythm,” he said. “I could cross-reference things between those two. I could make up new tap moves based on a really cool paradiddle with my drumsticks and do those same movements with my feet. I do like movement, rhythm and making noise; tap dancing brings all those things together.”
Mackenzie said he’s keen to teach a new rhythm generation a solid base in syncopation. The tradition of tap and its elements can be seen influencing some contemporary dance, such as stomp and heavy street-punk tap, he said.
“Then you’ve got the kind of classy Fred Astaire, the ridiculous Caleb Brothers and the full-on Lord of the Dance and Riverdance,” he said. “I still can’t watch Lord of the Dance and not get goosebumps. It’s kind of corny but at the same time it’s really powerful, just that unison of rhythm and beat and it’s hard to not want to jump in. There’s so many different paths you can go down and dabble in each one a little bit. It’s just a lot of fun.”
For more information on Mackenzie’s tap dancing classes, go to laszlodanceacademy.com.
