Thursday 8 July 19:30 BST | 11:30 PDT | 14:30 EST/EDT | 20:30 CEST

This first session of the series looked at floors and mics. Annette and Lee will talked about how to get set up with a portable tap floor and microphone for solo performance, as well as how to approach creating larger floors for group performances and mixing live sound for a tap ensemble and live music.

Lee and Annette shared their experiences of designing and building portable tap floors and working with sound engineers to achieve good quality live sound with a band. We then opened up a Q&A session followed up by conversations in breakout rooms so that we could get further into conversations about key topics.

Lee and Annette shared lots of links to help us navigate how to achieve our own performance set-up. We have shared these below. Annette also recommended this book which can be obtained through contacting One Dance UK- 

A handbook for dance floors by Mark Foley

First published 1991, Dance UK

The next Network Session on August 12th will be looking at different shoes and taps. But we will be coming back to the topic of flooring and microphones in the September session from the view of larger staging and ensemble tap sound in live performance. 

If you would like to contact Annette or Lee for further information or to arrange some consultancy, you can find their contact information here:

Lee Payne https://www.bruckfeetproductions.com/ 

Annette Walker http://annettewalker.co.uk/ 

Links

Floors

Annette’s blog about creating your own tap floor

http://annettewalker.co.uk/2010/02/tap-dance-flooring/ 

DIY Guides

https://youtu.be/K6jNEP6mYes   

https://youtu.be/eUlLRud6cYg 

Andrew Nemr Gig board

http://videolibrary.tapdancemethod.com/401986585?autoplay=1 

Stagestep Encore floor panels. Specs are here https://www.stagestep.com/dance-floors/encore-collection/#encore-floors 

Stage Step Flooring

https://uk.harlequinfloors.com/en/products/studio-equipment/harlequin-professional-home-studio-kits

Recommended foam to use under tap floors https://softfloor.co.uk/category/classic/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIsqf4zKHU8QIVDd5RCh1PkASCEAAYASAAEgI_O_D_BwE

Annette:

My tap flooring research led me to use “closed cell foam”. Check out the tech specs of other portable sprung dance flooring systems for comparison. For my latest tap floor experiment floor (still in progress) I ordered a sheet of 10mm thick Platazote LD45 Black (https://www.poly-props.com/ld45-plastazote) 2m x 1m and cut it to the batten sizes I needed for a similar floor construction to this: