The Yoda-Like Mentor Behind the Masters of Tap Dance

Medler would share with his students techniques and ideas that he hadn’t yet mastered, letting them all figure it out together. “That made us feel OK about whatever level we were at,” Hickey said, “and it allowed us to soar.”

In high school, Medler was an athlete: baseball, track and field. At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, he was a varsity fencer. After college, some friends asked him to be in a movie they were making. “My character was supposed to be learning to tap dance,” he recalled in an email. “And so I got an LP with ‘teach yourself to tap’ instructions. I was hooked.”

It wasn’t long before he was teaching tap to children, eventually at the Ballet School of Chapel Hill (founded by Gretchen Vickery and Dorrance’s mother, M’Liss Dorrance). That’s where he started the youth ensemble, which is referred to by the acronym NCYTE — pronounced “insight.”

As Medler began to attend the tap festivals that emerged in the 1980s, he learned about and from legends like John Bubbles and Charles (Honi) Coles, and younger innovators like Brenda Bufalino. From the 1990s on, he took his students to the festivals — to meet elders and peers, soak up tradition and perform. In 1999, he started his own North Carolina Rhythm Tap Festival, bringing the greats to Chapel Hill.

The youth ensemble he developed was far from kid stuff. When Hickey was a member, he said, he knew more than 40 pieces. Many were by Medler, but many were commissioned works by masters like Bufalino and Savion Glover — or by former members who were becoming masters, like Dorrance. Most performances were at schools and retirement communities, but they eventually expanded to stages in Mexico, Brazil, Europe and China.

Hickey called the ensemble “a self-cleaning, self-organizing mechanism.” Older members were responsible for teaching the repertoire to younger ones. At shows, performers had to introduce and explain the work and history to the audience — which sometimes meant, terrifyingly, that elementary school students were lecturing high schoolers.