At Co-Op, Three "Soles" Tap Into Cross-Cultural Storytelling

Top: Amanda Castro, whose primary medium is tap dance, does Kathak dance during Brinda Guha's portion of the master class. Bottom: Junior Vanessa Serrano. Lucy Gellman Photos.

"One two three four five! One-two .. three four five! One - two - three - four - five! Onetwothreefourfive!" Amanda Castro called out, and an entire dance studio snapped to attention. Across the room, feet pounded the floor, feeling out the fundamentals of Kathak dance, tap, and flamenco. In three rows, dancers spun gently, rocked on their toes from front to back, lifted their arms as if they were about to take flight. 

The count, steady as a drum, never stopped. Beside a floor-to-ceiling window, Quinton White never took his eyes off the mirror in front of him, hands raised at his waist. Each time he extended his arms, he added another chapter to the story he was telling with his wrists, fingers, and feet.  

That rhythm came to Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School last Friday, as Soles of Duende arrived to teach a master class before their performance of “Can We Dance Here?” at the Yale Schwarzman Center on Saturday night. In just over an hour of movement, the trio— tap dancer Amanda Castro, flamenco artist Arielle Rosales and Kathak dancer Brinda Guha—showed how percussive dance can tap into a shared humanity, as much a cross-cultural bridge builder as it is a heartbeat. 

The Dec. 14 performance closed the Schwarzman Center’s 2024 fall season. For Castro, it was also a homecoming: she grew up in New Haven and attended Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School (BRAMS) and ACES Educational Center for the Arts (ECA). More on that below. 

“I feel like for me, there’s always a little bit of curiosity and a little bit of fear, and you have to like, give that permission to face the unknown,” said Guha, who learned Kathak dance from her mother and has since worked to demystify and democratize the form. “Giving them permission to explore. It [Kathak dance] feels precious, it feels ancient and it feels untouchable. And that’s the point [of teaching it].” 

Soles of Duende, which was founded in 2016, captures that spirit from its collective brain to its members’ arms, legs and feet, which seem to be constantly in motion. That’s even in the title of the group: “duende” translates literally  to “elf” or “goblin” in Spanish, but its deeper, more intangible meaning is a kind of transcendent state of being, particularly when it is tied to music.

Castro, Rosales and Guha don’t just work across their respective forms: they share them generously, in service to the rhythm that binds them together and tell stories across cultures. Each brings a different expertise and tradition: Kathak is a North Indian form of classical dance, flamenco originates in Southern Spain, and tap is indigenous to the U.S., where its genesis is inextricably bound to jazz music, nineteenth-century Black dance, and a tradition of minstrelsy and oppression that is still stingingly, surprisingly recent. 

Friday, the three brought that into Co-Op’s second floor dance studio, where first-year dance teacher Tayvon Dudley is usually teaching his juniors during that time (Dudley, who attended BRAMS with Castro, stayed for the class). As students formed a circle around Castro, she counted to five, then counted again, then again, changing her speed and tone each time. Beneath her, her feet hammered out a rhythm, never still for more than a quarter of a second. 

As she moved, students loosened up, making the five count their own. Shoulders relaxed, falling from where they had been just moments before. Arms flew upward, following Castro’s lead; knees bent and stretched out as thunderous, then syncopated, footfalls filled the studio. On a dry erase board behind students, a suite of ballet terms peeked out in blue and red marker, momentarily forgotten.  

“Okay,” Castro said as the class prepared to fan out, students finding their familiar spaces on the floor. “Let’s take that and put it in your pocket.” 

With her back to a mirror that ran the length of the room, Guha stepped forward, tracing the origins of Kathak dance from Northern India to New York, where she is working to take it down from its pedestal. She guided students through mudras, or hand gestures, channeling centuries of politics, war and migration into a fluid set of movements. 

Her right arm swept to the side, thumb tucked in, as the left elbow bent. Her wrist bent towards the floor, exposing a duet of tattooed stars on her forearm. One row behind her, junior Vanessa Serrano looked down at her right hand and then up at the left. 

“It’s a welcome,” Guha said as her arms came closer to her core and rested there for a moment. As she shifted, the rich sound of her Ghungroos echoed through the space. “It’s a greeting. It’s a beautiful example of these two ideologies coming together. It’s about understanding how far from each other we’ve gotten.” 

She took a pause and looked at the students around her. It was time to add the feet. As she began to step, she described it as both dance and dialogue, through which she connects with history, with fellow artists and with the audience. “We really are talking to the audience all the time,” she said.   

In the center of the room, junior Dianalys Boyer focused her energy on each movement, extending her arms with a slow, gentle grace that didn’t feel quite like the classical porte de bras she was used to. As a dancer in school and at church, she’s used to different forms, she later said—but she had never experienced anything like Kathak dance. For her, each movement was a way to reach out and touch a new tradition.  

“It was different from what we usually do [in class]—we’re getting to experience different cultures,” she said. “For me, it’s more international. Every style comes from a different place. You get to challenge yourself.”

Back at the front of the classroom, it seemed that dancers were just getting started. Stepping to the front, Rosales clasped and unclasped her hands and pounded the floor, travelling from Northern India to Southern Spain without ever leaving College Street. Not far from Boyer, Quinton White watched every movement, smiling as even Rosales’ earrings—chickens with calf-high red boots for dancing—began to sway and dance with her body.  

Top: Arielle Rosales in action. Bottom: Teacher Trayvon Dudley (in knitted cap), a BRAMS and Co-Op alum who joined Co-Op at the beginning of this school year. 

“If you look at a world map, which I encourage you to do, you will see how close Spain is to Morocco,” Rosales said, talking through flamenco’s Andalusian and Arab influences as she moved onto her back leg, then fixed a thick, tidy imaginary belt around her waist. She rested her hands atop it for just a moment. “We’re going to take flamenco and put it into the world of Soles.”

Turning towards the mirror, she began to clap, a drumming, one-two one-two sound that filled the room as students joined in. Planting her left foot, she displayed a golpe or stomp, listening as the thud of over a dozen left feet joined in. Between claps, feet smacked the floor, the sound hard and certain as students practiced in unison. As Castro joined in, it became a full-body movement, with hands hitting shoulders and thighs with the unmistakable slap and smack of skin on skin.

“Don’t be afraid to use your whole body to fill the space,” Rosales said. As in on cue, White seemed to stand a little taller, taking a moment to feel where his shoulders, hips, legs and feet were in space. As a student at the Hamden Academy of Dance and Music, he later said he was grateful for the opportunity to push himself beyond his comfort zone. “It was different!” he said. 

Jasmine Tolson, Quinton White and  Dianalys Boyer.

That remained clear as Castro rounded out the lesson with a crash course in tap, teaching students to find their footing in the city that raised her. As she asked who in the room had ever done tap—only three hands went up—she encouraged dancers to rearrange themselves, watching them buzz through the space like excited electrons.

As they did, she tried to get a read on what students knew about the form.

“It’s very grounded?” said Payton Goodwin, with a lift at the edge of her voice that suggested a question. 

Castro nodded. “It’s very grounded!” she said. “What else?” The room was silent for a rare moment. 

“Look to your neighbor and say percussive! Dance!” she said, and waited as the room filled with the chirp and bellow of young voices. “Look to your other neighbor and say percussive! Dance!”

Turning the clock back to the nineteenth century, Castro described tap’s origins as an art form that is both uniquely Black and American, bound to both the history of jazz music and the economic oppression and disenfranchisement of Black Americans. 

From 1740 to 1865, the Negro Act of 1740 prohibited the use of drums (among other musical instruments) among enslaved Black people. While the law ended with the emancipation of enslaved people in 1865, the use of feet and hands as percussive instruments has remained and evolved since. 

“People didn’t have access to drums, so we did it with the body,” she said. She traced the evolution of tap from William Henry Lane—more commonly known as Master Juba—to contemporary tap dance today, taking the same sort of long view of history that Guha had earlier in the class. As she talked students through a cramp roll, she paused briefly, encouraging them not to favor their right sides. She was firm but gentle, smiling as she spoke. 

“Everybody look to your neighbor and say love! That left!” she said. Again, young voices filled the classroom, followed by a joyful explosion of footfalls that got a few glances from students making their way through the hallways. 

That Castro looked at home was perhaps not a surprise: she later recalled feeling like BRAMS and ECA “saved me,” she said. She now wants to give people she teaches the same kind of foundation that she had dancing with Nikki Claxton, Sheri Caldwell, and Liz Glover right here in New Haven. When she suggested that students put a Kathak-flamenco-tap routine together, it was as though the room murmured in delight. 

At the center of the room, junior Jasmine Tolson soaked up the sound around her as Castro, Guha and Rosales arranged students in three groups and ran their routines. As she returned to her normal Friday morning minutes later, she praised the artists for helping her challenge herself all before the third period bell. 

“You have to be more open with your body,” she said.