Review: Ayodele Casel Links Tap to Her Hip-Hop Beginnings

Ayodele Casel knows how to pull viewers toward her when she’s onstage. She’s a magnet. “There she is,” someone behind me whispered in excited awe as Casel casually stepped onto the stage of the Joyce Theater, dropping a backpack on the floor. Applause, the kind that often greets musicians, followed, which was correct: Casel makes music with her feet.

“What’s up, y’all?” she said, flashing an irrepressible smile.

With a feathery touch, Casel waved her hips and then caressed the floor with her feet as though strumming it. She is always pleasing to the ear and to the eye, but in “Ayodele Casel: The Remix,” her latest evening of tap at the Joyce — a most impressive mood lifter — she has a new level of ease. She turns 50 next week, as she mentioned more than once, but she has never been more in her body than now.

For all of its jubilance, “The Remix” is a serious show, one that celebrates the intimacy of friendship and specifically artist friendships — here, among dancers and musicians. But it unspools with a casualness, too, mirroring Casel’s mix of easygoing and grand.

In “The Remix,” directed and cocreated by Torya Beard, Casel shows that she can always be relied on to balance a light touch with heartfelt urgency. In this swift 70 minutes featuring her dances and those of others, she pays homage to a slice of time when she was finding her way.

“The Remix” is a trip back to the music, dance and soul of the 1990s, when Casel fell in love with tap and when it had a resurgence. During her early days, she practiced. And in those sessions, she was drawn to the music of the day, the music that she loved — the Fugees, Craig Mack, Nas. She experimented with finding, through tap, the groove and the swing in hip-hop.

“I wrote a poem, like the ’90s,” Casel said in a nod to the poetry slams of the era while opening a notebook at the start of “Q-Tap” (2025), a vivid introduction to her theme: “I’ve got my backpack and everything.”