tap dance on hands

I love tap dance so, that I tapdance even on hands!

In 1985, when I first saw the Americans - Fred Ustaire, Nicolas brothers and others - tapdance, I came to understanding that if you want to amaze anybody with such difficult dance as tap dance (that was and is the thing which I wished to do very much), being born in the USA and being tap dance professinal is not enough. It is necessary to bring in something original, which hasn't been on yet. I wanted to amaze very much (here my second profession - director - proved useful to me). And I began to tapdance on hands.

Of course, this idea hasn't come to me straight away. To tell the truth, somebody had already made attempts to tapdance standing head over heels before, but I wanted to tapdance naturally on hands - like on feet. I had to find the means to make it merely in practice, because it is impossible to perform even one tenth of all those taps used by tapdancers, standing on bare hands. Then I decided to provide my hands with shoes and began to invent and construct special shoes for the hands.

The first models of these shoes were unconvinient and had many disadvantages, but while experimenting I made it possible to perform almost all technical device of tap dance standing on hands.

The only obstacle is very large physical load on humeral zone of hands and, accordingly, the limitation of time for performing on hands. Already after the first minute of persistent dance in handstand position hands become so tired, that it becomes impossible to perform technically difficult tap dance combinations. To give them some time for rest, I turn over on feet for a while and perform acrobatic jumps, splits, twines, etc.

I must note, that some tricks, performed on hands, are merely impossible to perform on feet.

Konstantin Nevretdinov

Click on the middle photo to see
me tapdancing on hands!
(506Kb)