Born: 16 Janaury 1976, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Dormeshia Sumbry
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Tap dancer Dormeshia had a well-established career as a dancer from a young age, making her Broadway debut in the musical revue Black and Blue when she was just 13, having studied tap since she was three. As a dancer, she won a host of awards, was the only female tap dancer in the Tony-winning musical Bring in da’ Noise, Bring in da’ Funk and even spent more than a decade as Michael Jackson’s tap instructor. But it wasn’t until she was 40 that she debuted her first full-length piece as a choreographer. When And Still You Must Swing premiered to sold-out crowds at the prestigious Jacob’s Pillow dance festival in 2016, it was recognized by The New York Times as the “Best of Dance for 2016” and made its New York debut in 2019. That year, The New York Times ran an article entitled “She’s the Queen of Tap. Is Her Moment Now?” and asserting “Long considered a master by her peers, Dormeshia is entering her prime.
Like Beyoncé or Prince, the tap dancer Dormeshia is singular enough to need no surname. In her field, she is unsurpassed in all-roundedness. Other tap dancers make artistic compromises. They sacrifice elegance for complexity, or sound for visual beauty, or the reverse. Not Dormeshia. In her dancing, nothing is missing. Music and motion are a unified impulse, a perfect whole, and every time she improvises, the history of tap meets its cutting edge.
Like many women, it’s no coincidence that she came into her own once her children were grown. She married at 22 and had the first of her three children at 23. “There was no way Dormeshia could’ve stepped out on the front line while she was trying to raise her family,” a friend observed.
“I built my life around my children,” Dormeshia herself acknowledged, “I do what I do, and I come right back home.” Yet as The New York Times observed, “a tap dancer must attend both to the upper body and to footwork, all while doing the essential thing: making music, telling a story. Nobody else does all of this better than Dormeshia. Most ballerinas her age would be thinking of retiring now, yet as a tap dancer, Dormeshia is in her prime.”
Dormeshia is also well-regarded as a teacher at institutions like Yale and Barnard College, and producer, with credits including co-director of the Jacob’s Pillow Tap Program and creator and producer of “Ladies in the Shoe” Tap Conference. She even has her own stamp, as one of five tap dancers included in the U.S. Postal Service’s Forever Collection.