The Yoda-Like Mentor Behind the Masters of Tap Dance

As the top-shelf tap dancer Michelle Dorrance sees it, “Shift.,” the show that her company is debuting at the Joyce Theater this week, isn’t exactly a tribute to Gene Medler, her foremost teacher and mentor.

“It’s not about him, it’s because of him,” she said after a recent rehearsal. “I hope to honor the way he taught us.”

The education Dorrance had in mind went way beyond tap. “It’s not just how he inspired us to approach our art form, but the way he thinks about life,” she said. “It’s the community he created and how he charged us to care for each other.”

Medler’s pupils tend to talk about him similarly: as a second father, a role model, a joking but Yoda-like guru. The most prominent of them include Dorrance and several members of her company, Dorrance Dance, as well as Jared Grimes, a tap virtuoso whose performance in “Funny Girl” on Broadway earned him a Tony Award nomination.

“There’s not a day that goes by,” Grimes said, “that I don’t think of Gene’s contribution to who I am.”

In the 1990s, Dorrance and Grimes were members of the North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble, which Medler founded (under a different name) in Chapel Hill in 1983. The internationally touring ensemble of tap dancers, aged 8 to 18, became one of the best tap training grounds in the world.