Northwestern tap dance group TONIK Tap started without a performance floor.
After Leo Lamontagne (Communication ’05) founded the dance group in 2001, campus venues worried the dancers’ shoes would ruin surfaces like the Wirtz Ballroom stage, he said.
Despite this initial pushback, TONIK marked its 20th spring show with “Hall of Fame” Friday and Saturday in that very room. The group danced to songs in a range of styles, from Queen to Lady Gaga.
Lamontagne founded TONIK his freshman year, but the group’s first show wasn’t until 2005. He guarded and painted The Rock, organized auditions and choreographed on his own, he said. From starting with around 10 dancers on a portable floor they purchased themselves, the group has since doubled in size.
Members no longer need to sand a slippery floor on an outdoor basketball court or worry about it being stolen from storage — both issues Lamontagne said the founding members faced.
“(The TONIK floor) is a wonderful foundation of what TONIK is,” he said. “It’s what we tap on. It’s where we make our memories, whether good, bad or crazy. Then, you take a piece of it with you when you graduate.”
He said he still keeps his piece of their original floor, as do many TONIK alumni as part of a former tradition.
As each class of graduating seniors took pieces, remaining members added new ones every year. Although this specific tradition ended after the group found a home at the Wirtz Ballroom, other customs remain.
Each show concludes with the Shim Sham, a traditional 1920s tap routine that TONIK began performing at its first spring show in Lamontagne’s senior year. This weekend, alumni in the audience joined the current dancers on stage to perform the classic number.
Communication senior Alex Angrist, TONIK’s director of marketing, said she initially thought of reviving the group’s alumni outreach over winter break. After sending over 50 messages via LinkedIn, she chatted with alums online and even with some in person.
She said her meetup with TONIK alumna Ashley May Coussens (Communication ’12) at a New York coffee shop lasted three hours.
“I figured that this would maybe be 45 minutes, but there was just so much TONIK lore to catch up on,” Angrist said. “I literally took out a pen and paper and started writing things down.”
Through these conversations, Angrist said she learned about lifelong bonds within the group — including marriages.
Samantha O’Connell (Bienen ’11) met her now-husband Michael Salomon (Communication ’09) when she first auditioned for TONIK.
“I saw my husband as a 19-year-old guy, full ‘fro, sweatband, wearing a shirt that said ‘Reading Rules,’” O’Connell said. “And I was like, ‘Who is this goofball of a person?’”
O’Connell and Salomon got married in September. They performed a self-choreographed tap routine at their wedding.
TONIK also led to Jaema Green (McCormick and Communication ’08) meeting her spouse. A fellow TONIK member brought the group to a CD release party for their acapella group, X-Factors. There, Green said she met her now-husband Daniel Green (Bienen ’08).
Jaema Green became the group’s artistic director as a sophomore after Lamontagne’s graduation. She said other members nicknamed her “Mama T” (as in T for TONIK) because she was “mothering everybody at the time, even though we were so young.”
“We were rehearsing late at night and processing breakups and other stuff that was happening,” she said. “It was a group that knew everything that was going on with me, and I knew what was going on with them.”
Although Lamontagne said he felt confident TONIK would continue under Green’s leadership, he said he never would have predicted it to last two decades.
Still, he said tap dancing’s niche nature forms close relationships. Most members do not tap dance in groups before joining TONIK, like Angrist, who said she learned to tap dance through open classes.
“People identify as tap dancers,” Lamontagne said. “When you put those people together, all of a sudden you’ve got this thing that is kind of personal, and you find people to share it with.”
For Angrist, TONIK offered community not only in tap dance but also at Northwestern. She said joining the group helped solidify friendships in her freshman year.
Before this year, her knowledge of TONIK alumni came from watching routines on YouTube. So she said meeting Coussens, whom she’d seen in one of those videos, was “a little earth-shattering.”
“These are people that we never knew, but we know that we’re somehow connected to them,” Angrist said. “It’s kind of like finding a long lost family that you didn’t know existed.”
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