Nick Young has been making music with his feet his whole life. Young grew up at his mother's studio, Young Dance Academy, in Oak Creek, WI, and at competitions like New York City Dance Alliance. He caught his big break with "So You Think You Can Dance," making it to the Top 20 on Season 8. That led to three viral tap videos, teaching gigs at 24 Seven Dance Convention and NYCDA, and two appearances by himself and his company, Rhythmatic, at the Capezio A.C.E. Awards—where they won second runner-up in 2017. Catch his latest full-length work when it hits film festivals later this year, and read on to find out how Young gets inspired to create. —Helen Rolfe
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"Appearing on 'World of Dance' Season 1 turned out to be a blessing in disguise. We didn't get more than a tiny bit of TV time, and one piece of feedback from the show really bothered me at first. When we were eliminated, the judges said our work needed to be more visually appealing. My initial reaction was, 'That's not what tap is!' But I slept on it, and realized: I want my work to be accessible, so it needs to be visual and tell a story. If you want to get someone who's not a tap dancer to really enjoy tap, it has to be more than a bunch of cool sounds. It's become my mission to get people who aren't familiar with tap to change their minds."
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"One time, Andy Blankenbuehler was teaching at NYCDA Nationals, and he said, 'The music plays because you are dancing. The music is being produced because you are dancing.' Normally, we think about it the other way around, like we're just dancing to this song. What he said changed the game for me in terms of what I wanted to make and what I think about when choreographing."
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"I'm a perfectionist to a T. I played sports growing up, so I'm my biggest competitor. I can't move on until I feel comfortable with a phrase. Of course, things change as the rehearsal process goes on. I just don't want to ever put out anything that I'm not personally happy with, and the only way to do that is to take care of every single detail. As I'm getting older, I'm trying to not be as hard on myself. It's really great to have people in your life who will say, 'Nick, it's great. You're overthinking it.' "
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"Spotify Discover has me listening to artists I'd never heard of, like Lake Street Dive. I like music that isn't a single time signature, so a friend sent me a live acoustic version of 'Heavy,' by Birdtalker. I saved it to Spotify, and a week later got an amazing song called 'Blue Healer' in Discover. I knew I wanted to choreograph to it the second I heard it. Birdtalker's stuff is deep, with really smart lyrics."
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"For Rhythmatic's current full-length piece On Top of the World, we created a world that asks, 'What happens when you die? What do you go through before you move on or don't?' It's a crazy concept for a tap show. But I just love creating so much that I'm not worried about criticism. People aren't going to like it. That's just a fact. If you don't worry about that, the information doesn't even really get to you. There's so much positive energy with this show, because everyone loves being in it. We're not just out there doing tap steps. It's a story the dancers interpret with their own intellects, to play their own characters."
A version of this story appeared in the February 2019 issue of Dance Spirit with the title "Choreographer's Collage: Nick Young."