Freshman Dances Off the Beaten Path

Rummaging through the closet of her Canaday single, Tal Oppenheimer ’12 searches for a dress. The intense midday sun is banned from her room by heavy curtains as she ruffles through her clothing in search of her favorite gown. Finally, she holds her treasure up with pride—a miniscule turquoise number, bedazzled and glistening despite the shade. It is one of the Harvard Ballroom Dance Team’s standard competition gowns.

Minutes later, with nearly as much enthusiasm as she displayed over the stunning dress, she declares: “Let me show you my prosthetics.”

EVOLUTION OF DANCE

Oppenheimer has been dancing for eleven years despite being born with a congenital amputation caused by an amniotic band that left her right arm truncated slightly below the elbow.

“It’s not a big part of who I am,” she says. “I have one arm, but my friends forget about it. It’ll be like, ‘Oh, does my finger look swollen?’ And they’ll grab my other hand to compare and I’ll laugh at them.”

From the age of six Oppenheimer says she began lobbying her mother for the chance to take dance classes.

“One day I came home and said, ‘I want to tap,’ and my mom said, ‘Okay. Let’s find you a class.’”

The six-year-old was soon enrolled in a small studio, and embarked on what would become a life-long love affair with dance.

“Her first teacher was elderly,” said Oppenheimer’s mother, Tamar, in a phone interview, “and I think [Tal] was afraid of her. But that was her first tap teacher, and she was amazing.”

The decline of her first studio led Oppenheimer to begin dancing at The Beat, a dance company in her hometown of Berkley, California. There, she was exposed to rhythm tap, a style that incorporates jazz rhythms developed on the city streets and that is vastly different from the more common Broadway tap.

In high school, Oppenheimer received private lessons from tap master Sam Weber, who the New York Times writes is “the equivalent of a virtuoso pianist.”

“He’s amazing. He moves his foot and it makes seven different sounds!” she laughs, beaming as she describes her tutor.

Weber, a former ballet dancer and a professional tapper since 1986, remarked in an interview that Oppenheimer was a “great student.”

“She would find an exercise frustrating or nearly impossible in one lesson and then come back the next week having little or no trouble with it,” he said.

Oppenheimer also danced at the Bay Area Rhythm Tap Company, where she was thrust into the role of instructor.

“A teacher was having some knee problems and had to go through a recovery period,” Oppenheimer says. “[The teacher] had Sam [Weber], and he would teach her classes, and I would go to every class he was teaching, regardless of the level. When he left, I would sub.”

When Oppenheimer taught, she was typically the youngest person in the room. “They were all adult classes, but I knew all of them and I was friends with them,” she recalls. She fondly refers to the dancers as her “adoptive parents.”

In fact, in Oppenheimer’s dorm room, a plushy stuffed monkey sits at the foot of her bed, a gift from one of her “dance mothers.”

Oppenheimer also performed in the 2007 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

“I was a tap dancing Christmas tree. I danced the entire route. I wasn’t even on a float, so I had to travel,” she says.

“She’s a hard worker,” her mother commented. “When she’s not tapping with her feet, she’s tapping with her fingers!”

But upon her arrival at Harvard, Oppenheimer decided to try her hand at a vastly different form of dance.

INSIDE THE PRACTICE STUDIO

“My brother started doing ballroom at his school,” Oppenheimer says, speaking of her foray into ballroom dance.

“It made me think, ‘Oh, I can do something new in college!’ So that’s why I started thinking of ballroom,” she says. “That, and So You Think You Can Dance,” she added referring to the popular reality television show.

Oppenheimer joined the Harvard Ballroom Dance Team, and has since danced and placed in five competitions.

At practice, Oppenheimer’s dedication to dance shines brighter than her rhinestone-studded ballroom gown.

At first she stands with her team, which she describes as “one big happy family.” Then the music starts and it’s all business, she says.

With an upcoming competition at MIT looming, the dancers are aiming to hone their movements into a solid, graceful routine, worthy of the top prize.

A sensual Latin number comes first, and Oppenheimer takes her position, intense focus evident on her face. She joins her partner and sways to the beat.

In the austere, dim practice room, with dancers clad in basic t-shirts and tight black exercise pants, the lighthearted social gathering transforms into a passionate cat-and-mouse game between the dancers.

If Oppenheimer were not sporting a tank-top, it would be impossible to tell that she was wearing a prosthetic arm.

Her partner throws her over his knee, as other couples twist and spin around the room.

The song ends, and it’s all smiles once again as the team critiques each other’s steps. It’s a careful, exact process, an optimal blend of serious assessment and light-hearted banter. And once everything has been said, another song begins.

In the midst of the controlled chaos of practice, with couples looping in and out of each other’s paths, Oppenheimer taps her silver ballroom shoes across the floor in the brief moments of rest. Her feet move like lightning and it produces a crisp clatter that can be heard over the din of the practice room.

A CHORUS OF SOUND

When she is not in a dance studio, Oppenheimer can be found in a woodturning studio.

She will live in Mather House next year which houses its own woodshop. Oppenheimer says she is grateful that it saves her from midnight commutes from the Yard to the shop.

“I built my dining room table,” she says proudly. “You walk into my house, and you see my table. Then there’s a mirror with the mosaic I made around it, and then you see my salad bowls and cutting boards.”

In her room, she is eager to show off the numerous wooden bowls that she has crafted over the course of the semester.

As for the future, Oppenheimer says she is unsure of what lies ahead. She knows she wants to be a “science-something” concentrator, and that she intends to continue dancing throughout her life.

She still takes lessons from Weber when she returns home. “We’re doing some very advanced dances now, and it’s a lot of fun for me to dance with her— challenging, too!” Weber noted.

“Between the beats that other people do, he puts a few more,” Oppenheimer’s mother said of her daughter’s teacher.

However, Oppenheimer is hesitant to pursue dance professionally.

“As much as I love dance, I don’t think I’d want to make a career out of it. I love it, though, and I intend to do it my entire life,” she says.

It is easy to believe that she will never stop dancing as one watches her glide easily across the floor, her tapping feet emanating a chorus of sound.