As we prepare to open Love Taps next week, we near the end of our story show making process for this season. Every year, this process while familiar becomes a bit like reinventing the wheel as we push ourselves to explore new genres and choose which conventions to play up and which to pare down. Because we are (from our research) the only tap company in America and maybe even the world creating full length story shows, we have the luxury of defining what the tap opera looks like but also the drawback of not having many sources from which to draw inspiration or how-to's.

Being part of Chicago Tap Theatre means not only looking forward in the art of tap dance, but looking back as well. It has been our mission since the company’s inception to not only break through the boundaries of tap dance, exploring it’s capabilities to move, be expressive, and convey narrative, but also to preserve the history of tap dance that has let us do all that.

Here are even more behind the scenes photos of our morning at WGN news courtesy of company member Melissa Reh (she's one of our best documentarians.)

Today goes down in the CTT history books as just one of those great experiences we’ve had together. There are quite a few that live in the fondest part of our collective memory, among them our performance at Lollapalooza, our trips to France, our New York debut at the New York Music Theater Festival and of course those baked potatoes we had at Stevenson High School and today’s performance on WGN midday news is way up there on the list.