Ariel Hyatt has come a long way from obsessively watching a VHS tape of Riverdance in the nineties. Guitarist Alex Lifeson has joked that her step dancing inspired his dance moves on Rush’s massive reunion tour. Famed talent manager Sharon Osbourne has told Ms. Hyatt that her late husband, Ozzy, would have loved the dancer’s percussive tribute to Crazy Train. Tens of thousands of others watch every Instagram video the 36-year-old posts, flinging links across the internet of her tapping and clacking out transfixing rhythms to heavy-music classics.
It’s been less than a year since Ms. Hyatt, from Powassan, Ont., began building a digital community around the dance tradition that has shaped her life.
Her Instagram account, @arielhyattstepdance, had fewer than 1,000 followers when she posted a video of herself step dancing to Crazy Train in March. The response was so intense that she began choreographing and filming dances to more metal and hard-rock classics – building up her footwork’s complexity with the gradual rise of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck, blasting out the beat of Slayer’s Raining Blood and keeping pace with the sheer tempest of Alex Van Halen’s drum-solo intro to Hot for Teacher. She has amassed more than 220,000 followers in just months, and is building audiences on TikTok and YouTube, too.
Though she has studied the work of tap dancers and spent time in Istanbul immersed in Turkish rhythms, her style is steeped in the Ottawa Valley school of step dancing. Its lineage is in the Scottish and Irish step dance traditions – often performed at Celtic music concerts alongside fiddlers such as Ashley MacIsaac and Natalie MacMaster – with some French-Canadian influence, more aggressive stepping and a greater tap component.
This newfound fame is a little bittersweet for Ms. Hyatt, who, after her Riverdance fixation culminated in a performance for her parents’ wedding anniversary, began taking lessons at age nine. The popularity of the Ottawa Valley tradition, which was already mostly limited to pockets around Ontario, is fading.
“I always wanted to bring my dance style to an international audience,” she said in an interview, “because I felt like that was a way to keep it alive. Like, it couldn’t just stay in Ontario any more. We just had to get it out to more people, other countries.”
Chad Wolfe, an Ottawa-based fiddle and step dance teacher who took Hyatt under his wing in 1999, said she has become a crucial ambassador for the style. “Not a lot of step dancers can do the crazy rhythms and interpretations she’s doing,” he said. “It’s so exciting to see the interest in our art form.”
Mr. MacIsaac, the Cape Breton musician who found acclaim in the nineties by similarly stitching together disparate styles – blending Celtic traditions with hip hop, electronic music and punk – started out as a step dancer himself. “Through this powerful medium,” he said in an e-mail, “kids will be inspired by her who maybe wouldn’t have ever been exposed to this truly Canadian type of dance.”
Hyatt records the videos in the dining room of her home, setting down puck board - a slightly thicker version of what makes up the boards in hockey rinks.
At a century old, Ottawa Valley step dancing is a young enough art form that Mr. Wolfe can name the full lineage of teachers who came before him. Dancers hold their arms loose, as opposed to the rigid upper body expected of Irish step dancers; they often keep their feet low to the ground, but can throw them up in high flourishes.
There are clusters of interest across Ontario, with regular competitions in communities such as Omemee, Bobcaygeon and Pembroke. It’s hard to track exactly how much interest in this school of step dancing has changed over time, but Mr. Wolfe says there has been a downturn in attendance at these events.
Until she was 19, Ms. Hyatt spent virtually every summer weekend competing; her résumé includes three Canadian championship titles. Step dancing, she says, was a natural extension of her innate sense of rhythm. “My mom has told me that, even when I was a baby, the best way to get me to sleep was to bang the cradle against the wall and make rhythms with it,” she said with a laugh.
After she left the competitive scene, her interest in tap blossomed, and she’d study videos of dancers’ footwork for hours a day. She spent two stints studying in Turkey, joined a New York-based band for a while and formed a women’s percussion group called Ladies of Düm – its umlaut a bit of metal-like foreshadowing.
But a construction job she took in her 30s was so physically demanding that her desire to dance diminished. Last August, it returned. She changed jobs, got a phone with a great camera and, last November, began posting videos of herself dancing to a wide array of genres.
“Ozzy just loved watching people tap dance,” his wife, Sharon, wrote in a comment on Hyatt’s Crazy Train video a few months later. (Given the similarities, many people mistake step dancing for tap dancing; Ms. Hyatt wears traditional tap shoes.) “He would just love this.”
Ms. Hyatt was not, at first, a superfan of metal or hard rock. But step dancing is steeped in rhythm and thrives in complexity. Heavy music shares both those traits. When metalheads began sending her requests after the Crazy Train video, she quickly came to admire the breadth of these genres and what she could achieve by dancing to them. She can map out a dance in as little as an hour; the more complex songs, such as Hot for Teacher, can take as much as a week.
In spite of her soaring popularity, Ms. Hyatt has yet to monetize her videos, in part owing to the legalities of song licensing. Still, there is an endgame: She’d like to open an online school, helping new generations of percussion-driven dancers share her love of the step dancing craft. She may very well prompt a resurgence in Ottawa Valley step dancing along the way.
“I feel like this is the perfect platform,” she said. “And it’s definitely working.”
