Filmmaker Statement

I’d been working on an all singing all dancing TV series with my friend Keenan Munn Francis - great fun but we we were ready to make something a little darker. We wanted to make a gritty street drama but were keen to avoid stereotypes and not make something that had been made a thousand times before. We thought it might be interesting to combine the world of dance with the world of gang culture to provide a fresher take, so that’s where the idea for Tap Boy came from. It seemed a crazy idea at first (boy trapped in a county lines drug gang learns to tap dance) but the more we researched the origins of tap it made perfect sense. Tap was born after slave owners took away percussive instruments and so slaves used their feet to create percussive music instead. What do you do to escape your oppressors when you have nothing but the shoes on your feet? What would it be like if you had no knowledge of the tap history that had gone before you and you discovered it for yourself?