New way for the disabled to tap-dance

CHOREOGRAPHER Mary Six Rupert instructs her students to let their fingers do the dancing.

The former Rockette teaches a special Mount Sinai Hospital dance class for disabled patients called “Tap Dancing Hands Down,” in which participants perform their steps with two hands instead of 10 toes.

“Some of them used to be dancers, before whatever their injury was,” Rupert told the Daily News about her work in the hospital’s recreational therapy service.

“So for them, it brings back their joy of dancing again that they thought they might never have. Some of them used to tap, and they thought those days were over.”

Participants in the free program include patients disabled by stroke; brain and spinal cord injury; cerebral palsy, and multiple sclerosis.

Rather than tap shoes, Rupert hand-makes each of her “dancers” a pair of “tap gloves” — fitted with the taps from a dancing shoe. The patients then move their undulating fingers across a small wooden dance floor, creating the familiar click-clack of a typical tap dancer.

Jeanette French, 68, lost the use of her left arm following a stroke four years ago and feared her days on the dance floor were now nothing more than a memory.

When she joined Rupert’s program, “it was like a renewal to me,” said the Harlem woman. “I thought it was the best thing that I had ever seen in my life. When you’re disabled, everybody says, ‘You can’t.’ Well, here we can.”

Classmate Ricky Wilhite, 37, has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. He finds the class gives him a sense of joy and self that was missing from his life.

“I can do things I thought I couldn’t have been able to do,” explained Wilhite (photo). “To me, it relaxes my muscles. It’s helped me to be much more independent. I can do things for myself.”

The program, introduced in 2011, wrapped up its eight-class summer session last week. Classes resume Oct. 29, when some of the students will perform in a show marking National Stroke Day.

Rupert, a tap and jazz professor at Staten Island’s Wagner College, said the idea of tapping with fingers instead of feet popped into her head after her mother wound up in a wheelchair.

“Her arms and hands were in good shape, and that’s when I came up with the idea,” she said.

The class remains the first and only one of its kind in Manhattan.

Celebrity fitness trainer Corey Hill was paralyzed from the waist down in a 2011 elevator accident. He needs four arm crutches to move around, but only two of the tap gloves to get out on the small dance floor.

Hill, who had also pursued a Broadway career, hopes to return to the stage this winter with a one-man cabaret show.

But he prefers his performances with the crew at Mount Sinai to any solo work.

“It’s something that’s very exciting and very fulfilling, to be a part of a group again,” he said. “All our disabilities are different. But yet, we’re all one.”