Introducing Shanzell Page, 25/26 UMS/UM-Flint Artist in Residence

By UMS

UMS is pleased to announce Shanzell Page as the 25/26 season’s UMS/UM-Flint Artist in Residence.

Shanzell is a Flint-rooted, Detroit-based movement artist, educator, and cultural strategist with over 30 years of experience in tap dance and arts education. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of Mindful Movement with Shanzell, a performing arts initiative that blends rhythm, cultural storytelling, and wellness.

Her work is distinguished by a commitment to preserving the legacy, traditional techniques, and history of tap dance, by pushing the boundaries of the art form through innovative educational approaches and interdisciplinary learning.

Shaped by personal experiences with chronic illness, caregiving, and spiritual transformation, her mission is to create spaces where artistry meets accountability, providing life-affirming experiences that foster performance as an act of remembrance, presence, and return.

UMS interviewed Shanzell about her hopes for the residency, inspirations, and personal connection to Flint.

What is your connection to Flint, Michigan, and how will it inspire your work during this residency?

My relationship to Flint is home. This city is my blueprint. It’s where rhythm and storytelling first entered my life, and where I learned to hold more than one truth at a time. Flint has shown me that delight and struggle can live side by side, that discipline and improvisation are both necessary, and that community can be fragile and strong at once. All of that shaped not just my artistry but the way I move through the world.

As a teenager, I did one of my first full-length tap shows at the University of Michigan-Flint. Coming back now as a resident artist feels like answering a call I sent out years ago, an echo from my younger self.

This residency gives me a chance to honor that history while also moving forward. Flint taught me endurance, but it also taught me imagination, and curiosity. That’s the energy I want to carry into this work so people can feel the rhythm of Flint. Unshakable, and full of life. So anyone who experiences it can feel the spirit of the place I call home.

What draws you to the genre of tap dancing?

Tap dance is never finished. No matter how long you have been in it, there is always another layer to explore in the music, in your body, and in the stories it carries. That ongoing investigation is magnetic.

There is also a freedom in the sound, a language we speak without words. The dialogue becomes a conversation with the past, present, and future that only you can have in your own rhythm. And that is not something you can easily walk away from.

It’s also an inseparable connection to a layered history and the ancestors. It feels like both a privilege and a responsibility to preserve something people before me used as a means of survival and fought to keep alive. That commitment keeps me tethered to the form.

And it sharpens me! Tap is like a mirror, it does not let you hide. You have to meet yourself in the moment, stay present, stay aware. It demands refinement, self-discipline, and recovery. Those lessons carry beyond the floor, and they are much a part of the work as the steps are itself.

That is why I keep returning.

Your artistic work as a dancer and choreographer is deeply focused on your relationships to rhythm and legacy. Could you give us some background about your process and your artistic heroes? How do you connect your work to their legacy, and how do you innovate to continue building on this artistic lineage?

Shanzell Page | Photo by Quatiece Salter

This is a beautiful question. My approach is based on call and response. I don’t always start with asking “What do I want to say?” Often, it’s “What needs to be honored or made relatable?” That balance of listening and offering is how I create.

I am inspired by visionary voices. Katherine Dunham and Carmen de Lavallade show me how art can be anthropological, revolutionary, and liberating. The Clark Sisters remind me of how necessary family and the gospel are. John and Alice Coltrane show me how risk can be integrity. Tap artists like Dianne Walker, Jason Samuels Smith, and Ayodele Casel reveal how mastery, depth, and stories are carried by the dance through generational lineage. Sonia Sanchez, Carrie Mae Weems, and Renell Medrano shape how I think about space, intimacy, and clarity of voice.

Although, my greatest influences are my family’s testimonies. My grandfather and uncles used their musical gifts to minister and serve. My grandmother earned her degree and became a teacher at sixty-three after decades of factory work, teaching me that learning has no age. My mom worked over thirty years at GM while living with life-long challenges to her mobility, teaching me perseverance and independence. My aunt, after remission, losing her hearing with life-altering surgery, chose to heal through running even when doctors told her she never would again. Their courage and refusal to accept limitation has shaped me as much as any stage or studio.

Jimmy Slyde said, “It takes a lifetime to become a dancer.” For me, that lifetime is built not only on technical study but on witness. I see myself as a vessel, but also as a participant in the natural cycles that move through daily life. Everyday my body is changing, aging, adapting and offers a new layer of experience to translate into rhythm. That is how I honor legacy, and also how I keep finding ways to innovate: by staying open to the ongoing lessons of faith, imagination, and endurance that life itself keeps placing in my path.

You have extensive experience as an educator, working with students of all ages. What are some examples of how you have connected tap dancing to other educational disciplines?

First of all, by having fun! Leading with joy, because the love is the most honest and infectious energy in the room. So in my teaching practice, tap dance welcomes a special type of intelligence. It opens doors. When I teach, a rhythm pattern can easily turn into a lesson about fractions, sequencing, or even physics if we start talking about vibration. A phrase of choreography can turn into a story or a way for students to see their own history inside the art. And studying jazz, social dance, or the Great Migration always grounds us in the cultural make-up and history of the United States.

I also know that students don’t walk into class as blank slates. They bring their whole lives with them. So my priority is to create a room where they feel safe to move at their own pace, to take risks, and to be heard. I’ve worked with beginners, advanced dancers, neurodivergent learners, youth and adults navigating difficult emotions, and I want each of them to feel like there’s a place for them in this form.

I’ve seen this work in many places; the studio, residencies, after-school programs, and community workshops. What connects it all is the moment a person leaves more curious, confident, and connected than when they walked in. My goal is to help them see themselves as artists, thinkers, and keepers of culture.

Tell us about the work you will develop during this residency. What are you most excited about with this project?

This new work, Salt in the Soil: Seeds and Fruit, grows from my belief that rhythm itself can feed us. Tap dance carries a wisdom beyond technique, holding knowledge that is physical, sonic, and ancestral. It reminds me that art and life are not separate. Just as food sustains the body, rhythm sustains the spirit. The work asks: what seeds do we plant in ourselves and in each other, and what kind of fruit do those choices bear?

I’m most excited to share the joy in performing, even if the heart of my practice lives in the process. The classroom, the archives, studying with the students, faculty, and the master teachers who treat their craft as service, the rehearsals that invite participation. All of it becomes an exercise of cultivation. On stage, that becomes a continuation, a chance to water memory, plant imagination, and nurture the spirit through the dance.

This shared act of offering with live music and call-and-response will turn the space into an ecosystem where the “fruits” circulate. Everyone present becomes part of it. My hope is that each person leaves with something nourishing to carry forward. A rhythm in their body, a story they can share, or a deeper connection to their own sense of aliveness.

Is there anything else you would like us to know about you and your work?

I would add that my work comes from lived truth. I don’t approach this form as a foreigner to its struggles or beauty. I know what it means to fight to be seen and to keep creating when the odds are against you. That is where my practice stands.

I hold myself accountable to the lineage of the dance and to the people who shaped it. Preservation, accessibility, and intergenerational exchange are not ideas I use lightly. They are the ways I work to keep this tradition visible, valued, and alive. With respect, I build spaces where elders, peers, and young dancers can share across one another, and it’s essential because the future depends on these crossings.

If I am remembered for anything, I hope it is for sharing the dance with care, and creating spaces where people felt they truly belonged. Where they were challenged, supported, and able to see themselves inside the work. That, to me, is as much advocacy as preservation than any step. Making sure the tradition is alive in the people who dance it now and those yet to come.

Where can folks find out more information about you?

People can connect with me and follow my work in a few different ways:

• On my website, mindfulmovementwithshanzell.org, you can subscribe to my mailing list for updates, newsletters, and behind-the-scenes moments
• My personal and business Instagram accounts (@zelldoesitwell and @mindfulmovementwithshanzell) are both spaces where you can keep up with all my shenanigans!
• On Facebook, follow Mindful Movement with Shanzell for events, community offerings, and program highlights.
• I also like to keep a reflective blog on Tumblr, shanzellqpage.tumblr.com, where I share writing about tap, drumming, jazz, and the influences currently feeding my practice.

Please reach out to share the shuffle ball change, or create spaces where we can all move, learn, and imagine together. I welcome everyone to be part of the conversation. Whether it’s a tap show, workshop, reflections on history, or glimpses into new creative ideas, my platforms are spaces to stay connected to the ongoing movemeng of art, tap, and rhythm-based dancing. I’ll see you out there. Keep swinging!