Ariel Hyatt has come a long way since binge-watching Riverdance VHS tapes in the ’90s. Guitarist Alex Lifeson joked that her step dancing inspired his dance moves on Rush’s big reunion tour. Renowned talent manager Sharon Osbourne told Ms. Hiatt that her late husband, Ozzy, would have loved the dancer’s percussive tribute to “Crazy Train.” Tens of thousands of other people watch every video the 36-year-old posts on Instagram, throwing links around the internet in which she nails and nails rhymes to heavy music classics.
It’s been less than a year since Hyatt, a native of Powassan, Ont., began building a digital community around the dance traditions that have shaped her life.
Her Instagram account @arielhyattstepdance had fewer than 1,000 followers in March when she posted a video of herself step dancing to Crazy Train. The response was so great that she began choreographing and filming dances to more metal and hard rock classics. As AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” gradually rose to prominence, the footwork increased in complexity, erupting over the beat of Slayer’s “Raining Blood,” and keeping pace with the thunderstorm of a drum solo intro to Alex Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher.” She has amassed over 220,000 followers in just a few months and has also built an audience on TikTok and YouTube.
She learned the tap dancer’s trade and spent time in Istanbul immersed in Turkish rhythms, but her style is influenced by the Ottawa Ballet style of step dancing. Its lineage lies in the Scottish and Irish step dance traditions, and is often performed at Celtic music concerts with fiddle players such as Ashley McIsaac and Natalie McMaster, but it also has French Canadian influence, incorporating more aggressive steps and larger tap elements.
This newfound fame is a little bittersweet for Hyatt. She began taking lessons at the age of nine after her passion for Riverdance culminated in a performance for her parents’ wedding anniversary. The Ottawa Valley tradition was already largely confined to areas around Ontario, but its popularity is waning.
“I always wanted to take my dance style to an international audience because I felt that was the way to keep it alive. It couldn’t just stay in Ontario. We had to take it to more people, other countries,” she said in an interview.
Chad Wolfe, an Ottawa-based fiddle and step dance teacher who took Hiatt under his tutelage in 1999, said she became an important ambassador for the style. “There aren’t many step dancers who can do the crazy rhythms and interpretations that she does,” he says. “It’s so gratifying to see so much interest in our art form.”
MacIsaac, a Cape Breton musician who gained acclaim in the ’90s by stitching together similarly disparate styles, fusing Celtic tradition with hip-hop, electronic music and punk, started out as a step dancer himself. “Through this powerful medium, children who perhaps would not otherwise have been exposed to this truly Canadian type of dance will be inspired by her,” he said in an email.
Hyatt records the video in his dining room with a puck board (a slightly thicker version of what makes up a hockey rink board).
At a century old, Ottawa Valley step dance is an art form young enough that Wolf can list a whole lineage of teachers who came before him. In contrast to the rigid upper body expected of Irish step dancers, the dancers relax their arms. They often keep their feet low to the ground, but may also throw them out vigorously.
There are clusters of interest across Ontario, with contests held regularly in communities such as Omemee, Bobcaygeon and Pembroke. It’s difficult to track exactly how much interest in this school of step dancing has changed over time, but Wolf said attendance at these events has declined.
Until she turned 19, Hyatt spent nearly every summer weekend competing. Her resume includes three Canadian championship titles. Step dancing, she says, was a natural extension of her innate sense of rhythm. “Ever since I was a baby, my mother said the best way to put me to sleep was to bang the cradle against the wall to create a rhythm,” she said with a laugh.
After leaving the competitive scene, her interest in tap blossomed, and she spent hours each day studying videos of dancers’ footwork. She studied in Turkey for two years, joined a New York-based band for a time, and formed a women’s percussion group called Ladies of Düm. That umlaut is a bit of a metal foreshadowing.
However, the construction job she took in her 30s was physically demanding, so her desire to dance diminished. It was revived in August last year. She changed jobs, got a smart phone with a camera, and last November started posting videos of herself dancing to different genres.
“Ozzy loved watching people tap dance,” his wife Sharon wrote in a comment on Hyatt’s Crazy Train video a few months later. (Many people confuse step dancing with tap dancing, given the similarities. Mr. Hyatt wears traditional tap shoes.) “He’s going to love this.”
Hiatt wasn’t initially a big fan of metal or hard rock. However, step dancing has deeper rhythms and more complexity. Heavy music has both of these characteristics. When metalheads started sending her requests after the Crazy Train video, she quickly came to admire the breadth of these genres and what could be achieved by dancing to them. She can plan a dance in just an hour. For more complex songs, such as Hot for Teacher, it may take up to a week.
Despite its soaring popularity, Hyatt has yet to monetize his videos, due in part to the legalities of song licensing. However, there is an end goal. She hopes to open an online school to help a new generation of percussion-driven dancers share their love for the art of step dance. She just might inspire a resurgence of Ottawa Valley step dancing in the process.
“I feel like this is the perfect platform,” she said. “And it definitely works.”
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