Cipher Goings photo by Daniel Sheehan
“I’ve always known that dance was going to be in my life for as long as I’ve done it,” says Cipher Goings, a Seattle-based tap dancer experiencing one of the most ascendant rises of a local performer in recent history.
In the last two years, he’s traveled the world, contributed his talents to late-night shows and film, and played The Gaiety Theater in Dublin every night over three months to sold-out crowds. The opportunities have been coming fast and hard, and it’s all thanks to a lifelong zeal for tap. “It’s the one art form, or the one thing in my life really, that I’ve still had the same level of passion for – if not more – as I’ve gotten older,” he says.
Goings discovered that passion the moment he watched his first tap recital at Northwest Tap Connection, a dance school in the Rainier Beach neighborhood of South Seattle, as a seven-year-old. Around the time he passed away, his grandmother caught a rousing performance by the school’s troupe at her local church, and recommended her grandchildren experience the art form.
At first, Goings didn’t know what he was in for. “It didn’t seem cool,” he said. “Traditionally, you would think of tap done to jazz music, and I didn’t have that appreciation back then.” What did pique his interest was the performance’s usage of pop music: Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, and other artists that Goings had grown up with as a Central District kid. “At that moment, it clicked for me. Something was just like, ‘I want to do this.’”
From then on, Goings rapidly absorbed tap’s fleet footwork and percussive rhythms. “Teachers were telling me to stop moving my feet, and my mom would tell me to quiet down because I was always practicing around the house,” he says. He didn’t realize then that tap ran in his blood; his late grandfather (who isn’t to be confused with his other grandfather, jazz musician Reggie Goings) was an accomplished tap dancer in his life.
But a flame also needs stoking, and instructor Dani Tirrell provided that role to the young Goings. “Dani was the first mentor that saw me, poured into me, brought out my voice as a performer and a dancer and a young artist,” he effuses. “She was like my gay parent growing up, a great mentor and just a great human being to be around.” Besides choreographing his first big solo – to the song “Everything Scatter” by Fela Kuti – Tirrell provided Goings with a formative experience: a role in Black Bois, a dance production centered around a rumination of Black male bodies. Its healing imperative came at precisely the right time for the adolescent Goings, who “was navigating everything pertaining to my sexuality and how I wanted to walk through the world, and also my Blackness and everything.”
The same year of his Black Bois debut, Goings started his freshman year at the University of Washington. At first, he intended to sideline his love of dance for a more practical career, but changed after he failed an accounting class. “I thought, okay, I can either continue devoting more and more time to this thing that I don’t really care about doing, or I could just take a leap of faith and pursue what it is that I care to do in the first place.” Soon after, he switched his major to dance and committed fully to studying tap.
Throughout lockdown, Goings stayed busy, conceptualizing performances, filming them, and uploading them to Instagram while he continued his studies. One particular performance, a tap rendition of Beyoncé’s “BLACK PARADE” performed at Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Park, garnered buzz. “I definitely felt really burnt out, but I also really look back on it as a fun memory, how busy I was and how much fun I was having,” he says. “And that’s where a lot of people started to realize that I was taking this seriously, that this is what I love doing.”
His hard work paid off, and after earning his undergraduate degree in 2022, Goings started racking up the opportunities. You’d see him tapping next to Cedric the Entertainer on The Late Late Show with James Corden, or on the same screen as Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds during Apple TV’s Scrooge adaptation Spirited, or as one of many under-appreciated auditions on So You Think You Can Dance. Recently, he spent three months overseas performing with Riverdance, one of Ireland’s most celebrated dance shows – a week after our chat, he’d fly to Taiwan to tour with them.
Yet despite the global recognition, Goings remains as passionate an advocate for his hometown as he is a tap dancer. He still regularly performs in the city; at the end of December, for instance, he’ll be a guest performer at Earshot’s Sacred Ellington concert, a long-running celebration with Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, of Duke Ellington’s music. He’s also leading a free “drop-in style” Intro to Tap class, available to anyone of all ages, at Northwest Tap Connection. The first session started October 18 and it’ll be running all through November.
For Goings, sharing his love of tap is part and parcel with the dance. “I don’t know any professional tap dancer who doesn’t also teach: not only for supplemental income but for the sake of keeping the art form alive,” he says. However, his drive to teach is also his way of giving back to the community that made him the dancer and person he is.
“I’ve been fortunate to have mentors who were not afraid to leave the nest when it was time, and they went and made their mark in the world, but they always, always made it a point to come back and give back, to share that knowledge and that information to people like me. No matter how far I go, even if I were to move…I will always rep Seattle as my home and as my place.”
