Myrtle Beach Adult Tap Ensemble Gives Dancers a Second Act — and It’s Taking New Members

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. — A tap ensemble made up entirely of adults, many of whom set the shoes aside decades ago for careers and children, has become one of the more unlikely community success stories on the Grand Strand — and it is still taking new members.

The Carolina Rhythm Tap Ensemble was founded in May 2024 by Michele Selvanto-Kowalski, a dance instructor with more than 45 years of teaching behind her who moved to Myrtle Beach in 2014. The group is open to adult men and women, rehearses at Coastal Dance Centre, and performs at community showcases and nursing homes around the area.

The ensemble was profiled this month by reporter Loren Korn for Gray Media’s Aging Untold series, in a segment that carried to stations across the country. It was not the group’s first national exposure — a WMBF News feature in April 2025 was picked up and rebroadcast by Gray stations from Ohio to Texas that autumn.

Selvanto-Kowalski has said the ensemble grew out of her adult tap classes, where a handful of students simply would not stop — their persistence, rather than any plan on her part, is what turned a class into a performing group.

Among the members featured in the coverage are Trisha Heilman and Susan Krajewski, both of whom danced earlier in life, stepped away for work and family, and came back to it years later. Krajewski has described tap as a passion she had loved and set down; Heilman has said the nerves of performing again disappeared once the group was actually out in front of an audience.

An Ensemble Built for Grown-Ups

Most community dance programs in a resort market are built around children, with adults accommodated as an afterthought. The Carolina Rhythm Tap Ensemble inverts that. It is adults only, open to men and women, and it performs rather than simply meeting.

The working rhythm is straightforward. Members rehearse choreography once a week as a group and separately take tap classes to keep technique sharp — the same split a serious amateur ensemble in any discipline would recognize, and a meaningful commitment for people with jobs and families.

Selvanto-Kowalski has made the case that tap occupies a particular place among dance forms because the audience hears the story rather than only watching it — the percussion is the performance. That distinction matters for the venues the group plays, where an audience may be seated at a distance or may not see especially well.

The Second-Act Story

The reason this story travels beyond the Grand Strand is the pattern underneath it, and it is a common one. A person dances seriously as a child or a young adult. Then comes a career, a marriage, children, a move — and the shoes go into a closet for twenty or thirty years. The assumption, rarely examined, is that the door has closed.

What the ensemble demonstrates is that the door was never locked. Members describe the return not as nostalgia but as recovering something that belonged to them in the first place, and the group’s own account of itself leans less on performance quality than on what its members have built together — Selvanto-Kowalski has described the ensemble as having become a family.

The performance calendar reflects that outward turn. Alongside community showcases, the group has staged an Americana Show honoring veterans and active service members, and it performs regularly at nursing homes — audiences for whom a live tap routine is a genuine event rather than an evening’s option among many.

Where They Rehearse and Perform

The ensemble’s home is Coastal Dance Centre, a Myrtle Beach school affiliated with the Royal Academy of Dance of London that runs a pre-professional ballet track alongside recreational classes for all ages. The studio operates from two locations a short distance apart: the Deville studio at 3070 Deville Street in The Market Common, and the Howard studio at 3073 Howard Avenue.

That places the group at the center of Myrtle Beach’s most walkable district. The Market Common occupies the grounds of the former Myrtle Beach Air Force Base and has become the city’s year-round gathering point — restaurants, a cinema, Valor Memorial Garden and Warbird Park, and Grand Park with its lake loop. For visitors, it is the part of Myrtle Beach that feels least like a resort strip and most like a town.

Performances happen away from the studio, at community showcases and at nursing homes across the area. The group publicizes appearances through its Facebook page rather than a fixed published season, so anyone hoping to catch a performance is better off following the ensemble directly than watching a venue calendar.

How Adults Can Join — Class Schedule

The route in is the adult class program at Coastal Dance Centre, which is where the ensemble came from in the first place. Classes run in four-week sessions rather than a locked academic year, which makes them unusually workable for seasonal residents and long-stay visitors. Below is the adult schedule as published by the studio.

Coastal Dance Centre — Deville studio, 3070 Deville Street, Myrtle Beach, SC 29577, (843) 839-5678; Howard studio, 3073 Howard Avenue, (843) 839-8006; [email protected]. Schedules change between sessions, so confirm the current term before turning up with shoes.

No prior experience is required for the beginner class. That is the meaningful detail for anyone reading this and doing the arithmetic on how long it has been — the beginner tap class exists precisely for people starting from zero, or starting again.

Why a Tap Group Says Something About Myrtle Beach

Visitors know Myrtle Beach by its surfaces — sixty miles of sand, the boardwalk, the theaters along Highway 17. What is harder to see from a one-week rental is the year-round civic life underneath: the community bands, the art guilds, the church choirs, the adult rec leagues, and now an adult tap ensemble playing nursing homes on a Saturday.

That layer matters to two groups in particular. It matters to the snowbirds and long-stay winter visitors who come for months rather than days and who quickly discover that a beach is not, by itself, a social life. And it matters to anyone weighing the Grand Strand as somewhere to land for good rather than to visit — a town that will put a sixty-year-old beginner in a tap class on a Monday night is telling you something about itself.

For a visitor with a few weeks here, the four-week session structure is the door. It is genuinely possible to arrive in January, take a month of beginner tap, and leave having been part of something. Our guide to things to do in Myrtle Beach covers the wider picture of what the area offers beyond the beach, and the Myrtle Beach events calendar tracks performances and festivals season by season. Downtown Myrtle Beach’s monthly F1rst Friday ArtWalk is another window into the same year-round arts community.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources: Reporting on the Carolina Rhythm Tap Ensemble by Loren Korn for Gray Media’s Aging Untold series, September 2026, and an earlier WMBF News feature, April 2025. Class schedule, studio addresses and contact details independently verified via Coastal Dance Centre. Class days, times and locations run in four-week sessions and change between terms — confirm the current schedule with the studio before attending. Member name spellings vary between published reports.