EDGE Interview: Liberty Styles on Liberating Tap in ART's 'Diary of a Tap Dancer'

EDGE: Liberty is a great name. Is it a stage name or chosen name?

Liberty Styles: Ironically, Liberty Styles is my given name at birth. I spent quite a while going by Libby, and then I was like, "What am I doing? I love it!" I'm very grateful my parents gave me the name they did. They definitely shouldn't be surprised that I'm an artist, given that they gave me that name.

EDGE: I notice you go by she/they pronouns. Do you consider yourself part of the non-binary community?

Liberty Styles: Yeah, I consider myself a non-binary person, and also a woman. It's like both, and I think I've been coming into my myself and my own with the more work I've done the past few years with my gender fluidity. So, who knows – it may change, but "she" or "they." Preferably both, but not at the same time.

EDGE: Do you see a relationship between gender fluidity and dance?

Liberty Styles: Oh yeah. I think it's definitely related. I think that from the time I was young I have always enjoyed gender performance – like, the performance of gender. I did flamenco for a long time before I started doing tap, and while I was doing that I gravitated towards masculine presentations in that cultural form, which looks quite a bit different than masculinity in tap to dance. It looks different in each dance form, obviously, but I find it interesting to play with gender in movement.

I've also been doing quite a bit of drag in the past couple of years, experimenting with drag. I took a class with a drag performer and got to meet a lot of other performers, many of them non-binary, who were doing drag and also bringing in their other skills. That also really helped empower me to lean into femininity. Seeing drag as performance has allowed me to embrace the gender energy in performance more fully, because I haven't always had that experience in the past of being in certain circles. There's more of a binary, a stricter idea of who gets to do what on stage. But there's a lot of playing with gender in embodying different types of characters, different types of people, through movement.