Art Form: clogging
Location(s): Chelsea (Washtenaw County)
Sheila Graziano
Sheila Graziano dances on stage during the Wheatland Music Festival's Carry It On celebration. Photo by Peggy Brisbane
Sheila Ruby Graziano began dancing at the Shirley St. Mary School of Dance in Detroit, in the late 1950s. She studied tap dancing for 10 years, learning the steps and dancing to the songs that were popular in that era. She made her TV debut on a local talent show, Starlit Stairway, in the mid-1960s. At Cass Technical High School, she enrolled in the performing arts curriculum and took modern dance, but found it to be not as much to her liking because she missed the “percussive beats and the more aggressive nature of tapping.” In 1977, she attended a music festival (The Wheatland Music Festival), as a smoothie vendor, where she first heard old-time fiddle music, and saw Appalachian clogging for the first time. This was a life changing experience, and the pursuit to learn more about traditional percussive dancing began.
After some searching, she connected with cloggers in the metro Detroit area and eventually formed her first clogging group, The Crosstown Cloggers, in the early 1980s. Since then, Sheila has formed and participated in numerous percussive dance groups, including Crow’s Feet, and The CommonWealth Dance Collective, which is now 19 years strong. She has performed extensively as a solo dancer, and in collaborations with musicians such as Neil Woodward, and La Compagnie Music and Dance Troupe. She has been involved in the Wheatland Music Organization’s Traditional Arts Weekend (formerly known as Dance Camp) for more than thirty-four years. In addition to and alongside her performance schedule, Sheila is a dance educator. She served as a MTAAP master artist in 2013, 2014, and 2017, working with a total of four apprentices. Those interested in learning from Sheila can find her regularly providing excellent instruction at the Earful of Fiddle Music and Dance Camp in Rodney, MI, The Goderich Celtic College in Ontario, and via private and group lessons she offers. Her expertise has been invaluable to the formation and longevity of the Saline Fiddlers Philharmonic, where she served as a dance coach and choreographer for 30 years.
In 2020, Sheila was approached by members of her local dance and music community, AACTMAD (the Ann Arbor Community for Traditional Music and Dance) and was asked to put together a series of beginning clogging workshops that could be posted online for people who wanted to learn to dance during covid isolation. This resulted in a series of 8 progressive workshops that were put together with dance colleague Adam Wheeler. They are currently available and accessible to all via the AACTMAD website.
With support from AACTMAD, the Country Dance and Song Society, and The Wheatland Music Organization, Sheila and colleague Adam Wheeler have embarked on a historic preservation project (dubbed “the Marley Project”) to learn, present, and archive a repertoire of dances from the Vaudeville era. This repertoire of dances includes 10 numbers that showcase the blending of English clogging, Irish dance, and American tap dancing which happened quite naturally in the Vaudeville era. They were originated and performed by The Dancing Marleys, a family performance group, and have been passed down in the folk tradition though a living legacy for close to 100 years now. Though Sheila’s role in the project originated decades ago, the pair recently set out to complete their learning of the entire repertoire and have recorded presentations of the dances for archival purposes. They intend to present historical information, narrative from key players, the dance footage, and learning videos in a complete package. From her nominator, “Sheila’s dedication to the preservation and perpetuation of traditional percussive dance, especially Southern Appalachian Clogging, is likely unrivaled in Michigan. She has demonstrated a passion and reverence for the art and the artists who came before her through her holistic instruction of clogging to so many across Michigan and beyond.”
- Micah Ling, 2023
