Even the best tap dancers pick music that won’t upstage them. But ever since she’s been offered gigs equal to her talents, Ayodele Casel has chosen musicians who provide backup, yes, but easily fly from the score, provoking her to dig into improvisation, too, and dazzle. Her partners have included the Afro-Latin jazz pianist Arturo O’Farrill and, last year, the jazz drummer Max Roach in his legendary 1979 live session with pianist Cecil Taylor. Casel left critics agog. The Bronx native hasn’t divulged much about her upcoming two-week outing—her fourth at the Joyce in the last six years—except that it will involve the fast, hard, playful, and jubilant rhythms that set tap aflame 30 years ago, when Casel was starting out and Savion Glover was king. Rappers such as Public Enemy and a Tribe Called Quest laid their intricate rhymes over a boom bap beat that moved backward and upward at once: the direction this show is likely to head. —Apollinaire Scherr