Blame it on the bossa nova: Tapper Cintia Chamecki brings the rhythms of her native Brazil to a playful new fusion.

At one moment, the rapid-fire delivery of Cintia Chamecki's five-member tap ensemble sound big enough to be an entire orchestra, and in the next, quiets to a whisper. The performers onstage at the Duke Theater in New York City work each musical phrase as if it were dialogue. They modulate their cadence to mimic the inflections of human speech. You can almost hear the rise of question marks and the fall of commas.

Chamecki, a 31-year-old native of Brazil, is part of a new wave of international artists who are teaming tap dance with the rhythms and cultures of other countries. From Bali to Japan, choreographers are creating a fusion of tap with concepts as diverse as Afro-Cuban beat and Norse gods. Chamecki, in particular, is making a name for herself by interpreting traditional American tap dance with a distinctly Brazilian voice.

Her early dance training in the southern city of Curitiba, Brazil, was similar to that of middle-class children across the U.S.: jazz, tap, and ballet. But unlike many of her American counterparts, she didn't dream of becoming a ballerina. In fact, she didn't consciously decide to be a dancer at all. She simply loved to move to music. When she eventually opened a dance studio, she hadn't heard of rhythm tap. In this form of tap dance, sound is emphasized over form, improvisation rules, and feet become a musical instrument.

In 1992, Chamecki's life and career changed forever when a brochure for the Colorado Dance Festival landed on her desk. "I was already a tap teacher, and I looked at that brochure and said, 'We have to go.'"

We had no idea what to expect," she said, noting that she was far from fluent in English at the time, and the studio partner she traveled with didn't speak the language at all. "We were amazed. I thought, 'This is so different than everything we've ever seen for tap.'" As a teacher, she had focused on the basic brushes, shuffles, and ball-changes of tap. "It was good and fun and it gave me some technique, but I taught steps more than musicality," she says. "And I'd never heard of improvisation."

"We didn't know who Honi Coles was, of Cholly Atkins, of Buster Brown. They were all there," she says. "It was the first time I met rhythm tap. This was music. I fell in love with it."

She still remembers feeling out of her depth in Eddie Brown's class. "Every day I wanted to drop it because it was too hard for me," she says. "And now, everywhere I go, I see people that I met there." Among the friends she made at CDF are New York's Tap City Festival producer, Tony Waag, and Barbara Duffy, with whom she went on to study and perform. For several years, she continued to work in Brazil and traveled frequently to the U.S. to study. In 1997, she moved to New York, where her sister (the postmodern choreographer Andrea Chamecki) was living, and there she met her husband, also Brazilian. The couple now have a two-year old daughter and live in TriBeCa.

As a performer, Chamecki is the antithesis of her rhythm tap contemporaries who perform in the hard-hitting footsteps of Savion Glover. Rather than hunker down and focus on the floor, Chamecki holds her upper body erect and gives herself to the audience. Far from fierce, her dancing conveys joy.

Critics have described her style as playful. To that, tapper Jenai Cutcher adds the term generosity. "I think it comes from an affection and eagerness to share part of her culture," says Cutcher. "She loves the music. When I watch her dance, I see that exuberance within her."

Last summer, Chamecki, Cutcher, Michelle Dorrance, and Nicholas Young presented Chamecki's forty-five-minute Ritmico at Jacobs Pillow, and showed excerpts in New York at the Tap City festival with musician Pedro Ramos. The ensemble improvises within a choreographed structure that calls for a doubling of the speed each time the chorus is presented. When it becomes the fastest, Ramos, playing cavaquinho, a ukelele-like instrument, stands up and plays a solo. "The cavaquinho was so much fun," Chamecki says. "It looks like it talks to you."

It took Ghamecki years to find her artistic voice. "At first I didn't think about tap and Brazilian music. I was focused on learning to tap well," she says. "Jazz for me was very new. Then two or three years ago, I knew. I needed to be doing my own thing: dance to Brazilian music. I still like dancing to jazz, but this is what I choose to choreograph."

Though Chamecki's musicians are Brazilians, her dancers are not. Cutcher says it wasn't easy to adapt to the rhythms that are the lynchpin of Chamecki's choreography: the polka-like frevo and the complex melodies of choro (which means cry), as well as the more familiar samba and bossa nova. "In improvisation, it's easy for me to flip into swing," says the jazz tapper. "You can't rely on your own vocabulary. I had to get into a different groove."

Rehearsals for Ritmico began with clapping in order to become familiar with the rhythms, and Chamecki made a music CD for each dancer. "I listened to it day and night," says Cutcher, who is also a writer and tap dance author. "Cintia opened my ears to Brazilian music. She hears rhythms I would never think of hearing. But most special is that she is combining Brazilian music with American tap dance and she is maintaining the integrity of both. In a lot of hybrids where people combine tap with another art form, something gets lost in the translation. Cintia stays true to the essence of the art form and the culture."

When you see Chamecki strap on a pair of quirky kneepads with pieces of metal attached and, with a perfect mix of focus and abandon, play one rhythm on her knees with drumsticks, while tapping another in her feet, you can begin to comprehend the distance she's traveled from Brazil to the Duke in Times Square. She's mastered her tap shoes as musical instruments, but she hasn't lost the wide eyes of discovery from twelve years ago at the Colorado Dance Festival. Within her strong rhythm tap style remains a fresh-faced quality of that first day when she saw Honi Coles, and asked, "How is that possible?"

"She's a fireball of spirit," says Waag. "Her dancing is an extension of the light and brightness she shows in her face. She looks like she loves to dance and that really comes across. That's very Brazilian."

Karen Hildebrand is associate editor for DANCE MAGAZINE.