When the Straight reaches Vancouver International Tap Festival artistic director Sas Selfjord at her home on Gabriola Island, she’s preparing to transport a special goodbye gift for the final rendition of the 18-year-old event. In her back yard sit 14 four-by-eight-foot pieces of birchwood flooring, a perfect, portable dance surface the tap society will be able to use long after her departure.

“I’m hauling it over with a truck from Gabriola and then taking it to the [Orpheum] Annex’s stage door on Friday,” she relates, expressing joy that the world-class dancers she’s bringing in won’t have to click their soles on less-than-ideal Masonite. “It’s pristine birchwood—a beautiful honey colour.”

The floor is, in many ways, an apt symbol of the professionalism and gleaming artistry she’s been able to build at the festival, known over the years for its range of styles and creations by big names like Michelle Dorrance and Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards.

“Tap-dancing is about timing and so is the festival,” explains Selfjord, who will also step down in June 2018 from running the Vancouver Tap Dance Society, centred in the Hastings Sunrise heritage space on East Hastings Street she helped catalyze the group to buy in 2011. “I truly believe the festival in its creative capacity has run its course and we need new roads.

“It has been about money and you can’t stand on that platform, because it starts to compromise all your programming,” she clarifies, pointing to the ever-ballooning costs of staging a fest, with the high U.S. dollar, travel bills, and hotel fees. “Your programming becomes diluted. You either see that or you limp out. And I’m not going to limp out. All our classes will be filled, the Annex will be sold-out, and then it will end. It feels like a brave decision. It’s the right one and it will serve the community well. We take this wonderful infrastructure we’ve built for 18 years and snowball it into something richer.”

As ever, Selfjord has programmed her last festival from the heart, bringing in Caleb Teicher and Company Bach’s Variations, which plays physically and rhythmically with Johann Sebastian Bach’s complex compositional structures in the Goldberg Variations; and Jason Janas’s Resonance, a highly personal look at how tap has affected and shaped him, performed with dancer-drummer Channing Cook Holmes. The key to Selfjord’s programming, as the event has evolved, has been not to stage piecemeal mixed shows by master-class teachers, as so many similar events around North America do, but to spotlight full-length productions that have vision—“a beginning, middle, and end”, as she puts it.

Her unique fest reflects the fact that Selfjord, who dreamed of tap-dancing from the time she was a little girl but only attended her first class at 40, is not a professional performer herself. “I think the number one thing is that I am not a dancer. A lot of fests are run by professional dancers, and as a dancer you might lean toward what you like,” she says. “I’m not in that place of bringing in my peers. I am a producer and I am really there to serve the artists.…Not being a dancer opens up my lens a little wider.

“It also just comes from my passion for tap,” she adds. “I love it. And I love the whole range; I’m not in one genre. I love Broadway, rhythm, jazz… And that has been a joy to share.

Ironically, she’s choosing to leave the tap fest and society at a time when the art form is exploding around the world—and when Vancouver has a firm place on that map, thanks in large part to her work. But as she sees it: “We need to catch up to it in Vancouver. Artists here have very limited performance opportunities.”

Just what form a new festival might take is up for intense discussion amid her departure. If reborn, the event might offer a richer immersion in training, collaboration, and performance opportunities, she suggests. Selfjord also sees the potential for tap to make its way into broader-range festivals of contemporary art around the city, as it has in other centres and as it did recently in Telemetry, a piece combining the talents of tap star Danny Nielsen and contemporary dancer Shay Kuebler at February’s Chutzpah Festival.

“There could be more cross-pollination of the dance genres,” Selfjord offers. “The other thing with the festival is we’re preaching to the choir.”

But there’s no doubt she’s left a legacy—one that stretches far beyond that beautiful birchwood floor. “We’ve attracted international artists here and we’ve raised a community of tap dancers who are aware of the global context,” she says. “It’s raised the bar and it’s introduced the complexities of the art form—for artists and audiences. I hear audiences leave a show and they’ll say ‘I didn’t know tap could be like this.’ ”

The Vancouver International Tap Festival presents Variations on Friday (August 25) and Resonance on Saturday (August 26) at the Orpheum Annex.