Ayodele Casel has brought joy back into the Joyce Theater. Making a triumphant debut as a leader there on Tuesday, this tap dancer radiated joy and personified it. Joy, unsurprisingly, is the meaning of her name.

Simply put, the show is a delight — Ms. Casel’s exuberance matched by the pianist-composer Arturo O’Farrill, an excellent Afro-Latin jazz band and four younger hoofers. Do yourself a favor and go.

This review could end now. But there is more to say, and Ms. Casel says much of it herself. She is a top-shelf dancer, sensitively musical, intricate but never showy, cool in her casualness but generously warm. She is an adept choreographer who knows how to keep things moving, within a song and across an evening. But she is also an artist who can tell her own story sincerely and succinctly, with neither self-aggrandizement nor false humility.

So, in between two jubilant numbers, she picks up a microphone to recall how as a black and Puerto Rican girl growing up in the Bronx with a Yoruban first name (which really does mean “joy”), she wanted to be Ginger Rogers. She and her dancers recreate an elementary tap class she took in shoes bought from Payless, complete with the most basic and standardized step: the flap-ball-change.