BODY AND SOUL: Lisa La Touche: Tap 4 The People

Lisa La Touche (photo: Jeremy Fokkens)

 

Tap dancer Lisa La Touche is wearing a red cropped T-shirt with a Canadian brand "roots" logo and light blue denim shorts cropped just above the knee.  Lisa is focused on a rhythm with one legs crossing in front of her reaching for a particular step.  The room is a warehouse with light beige brick and a wooden surface underneath her.  Her tap shoes are a mix of light and dark caramel colors.

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I'm delighted to feature the wonderful tap artist and filmmaker Lisa La Touche as my next guest. Born in Canada and, for a time, residing in New York's Harlem, Lisa has traveled the world with her tap shoes--drumming the earth, finding community, and realizing the power of artistic legacy.

Listen to the podcast episode here.

Subscribe to Body and Soul for more. 

Read below to learn more about Lisa!

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

(photo: Joel Varjassy)

 Lisa is wearing a casual white denim dress with her arm crossed in front of her while looking at the horizon. She is outside in front of the Canadian Rocky Mountains with a train track behind her.  This is taken a moment before she begins to dance.

Lisa is wearing a black blouse and earth-green and greyish-brown leopard print leggings with dark and light caramel colored tap shoes. She is dancing on a wooden boardwalk with the city of Calgary's skyline behind her. She is in mid-action dancing with her hips twisted to one side, her arm reaching above her and her focus at her feet while reaching for a rhythm.

BIO: From both Alberta and New York, Lisa La Touche’s credits include: Broadway’s Shuffle Along, receiving the Fred Astaire Award and the Actor’s Equity Award for Outstanding Broadway Chorus, touring with the Savion Glover and the cast of STOMP. She is Founder of Tap Phonics, a tap dance based performance and production company. She is an educator/professor and co-curator of Dance Immersion’s Tap Dance Legacy Series with Travis Knights servicing black communities with free access to cultural history. She is also a filmmaker recently debuting TRAX encompassing her journey back to Alberta while discovering important local black history. http://www.lisalatouche.com

Tap in the city: ATDF's "Rhythm in Motion" takes wing

American Tap Dance Foundation presented
Rhythm in Motion at ATDF's Tap City festival.
(photo: Amanda Gentile)

This year's Rhythm in Motion--part of the well-loved TAP CITY, the summer festival of all things tap--might be artistic director Tony Waag's best show ever. No trace of bloat, fluff or cornball, just expert, all-in, radiant power tap for nearly two hours. This is tap right on time and into the future. And diverse aesthetic styles with something for everyone--from lovers of Brazilian samba to Fats Waller to Steve Reich--and millions (they wish) served. Really, if you came away not finding something to cheer hard about here, I'm worried about you.

I regret that this show--presented at Symphony Space, long-time partner with Waag's American Tap Dance Foundation--ran only one night. People, can we do something about this sort of thing? The show I saw last night felt downright historic. Certainly, there were standout and breakout dance artists on the bill, and a viewer might even start contemplating...hmmm, yeah....some award nominations. Just sayin'. But, seriously, Bessies committee, start taking a wide-angled look at some of what's happening in tap these days.

I loved so much, but I will long remember the matchless, grounded, joyous confidence of Brinae Ali's Ndizzy Spellz; the always-surprising Caleb Teicher falling off his high heels then proceeding to kill it with yet one more unexpected strategy around tap and space and theatricality; and the all-women Full Circle Hardrocks's sharp cheerleader moves for Rokafella's The Drums Say Africa; and Lisa La Touche's Tap Phonics trio in the propulsive, offbeat Fragile. These artists do more than make tap "relevant" today; they offer no excuse to ignore tap.

Also serving some awesome tap on this program:Chloe Arnold and Robin Passmore, Christina Carminucci, Michelle Dorrance (with collaborating choreographer/improvisers Hannah Heiler, Melinda Sullivan and Josette Wiggan), Felipe Galganni, Charles Renato, Tami Sakurai, Delores Sanchez, Leo Sandoval, Samara Seligsohn and Nicholas Van Young.

Rhythm in Motion is closed, but there's one more event (Friday, July 13) you can enjoy before the season finishes up:

"TAP IT OUT" -- a free, public outdoor tap dance event at 1pm, 1:30pm, and 2pm at Father Duffy Square/Times Square (Broadway, West 46th Street to West 47th Street, 7th Avenue, Manhattan). Adult and pre-professional students create a chorus of hundreds of tapping feet. The contemporary percussion and movement "soundscape" promotes tap dance as pure music, while consciously deconstructing the basic elements that propel tap forward.

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Play the floor: ATDF's "Rhythm in Motion"

Well, Tony Waag did say that American Tap Dance Foundation's spring series, Rhythm in Motion--at least, Program A of it--would be edgy. And edgy, it was. Also, the rest of what he said: "hopeful, passionate, experimental, lovely...."

"[Tap dancing] can take us somewhere we don't expect," he said. "It's no longer nostal-gyah--though we do love that."

ATDF's Tony Waag at Tap It Out 2012
(c)2012, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

At the modest Theater at the 14th Street Y, the first performance of Program A opened with a clever behind-the-scenes film by Waag, featuring a montage of breathless, high-powered tapping overlaid with "Synchronicity" by The Police. That led to an hour or more of all-the-way live tap designed with 21st Century tastes in mind--works by Nicholas Young, Michelle Dorrance, Chloe Arnold, Jason Samuels Smith, Lisa La Touche and Derick K. Grant, each making a case for tap's continued relevance as hardcore skill and art.

You might mistake Young, a tall, strapping Texan, for a country-western star, but he's a tapper through and through and, as shown here, an emerging choreographer of growing confidence. Thank you Forest, dedicated to the sound technology inventor, employs an array of tap surfaces wired for sound as he and an all-women crew--Elizabeth Burke, Michela Marino Lerman, Carson Murphy, Demi Remick and Samara Seligsohn--fire up the feet to play the floor with impressive accuracy, speed, force and assertive design.

Dorrance's bluesy improvisatory solo with guitarist Darwin Deez, Deez and Deez, is pure magic in all the little framed moments of wonder. The dancer holding firm as she drags the silver blade of her heel against the floor; catching the guitar's spare lines of sound at odd angles and whipping her lines all around and around them; pulsing waves of movement through the length of her lanky body; dazzling us with her killer feet then looking straight at the guitarist as if to say, "What you got now?" As an ensemble choreographer and director, too, she's the genuine article, able to transfer what's great about her personal style--loose, earthy, full-bodied insouciance--onto others with no artificial aftertaste. Last night's superb cast of She's Alright included Burke, Murphy, Remick, Young, Megan Bartula and Caleb Teicher, and you can tell she has inspired them.

Arnold's two pieces for her exuberant troupe Apt 33 emphasized hard-charging, tight arrangements to popular urban music ("So Fine" by Jamaican reggae star Sean Paul and "Not Afraid" by Eminem). Samuels Smith's solo + ensemble, Acasmellyah--its title, a tapper's play on the word acapella--is so masterfully sharp, finely complex, roaring in sound and mesmeric in effect that it's hard to believe that Rhythm in Motion wouldn't just stop there and let us stagger home.

Derick K. Grant
(c)2012, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

But there was more to come. La Touche with musical collaborator/dancer Sean Jackson and fellow dancers Brittany DeStefano and Karissa Royster brought We Used to Hold, partly set to an Erykah Badu song, innovative in staging and sound and with occasional subtlety and sexiness. Grant's Buzzcut Season, using the Lorde song, scatters a roiling mess of dancers in school uniforms around the space. Now and again, the galloping, spinning crowd briefly, ingeniously parts to throw focus on one or a few of its members in a floating narrative of high school life and love.

Program B will include works by Gregory Hines (staged by Barbara Duffy), Brenda Bufalino, Cartier Williams, Michela Marino Lerman, Max Pollak, Susan Hebach, and the capoeira-inspired Fuga by Felipe Galganni.

Rhythm in Motion continues through Saturday. Remaining shows include tonight (Program A at 7pm and 9:30pm), Thursday (Program A at 7pm), Thursday (Program B at 9:30pm), Friday (Program B at 7pm and 9:30pm) and Saturday (Program B at 3pm with a Tap Talk Back and 7pm).

For Rhythm in Motion tickets, click here.

For information on Sunday's Celebrating Gregory! fundraiser with guest host Bill Irwin, click here.

The Theater at 14th Street Y
344 East 14th Street (at 1st Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)