Savion Glover returns to The Joyce!

Tony-winning tap great Savion Glover
has a new show at The Joyce Theater.

LADY 5

@

SAVION GLoVER's

BARoQUE'BLAK

TaP Café

by Savion Glover
at The Joyce Theater
July 2-7, 2019

The letters flip up and down--kind of like hoofers' heels and toes--in the titles tap icon Savion Glover gives things. The off-kilter rhythm of the letters jingles and jangles...and jars. Skim across a program page, and your eyes might get snagged on a particular letter or the oddly-true sound a whimsical word makes inside your head. What, exactly, is Half-Our or I Can Here Myself? Tell me there's no part of you smiling at this thought: "Well, I kinda know what that might mean!"

As noted above, the title of Glover's new ensemble production--running now through Sunday at The Joyce Theater--is rendered in his program notes precisely this way:

LADY 5

@

SAVION GLoVER's

BARoQUE'BLAK

TaP Café

It has been several years since Glover, a popular man at The Joyce, has brought a show there. (The Joyce, by the way, is on a roll with tap--now through early January--with luminaries like Ayodele Casel, Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards and Michelle Dorrance waiting in the wings. And a tip of the hat to my dear colleague Aaron Mattocks for that programming.) LADY 5 looks nothing like your conventional tap extravaganza. It's so many things and soooo much. It's an illustrative tribute to a wide range of music genres and artists. It's a way of proving to us that dancers are musicians--and that we see through hearing and hear through seeing, or something like that. And it's a transparently messy, headlong plunge into an artist's overflowing psyche.

I count almost twenty sections in the 90-minute show, including one where a male tap shoe foot puppet (yes, you read that right) chats up a female footless-tight foot puppet (yes...) at a café table, and another binary-boosting segment (What Kind of MaNz) where aggressive male tap dancers seem to be all but literally humping their slithering female jazz dancing partners. I need to scold Glover for engaging superb dancers like Natrea Blake, Samantha Berger, Monique Smith and Megan Gessner (the last introduced by Glover as "our token white person") in cheesy moments like this. A finale set to Stevie Wonder's "Another Star" ends up slaughtering poor Stevie under Glover, Marshall Davis Jr. and Darrell Grand Moultrie's jet-propelled and amplified drilling. Maybe a single dancer--or these three without amplification--would have been kinder to the singer and his gorgeous song.

As noted before, with LADY 5 one must push aside any longing for the conventional. Glover takes you on a journey that, for reasons not exactly or convincingly clear, opens with a display of antique costumes arranged along a metal walkway above a café-like setting. Along the way, you'll see Smith dancing to spoken word (the brilliant Jae Nichelle on recording) about what it's like to live with anxiety; various and sundry face-offs between ballet and tap or ballet and jazz; and surrealistic vignettes with Glover apparently haunted, obsessed and traumatized by a ballerina's disembodied tutu descending from above. A dancer might be doing her thing downstage while a shadowy figure creeps along the high walkway in the background. The Dalai Lama makes an appearance. (Just dropping that here. Don't fret about it.) There was an impressive, spiky contemporary solo (PHuQSPaCE) performed by Gessner to the stylings of Bjork, and there is the lovely warmth of Blake's solo work in Everything Must Change.

So...a lot. And, although I am far from the kind of critic who needs the conventional, I must say I was grateful for a segment with fabulous, straight-up tap dance to Latin jazz that met percussion with percussion, fire with fire, spotlighting virtuosity in a way nothing else in the show really touched.

A show with turbo-charged ambitions and oddities, and not everything works. But, hey...Savion Glover at The Joyce. It took several years for that to happen again.

LADY 5 @ SAVION GLoVER's BARoQUE'BLAK TaP Café continues through this Sunday with matinee and evening performances. For schedule and ticket information, click here.

The Joyce Theater

175 Eighth Avenue (between 18th and 19th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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A joyful noise: Savion Glover brings STePz to the Joyce

Savion Glover (r) and Marshall Davis Jr. ring some changes on
the stair dancing made famous by Bill "Bojangles" Robinson
(photo by Elijah Paul)

By the time you read this, it will be too late to catch STePz--the latest and, to my eye, most incandescent tap dance production brought to The Joyce Theater by the great Savion Glover. I hope that someone will help Glover to take this show on the road, keep it going somehow, until the shoes and feet fall off each of its five hoofers or until Armageddon, whichever happens first.

Savion Glover in action
(photo by Elijah Paul)

STePz should not fade into history. Everyone should have the chance to see Glover looking up, looking out and beaming, perhaps, from the joy of knowing he has gathered the right crew: Marshall Davis Jr., Robyn Watson, Ayodele Casel and Sarah Savelli. This ensemble rocks consummate discipline, style, sass and stamina. Glover has pulled it off: a show that manages to be both delightfully playful and bracingly tight. Neatly arranged into two halves featuring six numbers each, the 90-minute program slips from one high-powered dance into the next--nods to Miles Davis, Gregory Hines, Stevie Wonder and more--with barely a pause for breath.

A tap dancer's perennially loving, reverent gaze into the storied past of ancestral mentors might have brought a stern life lesson: Get busy. No time for nonsense.

The new, unexpected radiance coming off Glover is no illusion. Whatever the source, it frees his entire body and his aura and self-presentation, makes him gutsier, more responsive and musical than ever. You can believe his Mission Impossible theme face-off with Davis Jr.--numerous attacks on stacks of stairs in ways that would make Bill "Bojangles" Robinson faint--could go on forever. No quit, really, in either man.

Left to right: Robyn Watson, Ayodele Casel and Sarah Savelli
aka, 3CW (3 Controversial Women)
(photo by Elijah Paul)

It's always a pleasure, and instructive, to watch Casel's feet work with the focus and precision of delicate needlework, and it has been too long since I've seen the juicy Savelli in action. Savelli's dancing reminds me of why I like to dance. I also got a kick out of the way the jazzy, tuneful Watson allowed herself more time than Glover apparently had planned. As she worked through her solo turn in Miles Mode, Glover started back on stage, then had to back off! No quit in any of these women, either!