Play the floor: Dorrance and Young at the Guggenheim

Michelle Dorrance
(photo: Works & Process at the Guggenheim/Jacklyn Meduga)

Audience waiting for the opening
Works & Process: Rotunda Project performance
at the Guggenheim Museum rotunda
(photo: Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

Despite what you might have read, tap dance is not on its last legs. Nor is it at death's door. Not while gifted makers like Michelle Dorrance and Nicholas Van Young still craft new ways to put its legacy and possibilities, its fun and glories in front of ever-expanding audiences like the ones that packed Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum last night for three back-to-back performances for Works & Process: Rotunda Project, the museum's new residency and commissioning initiative.

The opening crowd, for the 6:30 show, was an eager and, it should be noted, overwhelmingly white audience--fairly easy to notice as people climbed and lined the museum's famous helical ramps, single-file, to view the museum's ground floor, the primary area for performance. Seeing the show required standing at the ramp's balconies for about 30 minutes plus the wait time before the show started.

According to a New York Times report, when Dorrance, Young and the troupe got their first go-round at the rotunda, they were shocked to discover its tap-unfriendly acoustics. Ooops.

Above: Claudia Rahardjanoto
Below: Dorrance and Young
(photos: Matthew Murphy)

Well, being smart people, they set to work on this formidable beast and, while perhaps not quite besting it, they created a playful sonic dialogue with it. From the opening boom, boom, boom of Dorrance's straddled drum, to angelic voices spiraling towards the skylight, to Young's body percussion and whistling, to the clack and rumble of batons on the floor, wooden boxes or balustrades, music was made by determined performers, and the audience got a lesson in music as a phenomenon of bodies in motion in space, any space. The charming Young even served as conductor, wordlessly training the audience in a complex score and drawing delighted laughter from us. Ephrat "Bounce" Asherie, the Bessie-nominated b-girl, paired with Matthew "Mega Watts" West to contribute hypnotic breakdance segments like jewels nestled inside settings offered by their colleagues and the gleaming white floor.

Gazing down on that floor for most of the performance gave watchers a view of dancers who resembled worker ants or a crisp marching corps as they executed elaborate geometry and braids of formations. Towards the end, the sixteen dancers strapped on tap shoes, bringing the thunder to platforms and planks of wood: We shall have tap!

And so, they shall. And so shall we.

Performers:

Ephrat "Bounce" Asherie
Elizabeth Burke
Warren Craft
Donovan Dorrance
Michelle Dorrance
Michael Landis
Aaron Marcellus
Carson Murphy
Gabe Winns Ortiz
Claudia Rahardjanoto
Gregory Richardson
Leonardo Sandoval
Byron Tittle
Penelope Wendtlandt
Matthew "Mega Watts" West
Nicholas Van Young

Lighting: Kathy Kaufmann

Works & Process Rotunda Project: Michelle Dorrance with Nicholas Van Young has concluded. For updates on future events in the Guggenheim Works & Process series, click here.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan
(map/directions)

Free email subscription

to InfiniteBody

Click here!

"Rhythm in Motion" tappers bring their A game to Program B

L-r: Gabe Winn, Elizabeth Burke and Caleb Teicher
dance one of Teicher's Variations.
Photo: Vitaliy Piltser

Live and on video,
Chloe Arnold's hard-charging dancers
lay claim to fame and New York City
in Apartment #33...Where Dreams Are Made.
Photo: Vitaliy Piltser

L-r: Japan-born tap star Kazunori Kumagai
with vocalist Sabrina Clery and guitarist Masa Shimizu
in Kumagai's Excuse Me Mr.
In the face of discouraging world events, Kumagai says,
"music always helps me and inspires me to move forward."
Photo: Vitaliy Piltser

With his Rhythm in Motion programs, Tony Waag (American Tap Dance Foundation) has created an important new resource--space for the bumper crop of contemporary tap choreography of stylistic and thematic diversity. And he has found a congenial, if somewhat confined, home for it at The Theater at the 14th Street Y.

I missed this season's Program A. But, lordy, Program B--with works by Chloe Arnold, Felipe Galganni, Susan Hebach, Kazu Kumagai, Michela Marino Lerman, Caleb Teicher and Nicholas Young--was killer.

Introduced by Waag's appealing video montage of dancers at work and play in ATDF's studios, the show raced through ninety tightly-structured minutes of cool. Cool enough that even sand dancing--by a trio from Hebach's Nica's Dream crew--looked fresh enough to be the next street dance trend. Cool enough for me to take more interest in body percussion than I usually do (Young's intricate and social justice-minded WhiTeNoiSe). And even cool enough that the show's most traditional piece--Stardust, Marino Lerman's jazz duet with partner Dan Mitra--sustained its easygoing ways at length without wearing out its welcome.

More highlights included new pieces from Teicher and Kumagi.

Teicher has launched a study Glenn Gould's recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations, and Waag wove three of these trios--so far, he tells me, there are nine--throughout the Program B. Teicher, along with colleagues Elizabeth Burke and Gabe Winns, executes stark lines, delicate expressiveness and fiery speed with equal care. He looks poised to follow the acclaimed Michelle Dorrance into wider recognition as a striking performer and inquisitive dancemaker. Excuse Me Mr.--Kumagai's raw solo, accompanied in song and by guitar--plays the floor as a multi-voiced instrument and channel of soul. A modern rock star of tap, Kumagai holds true to its great Black ancestors while listening to his own empathic heart. And that will always be fresh and cool.

For information on future ATDF events, including this summer's Tap City festival (15th Anniversary, y'all!), click here.

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)