Fri 4/9
We went to see Dorrance Dance at Cleveland Public Theatre this Friday and the stakes were high. Michele Dorrance, you see, is one of very few post-Savion-Glover tappers who’s said to be doing good group tap choreography. If her work leaves us cold — like most concert tap dance has — then it’s time for us to forget about contemporary tap as a concert form.
Perhaps you’ve had a similar experience. Even if you like tap dance in old Fred Astaire movies and even if you tap for your own enjoyment, you find your eyes — and ears — glazing over at tap concerts.
But Friday’s concert showed us and the appreciative audience that packed the Gordon Square Theatre that tap lives in Dorrance Dance. This tap company succeeded where others have failed partly because of a less-is-more approach and partly because of Ms. Dorrance’s encyclopedic mastery of historic tap styles, forms and techniques.
By “less-is-more” we mean fewer taps. The first piece on the program, SOUNDspace (2013), begins with 2 dancers hitting their heels on the floor only twice in each bar. No musical accompaniment. No time steps with their flurries of taps. Just “And! One! (Wait, wait, wait) And! One! (Wait, wait, wait)” again and again with the heels barely coming off the floor before they came down, the two dancers in precise unison on that emphatic rhythm.
Each time the dancers suddenly hit “And! One!” they suddenly dropped into a low squat. So, less-is-more in terms of fewer taps but right away there was a spatial, sculptural component that added visual interest.
SOUNDspace didn’t stay so radically simple for long. The first two dancers were soon joined by a third and they danced unison trios, three-part canons and two-part canons in which two dancers danced in unison and the third dancer tapped a faster, apparently improvised, part against them. As the program note says of all the dances, “directed and choreographed by Michelle Dorrance with solo improvisation by the dancers.”
But even as SOUNDspace developed to include all six dancers entering and exiting, less-is-more remained the watch word. For a time, for instance, selective lighting lit the dancers’ legs and feet but left their arms and faces in shadows; we were shown less of them so that we could see and hear more. Not until late in SOUNDspace did the lighting again include arms and faces, and Dorrance and her dancers began using their arms as part of their tapping; the dancers did less so that — again — we could see and hear more.
Yes, things kept developing and new elements were added. At one point, taps were replaced by soft shoe. Late in this first dance, some of the dancers added a clapping pattern to the tapping and one of the dancers performed a kind of B-Boy solo in front of the other dancers. But SOUNDspace started out with a less-is-more approach that taught us to see and hear the tapping better and kept the piece interesting for all of its 23 minutes.
A very brief pause separated SOUNDspace from the next dance, Boards and Chains, which introduced two more elements. One was slides — or slydes — inspired by one of Dorrance’s teachers, Jimmy Slyde. Born James Titus Godbolt, Slyde named himself after his specialty and, as Brian Seibert writes in What the Ear Hears, “out of what could be a gimmick, he fashions an entire expressive idiom.” In Boards and Chains, Dorrance Dance demonstrates slides that carry the dancers along the floor, slides scraping the foot on the floor to create a sound. Thanks to the microphones placed around the stage that Dorrance Dance brought with them, we hear every nuance.
Throughout Boards and Chains, four-foot lengths of chain have been lying on the stage. Toward the end of the dance, the dancers pick up the chains and lower them, one length at a time, onto the stage. This produced a random succession of sounds, an arrhythmic pattern that was off the established beat, a pleasure to hear after long rhythmic passages. The dancers kick the chains into the wings. Blackout. Applause. Intermission.
The first piece after intermission, A Petite Suite, includes live vocal and instrumental music. The tone is less formal, less intense, cabaret rather than concert. Dorrance sings but she’s modestly amplified, back-up to the three tappers in front of her. Later in A Petite Suite she dances a loose-jointed dance of the dead with tall, thin Warren Craft while two of the musicians trade vocal lines behind them. Shake my bones, Saint Louis cemetery blues.
In another dance in A Petite Suite, dancer / keyboardist Claudia Rahardjanoto sings Nature Boy: “There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy …” And strange indeed is the solo Craft performs, falling to the floor and making percussive sounds with his knees and hands.
The concert concluded with an excerpt from Myelination, with original recorded music by Donovan Dorrance and Gregory Richardson. This was more like the finale we’d been taught to expect from tap with all the dancers tapping high and fast.
Listen to Michelle Dorrance while we dust off our tap shoes.
[Written by Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas]Cleveland, OH 44102