SeeChicagoDance.com

Chicago Tap Theatre "Tap Out Loud"

By Laura Molzahn

Think tap is monotonous? If you’re not an aficionado, a long program can seem that way.

But not when it’s in the hands of Mark Yonally, artistic director of eight-year-old Chicago Tap Theatre. "Tap Out Loud" --- a two-hour show of 11 pieces, many brand-new, performed Saturday night only at the Athenaeum Theatre --- didn’t always work. But it was never less than original and ambitious.

"The more, the merrier" seems to be Yonally's motto. He collaborated with three Chicago artists on cross-disciplinary works and opened up the program to company member/choreographer Kendra Jorstad, and to other company dancers in partly improvised pieces. Only one work --- the show's jaw-dropping finale, an extravaganza truly worthy of the name --- was a straight-up Yonally debut.

Dedicated to his brother, David, "The Queen Suite" memorializes the passion they shared for the music of Queen (David passed away three years ago, at the age of 40). This joyous piece often feels more about the music than the dance, but what it lacks in serious dance purpose it more than makes up for in energy and chutzpah. Rather than use recordings, Yonally divvied up the suite’s six songs among singer/pianist and composer-in-residence Anthony Edwards, the Chicago Red Line choir, opera singer Allison Setzke, and the Lakeside Pride Freedom Band, a brass-and-percussion marching band wearing Tweedledum-Tweedledee shorts and baseball caps. The closest the music comes to the originals is a karaoke take on "Under Pressure," while the band’s playing renders "Bicycle Race" almost unrecognizable.

Yonally has never shied away from kitsch, but he's outdone himself in "The Queen Suite," a heart-bursting celebration of love and life. He closes it by bringing dozens of amateur tappers of all ages up on stage, creating an overwhelming sense of joyful community.

"Thug Life" --- Yonally's collaboration with Kyle Vincent Terry, former artistic director of hip-hop-oriented Chicago Dance Crash --- takes a comic view of rap’s implicit violence and ties it to the traditional competitiveness of tap dance. The screaming, shoving, and slugging can get a little old, but Terry's tongue-in-cheek fight choreography neutralizes the antagonism; one dancer hauls off and “hits” another, for instance, while a third --- far downstage and a second too late --- provides the sound effect.

Yonally's joint effort with jazz choreographer Eddy Ocampo, "LAB," was probably the evening’s most ambitious piece in dance terms. Josh Weckesser's fabulous lighting gives this rather cold work a polished, highly dramatic veneer. And its Frankenstein-monster blend of jazz and tap works well --- though the nine dancers sometimes struggled with the balletic side of Ocampo’s Giordano-influenced movement. But I had to admire the attempt and the outcome, while "Trip Ticket," Yonally’s collaborative remake with lighting designer Jesse Klug, was a lost cause. Fussy and mysterious, with lots of lighting and costume changes, it was the program’s one instance of total lack of communication.

Jorstad, who choreographed a couple of humorous pieces for last December's "Tidings of Tap" show, revealed her serious side in two new dances. The clever "Click/Intrinsic" opened the evening with an assembly line of ten tappers who crossed the stage one way, then reappeared at the back going the other. Grave faces and stiff upper bodies suggest cogs in a machine, but their robotic look becomes more appealing as the performers begin to suggest tightrope walkers or birds on a telephone wire. Jorstad's gentle quintet “Sorrow,” performed with red balloons, is less successful: it didn't say sadness to me, and it seems derivative of Valerie Lussac's "Spyrographe," also in the company’s repertoire.

"Improvography" pieces, some of them superenjoyable, made up most of the rest of the program. Soloing to Edwards's cover of the Smiths' melancholy "Asleep," a sort of lullabye whose lyrics suggest going to sleep forever, Yonally responds to the music so freely that this small, simple piece has an oversize impact. Phil Brooks shows how far he’s come as a dancer in "Monk Indigo," "Waiting," and "Beggin'." Tall and spindly, he steals the show with his intricate tapping and long, loose limbs, flung around his torso like satellites orbiting a planet.

Brenda Bufalino's "Flying Turtles," created in the late 80s and first revived by CTT a year ago, is a sort of progenitor for Yonally's own brand of tap-dance experimentation. Choreographed arms might look modern or African, but the overall effect is orchestral as different parts of the body move to different rhythms and the dancers form and re-form into shifting groups. A symphony of visual and aural counterpoint for 12, "Flying Turtles" concludes with an a cappella section nearly as rousing as the close of  "The Queen Suite" --- but much quieter.

Reviewed by Laura Molzahn on 06/21/2010 at 1:53 PM