Chicago Tap Theatre’s “Circo Tap” trips the light fantastic with a unique co-mingling of dance, theatre, live music, and circus arts. From its ingenious tap construct of a circus train gaining momentum, traveling across the plains and pulling into small-town America, to the grand finale circus parade through the audience, tap rhythms and Kurt Schweitz’s original music keep the action moving at a brisk pace.
While the circus teases out the child in all of us, the poignancy of human longing for something beyond our grasp haunts the narrative, connecting this evening of circus- themed dance episodes with poetic wistfulness.
Expanding from CTT’s backstage tap drama, “TightWire” this past spring, “Circo Tap” reprises the same cast of characters for a whole new, front-of-the-house take on the magic of circus. Mark Yonally’s endearing Gioconi The Clown adds humor with a touch of pathos, and Marc Kelly Smith’s narrator/Ringmaster Carlucci brings a philosophical lament to his blustery showmanship, anchoring the evening in the context of a larger circus metaphor.
For CTT’s latest love song to the art of tap dance, Artistic Director Mark Yonally enlisted the collaboration of circus arts consultant Melissa Marie of Shore Circus, stilt dancers from the Kristina Isabelle Dance Company, and tiny acrobatic dancer Dasha Merkulova. Yonally’s choreography does a masterful job of utilizing their authentic circus arts to the max, along with the acrobatic prowess of CTT dancers Isaac Stauffer and Jessica Williams, to create a true blend of dance and circus. It doesn’t hurt that all of the performers, guests and company regulars alike, are dancers who know their way around an arabesque and a pirouette as well.
Using the idiom of tap as the foundational lexicon and agent of artistic expression, Yonally and contributing choreographer Rich Ashworth bring a tapestry of concert dance constructs to bear on the overall choreographic design of the work. Meticulous attention to port de bras, spatial design, breath, and full-torso movement only enhance the complex rhythmic design and virtuosic work of the tapping feet. The impressive result is a grafting of tap dance and circus arts onto a larger field of dance theatre, enhancing the creative reach of both, but especially of tap dance, into the arena of modern dance and ballet without losing the distinctive qualities that make each genre unique.
Thirteen loosely connected “acts,” each delightfully distinctive, comprise a cohesive evening that hangs together with just enough story, written by Marc Kelly Smith. The syncopated tap rhythms of Yonally’s human circus train in “Night Train,” open the show with the full company as a hulking locomotive behemoth, setting a magical tone for the rest of the night. The dramatic combination of sound, movement and looming upstage projection of an old steam engine is one of the most theatrically powerful examples of Yonally’s creativity in this production.
Rich Ashworth’s “Control” takes off on Carlucci’s dark reference to the circus performers as puppets. The eight circus characters dance in front of a projection of the puppet master’s giant hand at the controls in an eery and quite beautiful sequence of falling and suspension, swinging and tossing of limbs in the haphazard limbo of puppet life. A dance that could exist on its own on any concert dance stage, here set to Schweitz’s mesmerizing calliope music, it foreshadows the deeper undercurrents yet to come.
In one of the few scripted dramatic scenes between two characters--Carlucci (speaking with his voice) and Gioconi the Clown (“speaking” in mime and tap-talk)--Yonally uses the tone and subtlety of touch and attack to shape emotionally-metered tap responses to Carlucci’s verbosity. Yonally’s improvised solo to Schweitz’s arrangement of “Send In The Clowns” exposes the interior monologue of Gioconi with complex rhythms and formidable tap chops.
An audible “Oh my God!” escaped from the audience as Isaac Stauffer and Jessica Williams astounded in their breathtaking acrobatic duet that combined stunning athleticism with balletic lyricism in a choreographed sequence that transcended circus tricks and veered into sheer artistry.
“So Very Close,” the culmination of Act I, brought stilt dancers and tap dancers together in an effervescent dance spectacle, jointly choreographed by Yonally and stilt dancer Kristina Isabelle. The height differentials alone created an aura of the unreal, with the stilt dancers draped in white diaphanous culottes. Their fully jointed limbs enabled them to move like giant goddesses, with arabesques that spanned half the stage. Their height made for dramatic partnering, with lifts flying sky-high and group formations that took on sculptural beauty.
Rhythmic gymnast, 12-year-old prodigy Dasha Merkulova, cast an other-worldly glow in “Spyrographe,” with tap choreography for dancers Kirsten Uttich, Jessica Williams, and Jennifer Pfaff Yonally by Valerie Lussac and gymnast choreography by Merkulova. The delicate tapping of the motherly corps of muses accompanied the inspired child acrobat, whose unaffected charm and clarity of form etched crystalline wonders across the space. She tossed and cartwheeled over a silver ball, couched it in her arched spine in back walk-overs, and slipped it across silky arms in an exquisite and sophisticated dance that defies human limitations.
“How long will you stay in your comfort zones?” is the question Yonally’s “Thin Line” asks, as Uttich and Pfaff Yonally’s circus tightrope dancers create the illusion of being high in the air on the thinnest of wires without a net. They almost fall, catch themselves and each other, and live in the hair trigger moment of balance, all the while tapping their precarious routine. Yonally’s choreography and Dustin L. Derry’s projected visuals are enough to inspire vicarious audience acrophobia.
Aside from the early (and lamentably unresolved) allusion to an unsolved death (murder?) from “TightWire,” “Circo Tap” is its own animal, utilizing the same cast of characters, but only as they live “on stage” in performance mode, lavishly adorned in Emma Cullimore’s period circus costumes. Derry’s lighting and projection design appear, on the Athenaeum’s proscenium stage, more developed and integrated into the whole than in “TightWire.” The historic Athenaeum is especially well-suited to the presentational emphasis of “Circo Tap” and its turn-of-the-century traveling circus motif. This one-night-only performance is a keeper. While the Athenaeum was packed Saturday night, more Chicago audiences deserve to see this delightful production.