You can’t beat JUBA! MASTERS OF TAP AND PERCUSSIVE DANCE for sheer scope and variety of performance styles, techniques, aesthetics, and, well, people on stage in Wednesday’s opening night, sponsored by The Chicago Human Rhythm Project (CHRP) and The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). That very diversity beats any effort to nail it down with a definition, and maybe that’s just the point.
Rhythm is the express currency of tap dance, unique among dance forms for its use of the body to invent and produce the infinite and ingenious variety of patterns and riffs on the human heartbeat at the center of it all, fueling the human engine.
Rhythm World, CHRP’s annual, now four-week-long summer tap dance extravaganza, of which the three distinctly different JUBA! concert programs are the culmination, brings more tap dancers together under one roof at one time than anywhere else in the world. That’s important, for Chicago, for the world, and most especially for tap dance as a concert dance form.
Lane Alexander, founding director of the CHRP and mover and shaker extraordinaire--literally, still dancing with lyrical flow and tapping precision--has been pioneering just that for the past 24 years of Rhythm World, bringing together the best tap dance artists to teach and perform, sculpting a tangible presence for tap dance in Chicago and a national home for its cultivation into the future at the American Rhythm Center, home for the past two years of the CHRP and BAM!, its resident tap dance company.
JUBA! gives us an array of what is arguably the best tap dance in the world. We appreciate some pieces simply for the mind-boggling phenomenon of out-of-this-world tap dancing, but If you were expecting the formal conventions of concert dance, this was not it. The folksy introductions and informal chattiness that interspersed the evening, both in between acts and in the actual performance of some, contrasted with seriously significant art in evidence on stage. This contributed to the ambiguity of the event--an insiders’ love fest or an effort to legitimize tap as a dance form to be taken seriously and on equal terms with its sister genres, which is not to say the two can’t coexist, or shouldn’t.
Opening the program with the North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble set the tone for a night of fun and invention, inclusiveness and unbridled enthusiasm in Nicholas Young’s “Trash Talk,” which he choreographed for the group. Multiple tap dancing rhythms overlapped and dueled across the stage with drumsticks on plastic garbage cans and chimes, tin can shakers and sonic construction tubes while these kids lit up the stage with their energy and talent.
Humor punctuated the evening with Guillem Alonso’s “Sand Dance” a visual and auditory treasure, and French Tapper Victor Cuno’s rendition of Noel Coward’s “Always Something Fishy About the French.”
The almost self-conscious charm of Star Dixon’s solo to ”You Got Me” by The Roots combined her singing voice in a smoky lament that mirrored the pathos of her dance, a sensitive tap monologue of emotional highs and lows, rhythmic change, and subtle touch.
Greg Spero’s on-stage music was a great asset and consistently rich presence throughout the evening, giving us a tantalizing taste for what marvelous collaborations could ensue.
Young’s solo, “The Last Unicorn,” took a dive into political content, starting out with the choreographer reading what began as an intriguing personal journal entry and became an overly-long essay on gun violence. The dance that followed combined tap and jazz music, with the Spero Trio performing live on stage. The dance, poignant, nuanced, and brilliantly danced, spoke amply for itself, with dramatic narrative impact, and didn't need the prosaic text that preceded it. One would have wished for Young to integrate the stronger, first part of his spoken text with danced portions of the piece, using the rich imagery of animal magic, ritual, and the power of unexplained beauty. Could the text partner with the dancing as much as the dancing partnered with the live music?
I confess a personal interest in the seamless integration of percussive rhythm, instrumental music, and choreographic structure. This was most strongly represented in Alexander’s “Prisms,” performed by BAM!, the company he directs. Here, spatial and rhythmic design were equal partners, providing the excitement of stage pictures that came into focus through their rhythmic development in the tapping and integration of sound with the live music--”Children’s Songs,” by Chick Corea. Movement vocabulary branched out into broad, sweeping whole-body arcs, swinging and suspending, falling and rebounding on breath impulse. The introduction of jumps worked in a musically complex relationship between the tapping and piano and lent novelty to a dance form that usually stays fairly close to the ground. A virtuoso turn by Zada Cheeks combined balletic pirouettes and tours with tap dance chops.
In “The Question of U,” solo dancer/choreographer Daniel Borak also utilized full-body choreographic elements of shape and effort, integrating acrobatics, ballet, and modern dance vocabulary with dazzling tap moves, fully meshing with the title music by Prince to achieve a satisfying artistic whole.
The undeniably brilliant musicianship of “pure” tapping, essentially happening largely from the hips down, is equally valid and has a place on the concert tap stage, as well- evidenced in Charles Renato’s dramatic “My History of Tap,” also performed to Spiro’s live music.
Borak and Ursina Meyers’ “Suite No. 2 in B Minor,” set to the music of Bach, showed off the dancers’ rhythmic acuity and precision but lacked the choreographic invention to sustain a fuller partnership with Bach’s depth of musical invention.
The critical question is, can you separate choreography, the art of movement design in space, time, and energy, from the auditory and rhythmic design of tapping, albeit sound that is produced by body gesture? Or should you? The answer is yes, sometimes, depending...maybe, or maybe not.
My dance date that night was a friend whose acquaintance with tap dance consisted of vintage Shirley Temple, Fred Astaire, and Ginger Rogers movies. “Entertaining,” she quipped, “but you see one, you’ve seen ‘em all.” JUBA! changed all that for her. She was astounded and delighted, uplifted and invigorated by the innovation, artistry, imagination, and virtuosity on display. “More people should SEE this!” she exclaimed, upon exiting the MCA theater. “This should have the same popular draw for the general public as musical theater!” Indeed.
Lynn Colburn Shapiro
August 1, 2014