Dance review: Dorrance Dance explores the subtle nuances of tap in SOUNDscape
The New York City troupe began the production in complete darkness, attuning the audience’s ears to the intricate sounds of feet on floors
Dorrance Dance’s SOUNDspace. Photo by Ben McKeown
DanceHouse and Vancouver Tap Dance Society presented SOUNDscape at the Vancouver Playhouse on April 19 and 20
DORRANCE DANCE OFFERED up a night of subtly crafted rhythms over the weekend—the company’s SOUNDspace akin to a kind of sophisticated STOMP without the flash or volume.
For most of the evening, it was a tap show without metal taps—or even “music” beyond the complex, layered rhythms of feet and hands.
In fact, the leading New York City tap company began the production in complete darkness, attuning the audience’s ears to the intricate sounds of feet on floors—behind them in the aisles, and gently working up to the stage.
In later segments, choreographer Michelle Dorrance focused the spotlight on only the dancers’ lower legs and shoes, isolating the minute differences between the soft thud the ball or side of the foot might make versus the clack and tap of the heel. It was like a master lesson in the possibilities of “tap” technique.
All of this might have come as a surprise to audience members who know the company solely by Myelination, the sprawling, exhilarating interplay of tap with live jazz music and hip-hop that DanceHouse brought here in 2018.
By contrast, this more restrained trip into the complexities of body and foot percussion had its origins in a 200-year-old New York church where Dorrance Dance was not allowed to use metal taps on most of the wooden floors. Instead, they took to the balconies and altars in socks, leather-soled shoes, and bare feet, providing a sonic experience without the help of amplification.
This touring show grew out of that experiment and the results of the move to a big proscenium theatre—in this case, the Vancouver Playhouse—were mixed, with microphones now amplifying the sound.
The choreographer does find mind-bendingly intricate ways to build rhythms, elaborately blending the swishing and scraping of sand on the floor (an ode to Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s Stormy Weather) with skittering wood heels. Sometimes she builds a small soundscape with the different parts of the feet alone—a nonstop rainstorm of heels, with toes and other foot parts layering the top hits of percussion. The Dorrance Dance crew brings diverse styles and personalities to the show—most noticeably, the lanky Warren Craft, whose liquid limbs splay and slip underneath him, his spine hunching and bending backwards off axis as he rips through rhythms. And the crowd’s sizable contingent of tap fans clearly ate up the virtuosic displays by the dancers.
Still, choreographer Dorrance had so attuned our ears to the subtlety of sound that when music was at last introduced in the extended ending sequence—a dazzling interplay between the rhythms of Gregory Richardson’s bass violin and the dancers’ layering percussion—the show felt like it was finally taking off just as it was coming to a close. But there’s perhaps an alternate way to look at SOUNDspace: Dorrance, ever pushing the art form as she draws deep on its history, may have staged her most daring and challenging work to date—inviting us to listen closely in a world that’s filled with noise.
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