From a Far-Flung Correspondent

MacArthur Fellow and Bessie Winner Michelle Dorrance returned to the Vail International Dance Festival on Wednesday for a sold-out evening of music, rhythm, tap, and improvisation in Beaver Creek, Colorado’s Vilar Performing Arts Center. Joined by a troupe of six (mainly) dancers and four emerging jazz masters placed upstage right, “Dorrance & Friends” presented literal poetry in motion, in the form of a curated (and thoughtfully narrated) program honoring tap’s legacy as a source of musical innovation.

Michelle Dorrance performs regularly in both Massachusetts and Colorado, serving as an Artist-in-Residence at both Jacob’s Pillow [read my 2018 BMInt review HERE] and annual appearances and commissions for the Vail Dance Festival. The July 31^st concert was preceded with an overview of the whole festival, held one day before, entitled “Upclose: Swerve with Damian Woetzel” [2024 program HERE and “sizzle reel” HERE]. The festival has already posted a “sizzle reel” from the July 26, 2024, opening night performances (including the National Repertory Orchestra performing live) HERE.

In Dorrance’s remarks after intermission the award-winning choreographer and dancer praised the members of the specially-assembled jazz quartet, led by Dorrance Dance “Music Director Joel Wenhardt, at the piano. This is our first collaboration with these incredible musicians, and we’ve been having a total joyfest for the past couple of days. We’re so grateful to them. In the first half of this evening, we felt that it was really important to open with the musical language of our form, with a work that was created because of the acoustics of a church in New York City.” One of her best known pieces, SOUNDspace is a 2011 acoustic exploration of New York City’s St. Mark’s Church; it was recently adapted and presented at Boston’s ICA [see Jeffrey Gantz’s 2023 review for the Globe HERE].

Dorrance continued, “[St. Mark’s has] no amplification: you could hear the footfall of a sock two hundred feet away. So developing those compositional ideas to us lives in a very pure place in the form. We also hope to invite you into the tonal language of tap dance, because it’s subtle. It’s not as [orally] evident as a melody on these instruments. We hope that our ears are in this space to listen to the conversation that we’re having now.”

Viewing Vail
Vail’s July 31^st event featured eight contrasting dances, beginning with a newly redesigned SOUNDspace with dramatic lighting by two-time Bessie Award winner Kathy Kaufman (Sarah Lawrence College faculty). Kaufman’s work was an important component of the Boston Celebrity Series debut of Brazilian tap master Leonardo Sandoval’s touring company “Music from the Sole” in 2021 [photos and review HERE]. For the Vail Dance Festival performance, the audience’s view ranged from foundational (a flexible, rectangular band light revealing only the feet and ankles of a quartet led by Dorrance and Leonardo Sandoval) to scenic (contrasting cool and warm colors for a series of duets) to epic (allowing all seven members of the company to develop improvisatory solos). Technically, most of SOUNDspace could be described as a cappella, but by its conclusion, the audience began to respond sensitively to its music. We heard dozens of percussive motives, the development of themes, and clear sesquialtera layering long, lyrical glides and razor-sharp slides contrasted with gentle 12/8 shuffles and virtuosic staccato clicks creating melodies from treble pitches. The conclusion of the work paired solo dances with an extended acoustic bass solo by Jayla Chee, a recent graduate of the Juillliard School and former student of Gerald Cannon.

Music is a crucial element and structural organizer in Dorrance’s works. Watch her concise 2015 MacArthur Fellow discussion of tap’s musicality HERE. She embodies rhythms through hand, finger, and foot, calls on her collaborative dancers to shape and frame new works, and choreographs to both melodic and improvised music (especially classics of American jazz and new works by her brother Donovan Dorrance). Improvisatory passages, both musical and choreographic, are expertly woven into her pieces, making every live performance both site-specific and exhilaratingly unpredictable. The second work on the program was “Boards & Chains,” an excerpt from ETM: The Initial Approach (2014), co-created by Dorrance and Nicholas Van Young. Musical elements combine foot work (tapping, scraping, stomping, and sliding) on wooden platforms with attached aluminum pieces of diamond tread plate, floorwork, and chains dropped and dipped by the dancers. The chain work added a surprisingly graceful melodic element to the phrases of tap, rattling softly through sustained musical gestures [view a 2019 rehearsal HERE].

Dorrance’s many Vail premieres include 1•2•3•4•5•6, developed from the opening rhythm of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music [2016, video HERE]; They Try to Tell Us [2018, excerpts HERE]; Ex Pluribus One [co-commissioned with American Ballet Theatre, 2018, complete video HERE]; and the modern ballet Praedicere [premiered by ABT, 2018, excerpts HERE].  Before founding her own company and becoming a Jacob’s Pillow favorite, Dorrance danced with STOMP, Savion Glover, Jason Samuel Smith, and Darwin Deez. The Martha Graham Dance Company commissioned her to make a new variation on Graham’s landmark 1930 solo Lamentation [compare Graham’s original HERE with an excerpt from Dorrance’s 2015 company piece an excerpt HERE], and she has developed many of her best new works as a visiting choreographer at the Vail Dance Festival and Jacob’s Pillow (nestled in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts).

A North Carolinian Legacy

Michelle Dorrance began her training with the North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble under JUBA Award recipient Gene Medler and studied under many of the last master hoofers. Her July 31^st concert entitled “Dorrance Dances: An Evening with Michelle Dorrance & Friends” honored Medler’s legacy in several ways: Dorrance herself, Dance Captain/Dancer Elizabeth Burke, and Dancer/Soloist Luke Hickey were all mentored by Medler and toured with in his ground-breaking Ensemble.

She described the importance of Medler’s work as follows: “He was a late-to-life tap dancer. He did not start tap dancing until he was almost thirty.  He started a youth tap legacy that is unparalleled in the entire world, based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I wanted to make this historical journey really personal, because Gene invited us as very young people to take ownership of this form and deeply understand its history. As a member of the North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble, we were taught the various legacies that are the reason we dance the way we do. We also performed historical dances for our peers in the form of lecture-demonstrations throughout the state. [..] I wanted to open the second half of this evening with two very important traditions: the cipher and the soft shoe. Those are two huge pillars of tap dance.”

Following the intermission, the audience enjoyed an extended circle-based improvisation by dancers, followed by a sinuous soft shoe quintet from her newest work, entitled Shift. The improvisation was highly structured, beginning as a cipher: a circle of dancers maintaining the jazz quartet’s steady rhythm with their feet, while a single dancing body took a turn in the center of the circle. After each had improvised alone, Dorrance led a series of six sets of improvisations while remaining in the circle, with her back to the audience: she soloed for 32 beats, then passed the “solo” time to the dancer to her left, and each in turn took a matching number of “eights.” She then led five more complete rounds of the circle, soloing for 32, 16, 16, 8, and 8 beats respectively), and described developing the cipher with the jazz quartet, “I can tell you that [the cipher] is rooted in improvisation: we were out there [on stage], and [the quartet] pulled a 12-bar on us, and we all laughed [in surprise at the unexpected quicker change of the harmony]. It was great, thanks. [Audience laughs.] Anyway, the point is not to plan that. One our favorite things to do is to jam, both tap dancers and jazz musicians alike – that lives so deeply in our legacy, at the origin of tap dance as a part of the African diaspora. So essentially, our foundation is improvisation – that’s one of the most important things to understand and listen for.”

Following the cipher, the quartet performed “Dedicated to You” by Sammy Cahn, Hy Zaret, and Saul Chapin, in which Dorrance accompanied on ukelele, supporting vocalist Brinae Ali with humor and verve, on a separate platform upstage left. This laid a smooth and lyrical foundation for an excerpt from Dorrance’s newest work, Shift. (2024). “The second of the two traditions that we wanted to open this part of the show with is soft shoe, because it was one of the first presentational forms of tap dance, before it turned out towards to the world.” Abdias Armenteros led the quartet through multiple verses of this jazz standard, playing both soprano and tenor sax in alternation with Brinae Ali’s texted interpretation of the same melodic material. A current graduate student in the Juilliard Jazz program, you can hear the subtle influence of Wynton Marsalis’ neo-traditional stylings on his restrained, gentle tenor tone. A unified ensemble made up of Elizabeth Burke, Luke Hickey, Emiko Nakagawa, Leonardo Sandoval, and Claudia Rahardjanoto contrasted unison 12/8 shuffle rhythms in their feet with unique upper-body interpretations (think of the soft shoe as a bass line from the hips down, with six different ornamented melodies from the hips up).

“To continue this journey, we’re honoring three very specific artists who were game changers in the development of tap dancing music. We’ll start with Leonardo Sandoval’s tribute to the great John Bubbles. Brinae will then take us on her journey, honoring one of the most influential and enigmatic hoofers in our history, Baby Laurence. Deeply influencing musical sensibilities from bebop to hip hop, he was one of the most rhythmically inventive tap dancers of all time, straddling huge movements in the jazz era. We then jump forward a few decades, to a time that we call “The Tap Dance Renaissance,” to the great tap soloist and choreographer, writer, and performing artist Brenda Bufalino. Mentored by Honey Coles, who was a peer of Baby Laurence, she in turn [Brenda] took tap dance into a new compositional direction which we’ll see demonstrated beautifully by Elizabeth Burke and Luke Hickey. At the turn of the twentieth century, this is one of the first and most important as tap dance influenced the legacy of the dance work, but also, music and musical sensibility.”

Claudia Rahardjanoto appeared center stage to demonstrate a 4/4 swung time-step and buck-and-wing in the style of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, over which Dorrance made the following historical remarks: “She’ll move through a few of Robinson’s classic and signature steps. He popularized this form: incredibly clear, very light… you can hear the treble sounds, mostly from the balls of the feet. That’s not to say he didn’t use the entire foot; he was an incredible musician, a changemaker and a revolutionary. He broke the rule which forced African-American performers to form acts only as duos, trios, or groups, as the first successful Black dance soloist in American performance history. He also broke through one of the most horrific traditions of American history (but we have to look at it, because it’s so much a part of our culture); he was one of the first Black performers to not wear blackface, which was forced on many performers at the time. He helped to desegregate the silver screen, holding Shirley Temple’s hand, and his birthday is International Tap Dance Day, May ^25th. The “Mayor” of Harlem, he was one of the most widely respected and groundbreaking performers of an entire era. [We include this feature on] Robinson, because it was his popularity and his direct influence on so many artists, including John Bubbles, that led to where we’re about to go.”

“John Bubbles: known as the Godfather of Rhythm Tap. The legacy we’re rooted is both a legacy of music and of movement. It has such a deep relationship to jazz music and to the American musical legacy. We invite Leonardo to the stage to honor John Bubbles [watch him HERE in 1937], very specifically because he brought such a powerful syncopation and even deeper “swing” feel into our music and into our dance. Sandoval then took the stage, introducing his “Tribute to “Bubbles” for solo tap dancer, stride piano-dominated jazz quartet, and vocalist Brinae Ali, performing Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields’s “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” and Michael Carr’s “Rhythm’s O.K. in Harlem.” He prefaced the dancing by introducing his subject: “John Bubbles. Tap dance is not, and it was never dead. It has been always here: maybe what we need is just a couple more folks to join our club. So waste no time: pick up your tap shoes and come meet us on the dance floor. We are always honoring our masters, but with an eye to the future, bringing our own flavor to this art form, and recreating classical historical steps. Make no mistake, we don’t do this for a living. We do this so we don’t starve to death.” Watch a Sandoval developing a similar work in the studio HERE.

Brinae Ali then took the stage, presenting excerpt from her “Baby Laurence Project.” Che maintains a YouTube channel of recent performances and studio work HERE. Ms. Ali began by playing a recording of the artist’s own words from the 1973 Berlin Jazz Festival with Duke Ellington: “Ladies and Gentlemen, the tap dancing that I’m about to do is not just to watch, but to listen to, as I call it, jazz-tap-percussion. And I’m sure, after you’re witnessed this performance, you’ll agree with me that tap dancing IS percussion.” Singing, scatting, and dividing the audience into four groups and leading a participatory exercise to build up a dynamic 4/4 rhythm through clapping, she combined quotations from Laurence’s routines with her own hip hop-influenced improvisations, in a “reimagining and montage of Baby Laurence’s recordings of “Baby at Birdland” a[listen to the original HERE] and a phrase from “Concerto in Taps” [listen to the original HERE] from his album “The Dancemaster” mixed with “An Afternoon of Percussion.” Ms. Ali, an alumna of STOMP, teaches at Johns Hopkins Peabody Conservatory and is a cultural ambassador for the U.S. Department of State – Education and Cultural Affairs division.

Burke and Hickey’s elegant duet adaptation of an excerpt from Brenda Bufalino’s Cantata and the Blues (1984) provided both poignancy and understated elegance: this important landmark of American concert tap dancing was part of Medler’s youth tap curriculum. Brenda Bufalino, who will be 87 this September, creates art that crosses boundaries and media. As the founding director of The American Tap Dance Orchestra, she has taught and performed internationally for over 30 years [see her website HERE and view a collection her tap and soft shoe work HERE].

The sound component of Cantata and the Blues contrasts spoken “monologues” created by Bufalino with three pieces of music: Joel Wenhardt delicately played an excerpt from J.S. Bach’s Invention No. 1 in C Major, BWV 772; “Take the A Train” by Billy Strayhorn; and “Lullaby of the Leaves” by Bernice Petkere and Joe Young. The latter two works were sung by Brinae Ali and soulfully accompanied by Abdias Armenteros (soprano and baritone saxophones), Eliza Salem (drums), and Jayla Chee (acoustic bass, played both pizzicato and arco). Hickey and Burke are regular members of Dorrance Dance,and they maintain a long relationship as a successful double act [watch them HERE at the 2017 American Dance Festival]. Their synergy and humor recalled and honored the great family partnerships of tap, such as the Nicholas Brothers [watch their famous stair dance from the 1943 film Stormy Weather HERE (colorized)] and Maurice and Gregory Hines [HERE in the 1979 Broadway show Eubie!].

The evening was rounded out with an excerpt from Dorrance’s Rhythms of Being (2002, developed from hambones and hand jives taught to her as a student in North Carolina) and a joyous rendition of The Twelve/Eight (2012) featuring a body percussion solo by Leonardo Sandoval and an extended solo by Dorrance in the style of her Stockholm solo performance [see 2014 film HERE].

More Recent Film
Michelle Dorance has collaborated with John Baptiste and Stay Human on the Late Show HERE and spoken about how art can represent social change for the Ford Foundation HERE. First Lady Jill Biden recently commissioned Dorrance to create a youthful treatment of the Dance of the Floreadores from Duke Ellington’s jazzy Nutcracker Suite: meant to be a whimsical addition to the child-friendly holiday displays at the White House in 2023, the choreographer is featured near the end of the short video holding a candy cane HERE.

When Michelle Dorrance dances, her body conjures an expressive language that is more akin to singing than dancing. She transcends categories and invokes master artists of the past, bridging the gap between movement and sound: “To be a tap dancer is to be a historian.”

Dr. Prichard studied tap and ballet under Miss Ethel Marie Crabtree, a student of Fred Kelly. She is the Dramaturg for Aaron Zigman’s new oratorio Émigré, which premiered to sold-out houses in Shanghai (2023) and at the New York Philharmonic (2024). A finalist for the 2015 Pauline Alderman Prize for Outstanding Writing on Women & Music and the 2019 Kurt Weill Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in Music Theater since 1900, she teaches at the university level (Harvard Libraries, Bunker Hill CC, and formerly at Northeastern and UMass), as a certified K-12 teacher of music/dance/art, and works as a theater pianist (over 50 productions with the Winchester Cooperative Theater and ART). She was the Assistant Director for the Grammy Award-winning San Francisco Symphony Chorus from 1995-2003 under Vance George and has sung with major symphony and professional choruses on both coasts for 30 years.