Photo Credit: Christal Wagner
The old-school tap choreographer’s exhortation to “sell it, kids” is just material for humor in a Danceworks On Tap show. This company’s concerts aren’t made for profit, and few of the dancers qualify as kids. Artistic Director Amy Brinkman-Sustache’s company is interested in the nature, meaning and future of the art. Past concerts have explored tap’s Irish and African American roots, its relationship to street dance and the percussive dances of other cultures. This year’s concert, “Tap Talk,” focused on tap as a means of communication. “Listen, everybody” would seem the proper exhortation. This doesn’t mean it isn’t also fun.
The show began with listening: a voice suggested we’re better talkers than listeners, advising us to “enter every conversation assuming you have something to learn.” The first of a trilogy of increasingly challenging dances by Annette Grefig followed. Composed of unaccompanied tap combinations and hand clapping, they were impossible to execute without intense listening by the dancers to one another. Greffig, Brinkman, Holly Heisdorf, Katherine Stein and Gabi Sustache nailed the choreography, drawing the audience’s focus just as closely to the sounds.
Greffig’s Dendritic also made listening communal. Eight dancers, standing in line front to back across the stage, represented the human spine. Steps executed at one end were instantly repeated down the “spine” in sequence, like electric charges to the nervous system. When one dancer broke, succeeding dancers “died.”
Brinkman’s provocative Read Between the Lines featured Gabi Sustache as an outsider, whether by choice or force, to a group of women speaking an identical tap language. Choreographer Nikki Platt’s Coffee Talk explored the reverse: Platt, Sustache and newcomer Francis Faye, alone at separate café tables, each responded unconsciously with tapping toes or coffee spoons to the seductive rhythm of Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “The Girl from Ipanema” over the café’s sound system. Suddenly aware of their connection, they all sprang center stage and into a big Vegas-style number, united by music in a three-way dream.
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Platt was hilarious, chasing a written note passed among a happily tapping chorus anxious to keep the news from her in Brinkman’s Take Note. Individual personalities and solid tap skills were on display in performances by dancers from a summer workshop. And cabaret artist Bob Balderson sang the Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer standard “I Wanna Be a Dancing Man” in his sweet voice while gracefully tap dancing—no mean feat; a preview of his upcoming show at the Milwaukee Fringe Festival.
