E-Mail This Article to a Friend Tapstravaganza Savion Glover at the Majestic BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Critics like to complain that there aren’t any great dancers today though there are many above-average ones. Savion Glover is one of the greats. Fifty years from now, people will remember his performances with awe and mistrust. Could anyone have danced for 45 minutes non-stop with such a continuous flow of inspiration? Did he really do those remarkable feats of daring, intricacy, and stamina? Did he actually tap, sing, and carry on a sophisticated give-and-take with four musician partners all at the same time?

Savion Glover does do these things, and in the last few years he’s been touring the country, generously, obsessively, so that audiences can see for themselves. We got four chances last weekend when CRASHarts brought his "Improvography II" to the Cutler Majestic Theatre. Glover is only 32, but he’s already had a long career. He dances as if every night were his last, and deserving of his best invention.

Friday night, the show began with bassist Andy McCloud laying down and elaborating on a rhythm. After a while, you heard clumping footsteps off stage, and Glover kind of sneaked out, barely acknowledging the audience’s welcome. He picked up McCloud’s rhythm and kept it going with a long cadenza of interpolations and embellishments, establishing a base line of extreme virtuosity right off.

The first thing you notice about Glover is his funky appearance. Long and thin with a short black beard and his dreds tied up in a topknot, he wears an undershirt with another shirt over it flapping open, and some beads and a dangling ID card around his neck.

Besides his offhand attitude toward the audience, he’s a noticeably into-the-ground dancer. His steps seem to go down and down, hardly ever up, except when he hitches himself from the shoulders or hauls out of the floor from the hips and back. His legs compose tremendous volumes of taps, stamps, swipes, kicks, hops, skids, and vibrations, and as the surprises roll out, you also notice that he doesn’t do anything stylish to emphasize them. His arms just rappel off what his feet are doing, nothing pretty or picturesque. Sometimes he seems aggressive, insistent. The show is amplified to the point of distortion, but you get used to that.

After a long duet with McCloud, he finally turned and smiled to answer the audience’s applause before going on. Then he summoned solos from the other three musicians (Patience Higgins on saxophones and flute, Brian Grice on drums, and music director Tommy James on piano), accompanying them and sometimes dialoguing with them but still keeping us in mind of that original bass rhythm. This was only the first number.

He stepped off stage to towel off, then was right back to sing a very upbeat "The Way You Look Tonight" with a kind of locomotive tap driving underneath. This melted into a new song, new exchanges with the band. He ended a chorus on one toe, spread-eagled and off-balance, and he finished the set with a jump and two heel clicks in the air — these are known elsewhere as brisés. Act one ended with another song where the audience got to sing "toot toot!" on cue and Glover brought out new stuff including grands ronds de jambe à terre neatly set into the embroidery.

Savion Glover is very conscious of his place in tap history. Tap is defined by individuals and perpetuated by sharing and stealing, alliances of convenience and the bonding of pupil to master. Glover takes care to credit his mentors Gregory Hines and Jimmy Slyde, and it’s clear he wants to cultivate his own progeny. For the "Improvography" tour, he brought three young tap whizzes, Maurice Chestnut, Ashley Deforest and Cartier A. Williams, to lead off the second act. Then he joined them and they all took turns in solo choruses.

There was another extraordinary duet with Higgins’s sax. Glover started singing and dancing lines from "Nature Boy" in a mixture of bop, scat, and blues. Higgins imitated each phrase as Glover spiraled deeper and deeper into a stream-of-consciousness riff that was neither words nor music nor any kind of dancing you’d seen. Eventually all four guys in the band followed him phrase by phrase into Oz.

The other dancers came back to wind up with "The Stars and Stripes Forever, for Now," a huge tap, jazz, and Sousa jam that, if the title meant anything, suggested the best thing to do in these troubled times in America is to let out all the stops and wail.