American heritage

Savion Glover and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

by Marcia B. Siegel

The fusion of ballet and modern dance has been going on for a long time, but only in the last few years has the concert stage fully embraced vernacular dance as well. I'm talking about jazz, hip-hop, swing, and everything that used to reside in only the commercial or the social realm. At the same time, the vernacular forms are being consciously developed for stage presentation. Some of the most interesting dance around these days is being done by black choreographers, who not only use these components of our cultural heritage but honor them.

Two shows in town last week offered examples. New works by Ronald K. Brown and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar kicked off the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's annual visit to the Wang Theatre (part of the Bank Boston Celebrity Series). And Savion Glover's touring show, Footnotes, stormed through the Shubert for five performances.

Savion Glover was a teenage wonder, starring in The Tap Dance Kid on Broadway at 12 and dancing alongside Gregory Hines and Sammy Davis Jr. in the movie Tap. It's even more remarkable that, many hit shows and media slots later, he's still a star and still growing at 26. Footnotes, which will end a 10-city tour in Philadelphia after the Boston dates, is a showcase for Glover. For the hour-long first half, he never even goes into idle, and he has enough left for three more numbers after intermission.

You couldn't exactly say the fellow tappers who share the second half with him are incidental. After all, Jimmy Slyde, who helped spur the tap revival in 1969 as one of the original Hoofers, and Buster Brown, the last surviving member of the Copasetics, are the still feisty warriors of authentic tap and the warmly acknowledged precursors of Savion Glover. Dianne Walker represents the female tap minority, and Cartier Williams, who's only 10, already has a long résumé. Glover's message, as in every tap show I can remember for the past 30 years, is that tap has a life before and hereafter, and that he shares a responsibility with every other tap performer for its evolution.

Footnotes showed us a capsule view of that history, with few verbal explanations. The octogenarian Buster Brown reminded us of his vaudeville days with a few jokes and some clear, jaunty steps, so consolidated and centered over his legs, not a muscle wasted. Dianne Walker was relaxed and bouncy as she made neat embellishments on "Take the A Train." And Jimmy Slyde (71) can still do his signature step, careering into unexpected skids -- rhythmic dashes that punctuate his tap discourse.

Young Cartier Williams rapped out a nonstop succession of complicated phrases, repeating none of them, as if he couldn't get all his ideas out fast enough. He finished off with what appears to be his specialty, tapping with his weight over the heels or the toes of his shoes, simultaneously levitating and digging into the floor. Savion Glover includes this toe-dancing trick too; I think Gregory Hines was the first dancer I saw do it. Glover graciously allowed Williams to expand on the theme, and the boy let loose a long passage where he never put his whole foot on the ground, much to the audience's delight.

The diminutive Williams reminded me of Glover in his cute-urchin days, but the grown-up Glover doesn't trade in charm. Tall and rangy, with dreadlocks and a beard, he seems at once intimidating and diffident. He starts out almost hesitantly, trundles back and forth across the stage in a blaze of flamboyant lighting, finds something wrong with the sound system, calls the band and techies to start again. He dances stooped over, looking down, his arms inadvertently paddling and pumping with the fantastic beats he's creating. A lot of the time he turns his back to the audience and dances to one of the four musicians.

Glover dances with his whole leg, which I think accounts for the force and also the variety of his tap sound. I don't know what accounts for the manic intricacy. His upper body does nothing; he doesn't lead with his shoulders, or use his arms to stabilize, or do any engaging tilts or twists that would draw attention from his thundering feet. Often his body looks precarious, as if his momentum could throw it off kilter.

Over the course of the evening, he produced a little repertory of new set-ups that prompted new dance ideas. In one dance, he played as a member of the excellent jazz band led by drummer Eli Fountain. (The other musicians were bassist Emmanuel Gatewood, saxist Patience Higgins, and pianist Tommy James.) Glover would sometimes elaborate on the music, sometimes double one of the instruments, and sometimes duet with one of them. The ensemble numbers were long, and they unfolded from one idea, even one rhythmic structure, into another without a break.

One dance was slow, almost meditative, a sort of variation on the circular pattern of one leg, or what in ballet terms is called a rond de jambe, only instead of extending his foot into the air, Glover brushed it along the floor, and the band played moody rippling notes and vibrating cymbals. In another, he tested various sounds that he could get out of a miked and sampled floor. When he found one he liked -- his attack produced a kind of plucked-string effect -- he did a little echoing duet with the guitar player. When the sampler came up with a decaying tick-tick-tick, he danced a duet with that.

He did jogging dances, skipping dances, a little sand dance, a call-and-response duet with Fountain playing the triangle and dancing. The last and loudest piece began with John Coltrane. As Glover sped through a tremendous tantrum of rhythms, the band also went wild, falling almost accidentally into "My Favorite Things," playing in two keys for a while, whanging at what might have been a scrambled version of "Softly As in a Morning Sunrise." Glover sidled off in mid cyclone, leaving them to finish and the audience to scream.

Footnotes didn't pretend to be anything but a straight entertainment show, but it was spiritual in its sense of the dancing community, and in the creative rapport between Glover and the band. This unity of the social, the spiritual, and the artistic nature could be called tribal if that didn't connote a lack of sophistication. Ballet and modern dance somehow separated themselves from this kind of expression, and it was Alvin Ailey who first tried to reactivate it, through his magnificent reflection on African-American faith, Revelations (1960).

Revelations looks overproduced and calculated now, and the audience can't always distinguish between the reverent parts and the sass. But you can still see how beautifully Ailey crafted it to carry through a gamut of moods, and how Ronald Brown and Jawole Zollar are reconceiving the same ideas of community that Ailey brought onto the stage.

Zollar's piece, C-Sharp Street -- B-Flat Avenue, concentrates on the celebratory aspects of community, with music as an inspirational focus. Zollar uses some of the same poetic lines (by herself and Ntozake Shange) and some of the same music, by David Murray and Michael Wimberly, that accompanied Soul Deep, which was shown in Boston a few weeks ago by the Urban Bush Women. But the two dances are quite different. The strong male dancers of the Ailey company inspired some spectacular choreography from Zollar, and the whole work looked tighter with the 15 Ailey dancers, if less personal, than Soul Deep.

Ronald K. Brown's Grace, for 12 dancers, was ambitious and extremely formal. Brown derived his movement from modern dance, African dance, martial arts, and everyday gesture, demanding a very active and articulate body. But once developed, his phrase material was quite limited, used in various ways -- for men's and women's choruses, large groups in counterpoint, and finally for couples and intimate groups. This sharing of the dance material, and a consistently energized dynamic that didn't have a lot of ups and downs, gave a feeling of consensus to the group.

The piece began with a long solo for Linda Denise Evans, as a kind of priestess who seemed to be alternately thinking and orating with wide stomping and thrashing arms. Gradually the other dancers appeared, in groups and singly. Some were dressed in red, some in white. I thought perhaps those in red were strays who were being brought into line by the more dignified example of the leaders in white. At the end, with a reprise of Duke Ellington's "Come Sunday," everyone had found a friend and offered comforting gestures. Now, all dressed in white, they filed out to what would perhaps be a calmer place.