Annals of mischief

Tap Dogs at the Colonial; Tharp! at the Shubert

by Marcia B. Siegel

It's a sign of how dance changes -- and doesn't -- that the night after Tap Dogs (at the Colonial Theatre through April 12) opened to continual screams, the woman behind me at Tharp! interrupted her conversation about interior decorating to announce that The Fugue was "too weird, too long." Twyla Tharp's The Fugue, choreographed before most of the tap dogs were born, is nevertheless the original model for their success. And it's okay that some of Tharp's audience didn't cotton to the piece. As official voices have been saying about the Jonesboro murders, you don't want to get so cozy with violence that you're no longer afraid of it.

Twyla Tharp didn't invent rhythm dance, of course. The organization of furious physical impulses into stamps and slaps and shouts crosses all cultural boundaries. On the streets, around campfires, in tribes all over the world, it has been the outlet for joy and aggression, for communal bonding and war games. Rhythm dance bestrides our popular stages right now as a spectacle of virility and an outlet for frustration, a vindication of blue-collar muscle in an age of telecommuting. And sometimes, as in Riverdance, as a celebration of multicultural détente. Neither Tap Dogs nor its more powerful predecessor, Stomp, is notable for supreme tap art. We love them because they're legal tantrums.

By now, rhythm-dance spectacle has developed its own clichés, and Tap Dogs flaunts them all. There's male competition, ritualized into chest-thumping challenge dances. But underlying the rivalry is a much stronger comradeship that makes the pack invincible. They build their own dance floors and yank them apart. They play ensemble rhythms by jumping in precise sequence onto little squares of wood rigged with mikes and sampled sounds. (The English church-bell ringers developed this technique centuries ago.) They haul on ropes to make a complicated and hazardous system of ramps for dancing on.

Individual performers take on roles. In Tap Dogs there's a leader and his sparring partner. There's the perennial goof-up comedian and a few other players with their own specialties. The format also features an obligatory moment of terrible taste, usually involving urination. The performers always attack the audience, here by kicking water into the first few rows, and always enlist the audience's participation in some way, with rhythmic accompaniment or whistling or gestures. At some point the cast always fans out along the edge of the stage and seduces the audience with a chorus line, proving that neanderthals can be cute. By the end of Tap Dogs' hour of slamming, smashing, pounding, clanging dancing, the audience feels battered but purged.

Before Twyla Tharp made The Fugue, in 1971, modern dancers didn't indulge in popular forms like tap. It was Tharp's genius that made rhythm spectacle convincing on the concert stage, and then she slew us with equally convincing appropriations of social dancing, jazz music, and other artifacts of popular culture. Throughout the 20th century, ballet and modern dancers hugged the proper side of a border between art and entertainment, class and mass, until Tharp trampled across it with no regrets.

In The Fugue and many of the jazz and pop pieces that followed, Tharp unleashed a primal energy that art dance had kept in check. She sent the body's weight driving into the floor, released pent-up sexual power, loosened the head, the shoulders, the hips. Only passionate slaves and cossacks behaved like this in ballets of the time. What made The Fugue a revolutionary dance was that this forbidden realm of dancing was framed in a rigorous and even fanatical rhythmic counterpoint. The dance made its own music, a jittering, jogging, stamping composition that was hammered into a miked floor, another first. The dancers kept their torsos bolt upright, hardly ever used their arms, gazed intently and sternly at one another or into the audience.

Most defiant of all, the original dancers were women, and it's one sign of how deeply transgressive The Fugue was that women still make only token appearances in today's rhythm shows. Riverdance is an exception, but even there, the heartstoppers are the men. Tharp later put on The Fugue with mixed-gender casts, and it evolved to a males-only piece in the '80s. The present performers, Jay Franke, Matt Rivera, and Andrew Robinson, look as if they'd diligently learned the dance from a video but haven't yet discovered their own way to dance on the border. They don't project as macho types, and neither do they seem comfortable tossing off those fast, picky steps Tharp and her original cohort created.

After The Fugue Tharp made many tough-guy dances, some hugely successful -- for instance In the Upper Room, which has been in the repertory of Boston Ballet -- and none of them commercial in the way that Tap Dogs is. Now she's done Heroes, for the new company she started two years ago. Like Upper Room it has a score by Philip Glass, but the dance and the music are far less driven, far more lush and even romantic. I've seen Heroes three times and I don't understand it yet.

Heroes features three barechested men (Roger C. Jeffrey, Nigel Burley and Andrew Robinson) who plant their feet wide apart, jut their elbows akimbo, and thrust their chests out. They assume this signature stance, all in a row and facing the same way, at intervals through the dance, like sentinels guarding a building. Their job is to withstand attacks from other men and resist the seductive blandishments of women. At one point they team up with three other men and form a bulwark; Gabrielle Malone repeatedly throws herself sideways against them and they stand steady as they grip her with their outstretched forearms.

At times in the dance the men seem unreasonably threatened, especially by the women, who mince around like the odalisques in Scheherazade and try to engage them in various forms of dalliance. After half an hour of these encounters -- which are interspersed with demonic leaping, turning, and wrestling -- the lights black out on the three sentinels, who stand guard as the other three men are assailed by the women. Is Tharp hinting that there's vulnerability beneath these brave façades? If so, why are they heroes? Who or what are they defending?

Six or seven years ago Tharp was mulling over these issues in Men's Piece, a serious send-up of the posturing and vain physical displays of macho culture. Maybe it would be politically incorrect to do that today, but Heroes is awfully preachy, and if there were signs of irony, I missed them. Tharp's movement style is still evolving, and the young modern dancers in the new company, though accomplished turners and jumpers, have more flexibility and less fear about body contact than the ballet dancers she's been working with. The Boston performances were supposed to include one of her greatest middle-period works, Baker's Dozen (1979), but it was cancelled because of an injury. I would have liked to see the new company interpret the piece, but Sweet Fields was almost as good.

Like Baker's Dozen and unlike everything else Tharp! showed in Boston, Sweet Fields is elegant, pure, fundamentally good in the old-fashioned sense of that term. Set to Shaker hymn tunes and the vigorous praise songs of William Billings and other early American composers, it centers on the spiritual life of a more innocent time. Tharp has identified the Quakers' "insistence on form in the face of chaos" as an inspiration for the dance. Sweet Fields is formal, but also playful, solemn, and sometimes ecstatic.

The dance seems to evolve out of processions, prim lines of dancers, with the men and women working in separate groups until almost the end. The women run on their heels; they take tilted, gliding steps, with agitated little hops that seem prompted by ghostly messages. The men run backward in circles until they're logrolling through the center and diving over one another, without the least preparation. In a funeral cortège, one man is held aloft, then slips off to be replaced by another. The bearers change their positions and face in different directions, even letting the "corpse" go, only to catch him close to the floor and flip him above their heads again.

The dance and the recorded songs refer to the Shaker tradition, but Tharp avoids literally reproducing the movements of the Shaker dances depicted in old lithographs. Instead she sets flat, exclaiming gestures and floor patterns that seem dictated by mystical formulas, circles within circles. I thought of the drawings of William Blake. In the last movement, the men and women join in a communal circle, stopping to whack one another's shoulder blades, and going on to partnered lifts.

The costumes, by Norma Kamali, layer open, filmy shirts and dusters over mini shorts and tops for the women, trousers for the men. I didn't like seeing all that skin in a sacred dance, but finally the dance was so beguiling, it seemed perfectly all right.