Rain was forecast here at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival on Friday, but the first rumble came from inside the Ted Shawn Theater. It was halfway through the Dorrance Dance matinee performance and the lights had dimmed. The dancers had spread out across the room, drumming on the floor and walls, unleashing a storm of surround sound.
Converting the entire theater into a drum is a familiar and fun move for this tap dance company led by Michelle Dorrance. They’ve even done it at the Guggenheim Museum. But the true glory of “SOUNDspace,” the first of two works in the group’s Pillow program, is how quiet it is.
The work, largely performed without musical accompaniment, was created 10 years ago for Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, the East Village landmark, where the wooden floor was off limits to metal-tipped shoes. Dorrance’s solution was tapping without tapping, in leather-soled shoes or socks. While “SOUNDspace” has changed in the years since and adapted to less restrictive spaces, some sections are still run tapless. Rhythms in leather and wood can sound wonderful like billiard balls.
But even when the dancers wear tap shoes, their foot drumming remains wonderfully subtle, expressive with timbre and touch. Dorrance’s choreography helps draw attention to those subtleties, isolating twisting ankles and knees. For long stretches she maintains the tension with a kind of danced click track, a ticking like a stopwatch or a bomb that the dancers rhythmically embroider. Then they run across the stage like crabs, back and forth, playfully adding and pulling away dancers, exchanging phrases that please each other.
This unusual compositional skill – sustained for nearly an hour, combining steady choreography with improvisation, gathering tap dancers into a tight-knit group without sacrificing individuality – is what made “SOUNDspace” so exciting in 2013, just two years after Dorrance Dance was founded. Ten years later, the play endures both as a reminder of early promise and evidence of longevity.
Besides Dorrance, only one original cast member (the self-effacing excellent Claudia Rahardjanoto) performed on Friday. The new dancers (the newest, Dylan Szuch, debuting this week) throw themselves into work. Luke Hickey is the flashiest, exciting and never unmusical. Leonardo Sandoval adds Brazilian rhythms and sounds to a body-percussion, one-man-band solo. Addi Loving, who joined the group this year, is quick-witted, super-skilled, adorable, and a little dorky—clearly one of this tribe.
Also on the schedule was Dorrance’s latest work, ’45th & 8th’, which debuted at the Joyce Theater in December. It’s a feature for the great singer Aaron Marcellus, who composed and performs the score as part of a four-piece band. There’s a place for Marcellus to show off his amazing technique of looping his voice electronically, building a multi-layered pie of soulful sound. But as the score begins and ends funkily, the silent storm middle is slow and sticky, and the dance, sensitively following the music, fades away. The gliding dancers certainly make it a good time.
The premiere of the day came later, on a separate evening schedule, when Mythili Prakash debuted “She’s Auspicious”. Prakash, a second generation Indian and American expert in the Indian form Bharatanatyam, is steeped in tradition but questionable. She also collaborates with contemporary choreographer Akram Khan. Here she questions the mythology of the goddess Devi and society’s expectations of femininity.
The work, largely a solo, is strongest when she uses the Bharatanatyam technique subversively. A skilled Bharatanatyam dancer can switch between multiple characters with clarity and total composure during a solo. Prakash has that skill but drops the composure. Her goddess or wife, trying to be seductive one minute and a mother the next, shows the tension and panics. When she bounces and rocks an invisible baby, you’re afraid she might shake it to death.
The work becomes even stronger when Prakash is joined by three musicians – all women, a rarity in Indian dance. What begins to look like a traditional solo turns into a portrait of the goddess as an exhausted multitasker: pulled back and forth by invisible children, cleaning up their messes, dressing their wounds, cooking their meals, all while preparing for a public appearance. Now you’re afraid she’s going to shake herself to bits.
This is actually ironic, even though the tone is actually serious rather than comical, which seems like a missed opportunity. What comes before and after takes a long time and is harder to follow. At the beginning, Prakash introduces some of her themes of personal memories in clumsy voiceover. Towards the end, she takes off her jewelry and lets her hair down, apparently seeking freedom in greater ferocity, only to finally end up exhausted, cramping to the floor and then rising to look each audience member in the eye, as if she’s established a fairer self-presentation.
She has, but the work feels like it’s still in development. Scheduled for the Pillow’s outdoor stage, but moved indoors to a studio theater due to the weather, it seems to be in need of better production values, especially advanced lighting, along with some editing. On Friday, just as it came to an elongated close, it got an assist from nature. The heavens opened and the glass-walled studio shook with divine thunder.
