This year, a fresh crop of dancers revived and reinterpreted classics, and presenting organizations finally realized that tap has room at the top for more than one performer.
New Bodies Feed and Revive Old Works
The ephemeral nature of dance can cause a lot of anxiety: How to maintain the integrity of a live artwork over time? Do new performances measure up to the original? While the fear is that dances will diminish with age, sometimes they get better or just change in illuminating ways. In a few of this year’s most memorable moments, older works bristled with the fresh energy and ideas of new dancers and collaborators.
Martha Graham’s 1936 “Chronicle” is a staple of the Graham company’s repertoire. A stark response to the rise of fascism in Europe, it embodies an anti-war message that has remained resonant. But when Leslie Andrea Williams made her New York debut in the heroic central role in April, she imbued it with newfound authority, sincerity and drive. And as the first black woman to dance this part, she expanded the work’s meanings and the possibilities of who might see themselves reflected in her power.
It was also refreshing to see a more heterogeneous cast in the early works of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, who recently passed on her celebrated solo “Violin Phase,” a section of her 1982 “Fase,” to two women of color, Yuika Hashimoto and Soa Ratsifandrihana. (For most of its history, only De Keersmaeker, a white woman, danced the solo.) At New York Live Arts in September, Ratsifandrihana was especially riveting, navigating the work’s geometries with revelatory tenderness and concentration.
I didn’t see Yvonne Rainer’s long-dormant “Parts of Some Sextets” in 1965, so I can’t compare its vivid reconstruction, presented by Performa, with any previous iteration. But what she assembled with the dancer Emily Coates, who oversaw the reinvention of this dance for 11 people and 12 mattresses, deftly superimposed the present and past, while inviting us to contemplate the timeless themes embedded in a mattress: in Rainer’s words, “sex, death, illness, sleep and dreams.” It all was there.
— SIOBHAN BURKE
A Breakout Year for Tap
This year, the great American art of tap dance enjoyed a sea change.
At the start of this century, it often appeared that in the eyes of presenters, only one tap dancer existed: Savion Glover. After the success of his 1996 Broadway show, “Bring In da Noise/Bring In da Funk,” his young genius was hard to ignore. Most of the few concert-dance slots allotted to tap went to him.
Then came Michelle Dorrance. After she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2013, she became the one. Rightly recognized as a charismatic performer and an imaginative choreographer, she was invited to just about every dance festival and even onto late-night TV. A little younger than Glover and inspired by him, she, in turn, immediately inspired and emboldened younger dancers, including Caleb Teicher.
Teicher, whose career is now taking off, might seem in line to take over. But Dorrance’s example has helped to change attitudes, and her penchant for spreading attention to others seems to be opening up more room. Both her company and Teicher’s appeared at City Center this year, separately, each delivering a performance that was crowd-pleasing in the best sense. More remarkably, dancers a bit older than Dorrance, 40, also got their day.
In September, Ayodele Casel, 44, led her first show at the Joyce Theater: a knockout joyfest. And just this past week, the hoofers Jason Samuels Smith, Derick K. Grant and Dormeshia, all veterans of “Bring in da Noise,” brought their extraordinary “And Still You Must Swing” to the same theater. When Dorrance returns there this month, it won’t just be a precedent-breaking number of tap acts in one season at a bellwether theater for the dance mainstream. It will be a sign that a truth long buried can finally be seen on New York stages: The top of tap is broader than any single dancer.
— BRIAN SEIBERT
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .