THE Joyce Theater opened its new season Tuesday – its 26th, for those counting – not with a whimper but a tap. Returning to that venerable dance epicenter in dance-conscious Chelsea was Lynn Dalley’s Jazz Tap Ensemble.
The title embraces the Los Angeles company’s purpose – to preserve as a unit two of the nation’s most transient art forms: jazz and tap dance.
Both are regarded as largely improvisatory, but Dalley, when she founded her troupe in 1979, saw the need for a concert-style jazz/tap, where set pieces could be given with the free-fall improvisation inherent in tap dances past, present and future.
Dalley herself was a dancer, and her company is, naturally enough, based on tap – where the need for preservation is the greater – although all performances are accompanied by a small jazz combo.
The Jazz Tap Ensemble has not only worked with many of the legendary masters in modern tap – Charles “Honi” Coles, the Nicholas brothers, Gregory Hines and Jimmy Slyde – but has also absorbed the stylistic elements of screen giants such as Fred Astaire and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.
The results are effective but mixed. The first part of the program consists of odds and ends of homage to stars past – there goes Astaire, here comes Ann Miller – that becomes a little wearisome.
Yet in the evening’s second section, the concept of a firm choreographic structure occasionally
opening out into passages for introspective improvisation is, while owing something to Hines, fascinatingly original.
Hines’ own “Groove,” Dalley’s “Bahia Dreams” and especially Slyde’s 1998 “Interplay” break interesting ground for the world of tap.
Of the six dancers, the truly outstanding ones are Sam Weber and Jason Samuels Smith.
In a few linking vignettes, choreographed for him by Bill Irwin and aptly described as “Clown Bits,” Weber seems a reincarnation of the dancer/clown Ray Bolger.
Smith started his career in the Broadway cast of Savion Glover’s “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk,” and there’s something of Glover’s wild and untrammeled performing style floating around him.
His upper body still lacks control – at times he seems like a virtuoso from his tap shoes down – but there is a very real promise here.
JAZZ TAP ENSEMBLE