‘This is tap dance’
Jumaane Taylor’s masterwork ‘Supreme Love’ returns for 2 nights at the Dance Center
Hoofer Jumaane Taylor’s masterwork “Supreme Love” is back for a two-show revival this week. Last performed in Chicago in 2016, “Supreme Love” was Taylor’s first major, full-length project. And it remains a talking point in the dance world — a launchpad that cracked open Taylor’s choreographic oeuvre and raised the bar for tap dance.
“Supreme Love” runs April 20-21 at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago. It concludes a petit season of just three engagements for the Dance Center. Staycee Pearl and FLOCK appeared in February and March, respectively.
For Taylor to circle back to “Supreme Love” all these years later could be viewed as a kind of retreat. He now leads the Chicago Human Rhythm Project which, in addition to putting on a massive annual tap festival called Rhythm World, took over the Mayfair Arts Center last year — a historic studio shuttered by the pandemic. Despite tripling his workload (by modest estimations), Taylor has managed to keep up some level of artistic output. This has mostly come in the form of works-in-progress, short bites easily brought up to snuff for festivals and his ongoing live music project: The Jazz Hoofing Quartet.
Perhaps the most serious of these endeavors is “Ugly Flavors,” a mashup of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and Ornette Coleman’s “The Shape of Jazz to Come.” The piece references historically “undanceable” scores, with a specific nod to Pina Bausch’s interpretation of “The Rite of Spring.” Taylor developed “Ugly Flavors” as part of a pandemic residency program at the Dance Center; the results of his multiweek investment in a then-empty center were presented via livestream near the end of 2020.
Designed to tee up an eventual world premiere at the Dance Center, prolonged pandemic closures took the wind out of “Ugly Flavors” — for now.
“It’s still in the works,” Taylor
said in an interview. “It’s just about finding the right amount of support. Should it be premiered full-length with live orchestration? I’m not sure. Should it be some fly jazz happening? As much as I want to present that, I never want to rush it. Those compositions are nothing to be
played with.”
Other factors led to bringing back “Supreme Love.” Taylor’s 2020 residency was curated by Ellen Chenoweth, who was the Dance Center’s Presenting Series director for five years. Chenoweth left last summer. Former program manager Meredith
Sutton has since stepped in for a yearlong appointment as interim director, charged with curating the Presenting Series’ 50th anniversary next season.
Sutton said Chenoweth planted the seed for “Ugly Flavors,” and
the current team wanted to try and keep the commitment in some form. Sutton simply asked Taylor, “What do you want to present? Is that ‘Ugly Flavors?’ If not, what is it and how can we make it happen?”
For Taylor, it had to be “Supreme Love,” a work that interrogates jazz music — specifically that of the bebop era — by investigating John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.”
The dawn of bebop presented tap dancers with an existential fork in the road. Its rhythmic complexity, wholesale commitment to improvisation, fast tempos and experimental harmonic structures were difficult for dancers to interpret. Mainstream “Broadway tap” stuck to easy-on-the-ears dance hall tunes, while jazz musicians liberated themselves from the need to provide slower, more predictable chord progressions and tempos.
Taylor is certainly not the only person committed to rejoining tap with its roots in jazz music, but he does it better than just about anyone else. Indeed, “Supreme Love” is part of why Taylor, now in his mid-30s, was picked to lead the Chicago Human Rhythm Project, a role founding director Lane Alexander held for three decades.
“I don’t know that the field
of tap dance understands what he created when he created that piece,” Alexander said of “Supreme Love” in a 2022 interview with the Tribune. “It’s a Leonardo da Vinci. It’s just beyond. Usually, that’s not an accident.”
As Taylor traveled the tap
circuit since “Supreme Love’s” 2015 premiere, he noticed folks wanting to take the deep dive with him into Coltrane, Cedar Walton, Miles Davis, Joe Henderson, and on and on.
“That’s what I want to continue to highlight through ‘Supreme Love,’” Taylor said. “I want more people to experience the divinity I’m trying to showcase within the tap.”
To that end, he’s the only member of the original cast performing this iteration, which is a cross-state collaboration rehearsed virtually. This week’s performance features Taylor with New York-based Christina Carminucci, Ayan Imai-Hall of New Hampshire and Shanzell Page, from Flint, Michigan.
“There are a lot of great tap dancers,” he said. “There are only a few that consistently want to investigate their study and their technique within live jazz.”
Joining the dancers on stage for this celestial live interpretation: Justin Dillard (keys), Brent Griffin Jr. (saxophone), Marlene Rosenberg (bass) and Isaiah Spencer (drums).
“I think the improvisational nature of what the dancers are doing in tandem with the score — it is something that is so authentically fleeting, you must experience it,” Sutton said. “You can’t read about it; you can’t see it on a two-dimensional screen. This is something that you have to experience in real-time.”
And for Taylor, it’s even bigger than tap and jazz. “Supreme Love” is a devotion that is deeply connected to his Muslim faith. That opening night marks the end of Ramadan, is a happy accident.
“I’m super ready to put it down,” he said, “to make a statement for tap. This is tap dance. It’s always that first.”
“Supreme Love” is at 7:30 p.m. April 20-21 at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, 1306 S. Michigan Ave.; Tickets are $30 at 312-369-8330 and dance.colum.edu