Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Hear The Rhythm
Dorrance blurs line between music and dance
What do you get when you combine technology, handmade “instruments,” tap shoes, award-winning dance talent and dancers using their feet to create music electronically in real time? “Electronic tap music,” according to Nicholas Van Young and Michelle Dorrance of innovative and energetic Dorrance Dance.
“This show is for this generation,” asserts Dorrance — artistic director, the company’s namesake, and 2015 MacArthur Fellow.
Coming up during the explosion of electronic dance music (EDM), the evolution of hiphop, and a time when innovative ways to produce music were being explored in general, Bessie Award winner Van Young began doing his own explorations using that same technology. Learning how the musicians and DJs were using technology and different types of hardware — not just loops — to create compositions in real time, Van Young applied those techniques to his dance, enabling him to create his own music … with his feet.
“I have much better understanding now how everything works together — I’ve learned so much from Nicholas — but [at the time], he was doing stuff that no one could even understand in our community,” Dorrance remembers. “He had gone so deeply into this world and experimented with their language and made it accessible to ours in a way where you couldn’t not just explode with excitement.”
One of the most basic ways to describe it is that the whole stage acts as an electronic drum trigger, but for feet. As the dancers trigger different areas of the dance surface, the sound is recorded and manipulated through the electronic hardware. They create the score they perform to, as they layer improvisational elements over the sound and the movements.
“When you’re improvising, a lot of the times it’s just kind of flowing through you, but having to think in a really technical way while you’re improvising is a pretty wild thing to experience,” Van Young says of those early days. An extensive background in percussion instruments, though — a “master percussionist,” Dorrance calls him — certainly helps with the music side, as well as integrating these different artistic forms with such a percussive dance style.
“Good tap training includes musical training from the beginning,” Van Young shares. “You’re studying music from day one — music history and music theory. So any time there is this disconnection from the music, it’s actually just bad tap dancing. People try to give [the form] all of these different names, but really there’s only good tap dancing and bad tap dancing.”
“People constantly have this realization when they come to our shows, they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, I get it. It’s music. Their dancing is the music!’ And that’s an important thing for someone who doesn’t have a relationship with tap dance or just thinks of Fred Astaire — who, by the way, was a great musician,” Dorrance says. “We are always responsible for our music just as much as we are [our] form. In fact, the way we were sort of raised by the elders and legends [we studied under], often the music you’re making is the first goal and then the style comes from that idea.”
It was modern legends of the style that “raised” Dorrance and Van Young, but both dancers acknowledge and have a reverence for the legacy they carry on in performing tap. Tap dance predates any other strictly American art form, Dorrance asserts, because it was born on the plantation as a way of communicating and self-expression.
“To steal a quote from a tap dancer named Steve Zee,” Van Young says: “‘The history of tap dance is the history of America.’ And I think that’s a really simple, clear way to state that. And tap dance within the African-American community has continued to be a catalyst for social change. A lot of the early tap dancers were groundbreakers
in multiple ways for film, for music and for civil rights.”
“To know that it was born from a place of oppression and has become this very sophisticated form of expression,” Dorrance goes on, “I think is just really tremendous and kind of what you could hope for, for what America could be.”