NOT A PURIST.

NOT A PURIST BARRY BLUMENFELD/TAP FUSION UNIVERSITY SETTLEMENT NEW YORK, NEW YORK DECEMBER 1-3,2000

Tap dancers fall into several categories: jazz-tap purists play their feet and consider themselves percussionists first; the Fred Astaire/Nicholas Brothers ilk focus on whole body moves but are still considered tappers. Then there are the apostate modern dancers--Heather Cornell, Gail Conrad, Lynn Dally and Anita Feldman immediately come to mind--who came to tap in the 1970s and 1980s after they had trained as modern dancers and use tap as one more tool in their choreographic imaginations. Add to these moderns Barry Blumenfeld, who calls his work Tap Fusion, a combo of tap with modern.

Like other modern choreographers who fell in love with tap, Blumenfeld uses the tap as percussion added to the body. His most successful piece, Gravity, begins with five dancers lying on the floor in a circle looking like little amoebas, pulled down by the weight of their tap shoes as they helplessly, often aggressively, try to get up as if stuck in quicksand. The dancers use the weight of their feet to demonstrate how the sound pulls them down. It is not the sinking of the Titanic we're witnessing, but there does seem to be a certain inevitability to this horizontal group as their tap-shod legs clunk to the floor. Civil Deconstruction, on the other hand, is less convincing as a modern/tap piece because the tap part feels like an add-on rather than an integrated part of the improvography. There's a rehearsal-room feel, like "I'm dancing, now I'll add my shoes to see what I can come up with." To be successful at the modern/tap fusion, it seems one has to know the feet can't just be "instrumental" to the body moves, but must be a natural extension of sound. Inspired by his own wedding, Blumenfeld is now working with ritual in Sheva Birachot (Hebrew for Seven Blessings). We saw the first and fourth blessings, the first with wonderful live music by Katie Down, who played with the sounds of water in a bowl, as well as numerous musical instruments. The first blessing showed how even simple tap steps can build in sound to pave the way for a meditative journey. The fourth movement had no tap. Live music with tap always enhances a stage and Blumenfeld's eclectic group of musicians included Greg Burrows, Erik Jakobson, Josh Ginsburg, Peter Hess and Dan Pratt. A guitarist, Genta, accompanied Blumenfeld on some jazz-tap improvisations. Blumenfeld's lively and enthusiastic dancer/collaborators were Ivy Baldwin, Jessica Jahn, Jeanne Schickler, Jen Uzzi, Heather Warfel, Katy Woitel and John Zullo. In the Sunday program, a youngster, James Lowenthal, solo tapped to the delight of the young audience.

Blumenfeld deserves credit for experimenting--God knows, tap always needs experimentation to keep it thriving--and he has yet to develop a visceral need to bring tap into a full moving body.