Peggy Spina Tap Company.

SPINA LOFT NOVEMBER 15-16, 1996 REVIEWED BY MARILYN HUNT

Informality was the order of the evening when the Peggy Spina Tap Company made its yearly appearance at Spina's loft. You could see advantages in the setting. The dancers' confiding, shyly eager-to-please style calls for close-range viewing.

For the most part, they perform with relaxed arms that recall those of Spina's mentors, Cookie Cook and Charles "Honi" Coles. Spina seldom shows a hierarchy of soloist and group; if a grouping has a center, the members of the all-woman cast take turns in it. Often they interweave their paths in space and pause to address their tapping and smiles to each other. The laid-back style nicely coincides with the cool jazz of the excellent Joel Forrester Quartet, with whom Spina works regularly.

Of Spina's premieres, the brief but typical Timeout features mainly unison dancing (of which the evening had an overabundance), with the attendant problem in hearing her characteristically dense outpouring of taps. Quiet circles of the arms in Timeout, however, allow you to focus on a catchy recurring motif for Forrester's piano. The light-footed Waltz, to light-footed music, provides a rhythmic change and a hint of a waltz step. It features Spina in a solo with her conversational style of subtle rhythms.

In spite of differing music and forms [including a tap fugue and a piece set to bongo drum), this evening had a certain sameness of tone and overmodesty. These were relieved by differences in the likable dancers' personal styles, especially Wendee Lee Curtis's presence and sure, emphatic tapping. The choreography's even spread of energy in the tap sounds contrasted with welcome exclamations of sound and small dramas of straightforward weight shifts in veteran tapper Buster Brown's choreography for the company's finale, Laura, to a Latin beat.