It's All Rhythm: A New Festival Embraces Percussive Dance

New York Times

18-04-2025

Fans of the sometimes disrespected genre known as dance music have a quip: What other kind of music is there? A similar crack could be made by artists put into a category called rhythm dance. What dance isn't in some sense rhythmic?
The new Uptown Rhythm Dance Festival, at 92NY and Works & Process at Guggenheim New York from April 21-27, addresses the question from the opposite direction: What do top artists in tap, flamenco, hip-hop, swing, kathak and Appalachian clogging have in common? And what connections might spark if they were programmed side by side?
'We're talking about percussive dance,' said the tap and swing dancer Caleb Teicher, a curator of the festival. 'This is dance that has a deep relationship to the floor, dance that is expressive through musical phrasing and rhythm and a lot of African American diasporic ideas of call and response and improvisation.'
The need for such a festival arises in part from the needs that percussive dancers share. Most prefer live music and sprung wooden floors, which they consider instruments. Most require floor microphones, sensitive sound design and a rehearsal space where they're allowed to imperil the floor. Most still face some measure of condescension or exclusion from the rest of the dance world.
'A lot of mixed bill programming is very happy to have three contemporary dance or ballet companies,' Teicher said, 'but if there's one percussive dance or street dance company on each program, that would be a lot, and there certainly wouldn't be two.' Space in New York where such dancers can rehearse has been shrinking, and Tap City, the annual festival that the American Tap Dance Foundation put on for nearly 25 years, ceased last year.
'We still don't have a home,' said Brenda Bufalino, 87, a grande dame of tap who was a leader in making it into a concert form in the 1980s. The American Tap Dance Foundation grew out of her pioneering American Tap Dance Orchestra. In a recent interview, she remembered the difficulties of finding somewhere to rehearse and of touring to theaters set up for other kinds of dance. 'We were never made to feel that we were part of the dance world,' she said, 'and we still don't have any theaters dedicated to our art form.'
Despite such obstacles, tap and other percussive dance forms are thriving artistically. Bufalino recalled that when she and her mentor, Honi Coles, started teaching tap in New York in 1978, they had three students. 'Now there are so many brilliant tap dancers and good tap work being seen all over the place,' she said, mentioning Teicher and Michelle Dorrance. 'People are really stretching out and using ideas.'
One goal of Uptown Rhythm is to help address the imbalance between this artistic ferment and the space and resources available to develop it. 'We want to support as many of these artists as we can, but also shed light so that other organizations might open up more space,' said another of the festival's curators, Alison Manning, co-executive director of the Y's Harkness Dance Center.
In a sense, the festival is an outgrowth of Tap the Yard, a festival that Manning organized at the Yard on Martha's Vineyard from 2012 to 2019. A tap dancer herself, she wanted to champion what she called her 'secret love,' but she and her fellow curator David Parker also included hip-hop, folk and classical Indian forms.
'That festival blew our attendance numbers wide open,' Manning said. 'It worked as an entry point, because there was something for everyone in it.'
With Uptown Rhythm, Manning said, 'We're not just throwing a smorgasbord of types of dance at the wall. We have very specific ideas about who we're programming and what conversations might connect them.'
The Tuesday program, for example, combines classical lineages and roots music. Rachna Nivas, an adept in kathak, a classical Indian percussive dance influenced by both Hindu and Islamic court traditions, is performing a condensed version of a traditional solo, combining storytelling and improvisational, rivalrous exchanges with musicians from India. How will these exchanges compare to those between the Appalachian flatfooter Nic Gareiss and the innovative roots musician Jake Blount on the same program?
'There's a real feeling of camaraderie and kinship,' Nivas said about the festival, noting that she had worked with tap dancers before and that they had bonded not only musically but also over a shared reverence for elders and ancestors.
'This is what real diversity looks like,' she added. Her guru, Chitresh Das, helped to found the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival in 1978: 'It was groundbreaking,' she said, 'but, like world dance, the term is still othering. This rhythm festival isn't like that. It's about finding common ground.'
Billy and Bobby McClain, the identical-twin hip-hop duo known as the Wondertwins, performed several times in Tap the Yard. At 92NY on Wednesday, they join Ladies of Hip-Hop and Chrybaby Cozie, a creator of the hip-hop style Lite Feet; but also the first-class tap dancers Derick Grant and Nicholas Van Young.
Putting tap and hip-hop together makes a lot of sense, Billy McClain said. 'They play off each other,' he added. 'In hip-hop, you see the feet move but don't hear them, and in tap it's the opposite. But it's all rhythm.'
When McClain and his brother were starting out in the late 1970s, they were inspired by brother acts — tap duos like the Nicholas Brothers and the Hines Brothers. Performing on the same program with tap dancers now, McClain said, 'gives us fresh ideas' — ideas they can use.
Not all the Uptown Rhythm programs are about juxtaposition. Some showcase the outcome of earlier mingling. The Thursday show commemorates the 25th anniversary of the Austrian-born Max Pollak crossing tap with Afro-Cuban rumba, creating RumbaTap, both a style and an on-and-off ensemble.
In New York in the early 1990s, Pollak became an acolyte of masters in the jazz tap tradition like Jimmy Slyde and Lon Chaney. But he also became interested in the Latin jazz being played at jam sessions at the Nuyorican Poets Café. Studying Afro-Cuban and Latin jazz drumming, he began transferring those rhythms to tap and body percussion, then tried sitting in with musicians at the Nuyorican. 'And they were like, 'You got something there,'' Pollak said.
One night, members of Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, an eminent Cuban rumba group, came to the jam. After watching Pollak perform, they wanted to know who had taught him to dance like that; when he told them he had developed the style himself, they asked him to teach it to them. He was flabbergasted and then astonished again when, during a lesson, they were able to replicate what he was doing immediately. 'That's when I thought, 'I am onto something big here,'' Pollak said.
Pollak soon visited Cuba, carrying tap shoes with him. Los Muñequitos put what he taught them into their act, and the group's director told Pollak: 'You have given us a gift. You are part of this family now.'
For Uptown Rhythm, that family is reuniting. Coming from Cuba are Barbaro Ramos, Pollak's first Muñequitos student, and also Ramos's son and nephew, whom Pollak first taught 25 years ago, when they were little boys. This edition of the RumbaTap company includes both alumni, like Lynn Schwab and Lisa LaTouche, and curious young hotshots like Jared Alexander, Tommy Wasiuta and Liz Carroll.
While that show will be a retrospective of a hybrid percussive form, the Friday program is a cornucopia of almost all the festival's facets. LaTasha Barnes, a dancer who embodies what she calls 'the jazz continuum' connecting Lindy hop with house dance, shares the evening with Soles of Duende, a trio made up of the tap dancer Amanda Castro, the flamenco dancer Arielle Rosales and the kathak dancer Brinda Guha.
'There's a natural conversational dynamic that happens with other rhythm dancers,' Rosales said, emphasizing that her group is not a fusion project but that kind of conversation.
'Not only are we in solidarity with other percussive artists, but we're also modeling what that kinship can look like,' Guha said. All the artists in the festival, she added, 'share the responsibility of preserving our forms, making sure people don't forget them, while also allowing ourselves the freedom to create and be innovative.'
Someone who knows all about that balance is the festival's final artist: Bufalino.
Her premiere tackles music that she said had been 'dogging her for decades': 'Meditation on Integration' by Charles Mingus, her favorite composer. She herself is dancing in it a little: 'I'm not doing 10 choruses anymore,' she said. In addition to her and Joe Fonda, a bassist she has been working with for 40 years, the cast is made of up young mentees, including her granddaughter, Alice Baum, who is also an opera singer. Bufalino has written a coloratura melody for Baum to sing alongside the Mingus.
Last year, Bufalino announced, not for the first time, that she was retiring. But when Duke Dang, the executive director of Works & Process, asked her to make a new work for Uptown Rhythm, she didn't take a lot of convincing. She got excited about the Mingus music and the dancers and the musicians. She got caught up in the rhythm once more.