Opening Jacob's Pillow's season, Dorrance Dance stays true to the beat

Boston Globe

26-06-2025

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The stern yet buoyant Tomoe 'Beasty' Carr rotates her forearms with speedy precision; Fritzlyn Hector circles her arms, offers the audience her palms; Zakhele 'Bboy Swazi' Grabowski's handstand is more stable than funding for the arts.
With fast feet, bent knees, and heavy arms, each dancer in the ensemble moves through and around the rhythm of composer Donovan Dorrance's score and John Angeles's live percussion, making visible the syncopated, polyrhythmic interplay between motion and sound. (Angeles and Michelle Dorance share roots in the percussion sensation 'Stomp.')
"The Center Will Not Hold" at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival 2025.
Christopher Duggan Photography
A downcast square of light illuminates Dorrance and Asherie centerstage. They grasp hands but look away; they adjust their black cropped blazers rocking back on one leg; they look toward each other, but find no recognition in the other's eyes.
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Behind them, three more pairs of dancers are revealed in similar dress. The swing of a knee, touch of a foot, and pulsing lift of the torso echoes quickly from one partner to the next with syncopated precision.
Some of the best moments are when Angeles performs from inside and among the dancers onstage; he wears a snare drum holstered around his neck, which he beats insistently, twirling his drumsticks for a flourish. His punctilious and insistent rhythms are a worthy match for Dorrance's razor-precise taps that perch on the edge of control.
Dorrance Dance has been blending tap with contemporary dance forms for years, but the meat has been percussive movement. This evening's vocabulary is just as much hip-hop as tap.
If tap and hip-hop have something in common, it is a shared worship at the altar of 'The Beat.'
Dorrance has been hinting at the intertwined histories of tap and hip-hop for years, but this piece, with one dance happening next to the other, reveals through proximity rather than fusion just how tangled the two are.
'The Center Will Not Hold' pairs tap with regional hip-hop styles from the East, West, and Midwest. With so many distinct hip-hop forms on one stage, the dancers are brought into conversation not by the saccharine promise of connection across difference (the dancers often look serious, keeping to themselves), but simply by performing near to each other. The roll of a torso echoes in the fluid locking of an arm; the dexterity of Memphis jookin is made audible by a tap shoe.
Historically, tap and hip-hop are both Black American dance forms that originated as street dances — refined and expanded through improvisation and exchange outside the colonialist influence of the 'institution.'
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Jacob's Pillow is nothing if not an institution, and for the festival to open its season with a tribute to the intertwining vernaculars of Black American dance traditions feels important, even if it arrived under the name of a white woman. But Dorrance has long understood this — hence the way she credits the work. The center will not hold, nor should it.
THE CENTER WILL NOT HOLD
At Jacob's Pillow's Ted Shawn Theatre, Becket, runs through June 29. Tickets start at $65. 413-243-0745;
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Sarah Knight can be reached at [e-mail].