The Bang Group Blog

Curator's Letter

Curator's Letter

by David Parker

This month, Danspace Project commissioned a full evening of tap—the first ever in its 37-year history.

Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards by Eduardo Patino.

It featured the work of Michelle Dorrance and Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards in the reverberant sanctuary of Saint Mark’s Church, and was curated by me under the rubric “Rhythm and Humor,” part of the Platform series initiated by Danspace’s visionary director, Judy Hussie-Taylor. It has been a long-held dream of mine to see tap at Danspace. I integrate tap in my own artistic work and I wanted to do the same as curator.

About a year ago, when I was putting together this evening, I thought of my early years in New York’s “downtown” dance world.

Programming was much more anarchic then; we hadn’t grown so sclerotic about genres and forms and which methods of experimentation are acceptable. Maybe we lost our sense of play when somatic work took the place of training in dance classes with music, maybe when we began to envy Western European conceptual work without really feeling an internal urgency about making it, maybe the end of the dance boom brought about a willful disengagement with the public, an almost churlish and petulant refusal to consider things outside a certain view of experimentation. Maybe because tap is a tradition, it’s marginalized by downtown dance folk.

The word “contemporary” didn’t exclude tap then and shouldn’t now.

So I sought out Michelle Dorrance and Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards. Dormeshia is sui generis, a masterful technician who has gleefully introduced high heeled tap shoes as an option for women (and I might add, for men). For years they’d been rejected as a sexist artifact which put female tappers at a technical disadvantage. But Dormeshia’s technique is so pointed, so finely cut, no high heel could dull its edge. Beyond this particular heresy, Dormeshia is glamorous and earthy and has been at the forefront of tap’s renaissance over the last 15 years. She was also a mentor to Michelle Dorrance.

Michelle is a real choreographer—I’m not modifying that term with the word “tap.” She is not only interested in foot rhythms. She also cares about shape, space, the arrangement of visual information, and unusually for a tap dancer, silence—not as an absence but as a structural element.

Many tap dancers use silence to create space or suspension in their work. Michelle goes further. She has set a whole piece for dancers without tap shoes and she can make silence as much a touchstone as taps in her work. Her segment began with a group of dancers in a ghostly, almost lunar sliding dance performed in socks against the gleaming floor of the church which surrounded the smaller tap floor set up for the shod-hoofing. This culminated in a cagey and ruminative tap solo right on the altar. It was heart stopping.

Seeing the tap show helped me see other things, too. I was much more attentive to how Aynsley Vandenbroucke, another artist in my series, dealt with rhythm in her stepless, nearly movement-free piece last weekend. The information and ideas she uses are exquisitely choreographed and quite poetic but, because I’d seen the tap show, I was able to view the segment wherein Aynsley and Brian Rogers typed out a gentle argument onto large computer screens as something akin to a highly syncopated tap duet, much like the one in Michelle’s show danced by Ryan Casey and Elena Steponaitis. Their ratcheting tap clusters had the same bite and grace as Aynsley and Brian’s overlapping dialogue. Rhythm speaks in many ways.

I’m reminded of a line from the movie The Bandwagon: “There is no difference between the magic rhythms of Bill Shakespeare’s immortal verse and the magic rhythms of Bill Robinson’s immortal feet.” Jack Buchanan said this while playing an avant-garde theater director.

He would know; Jack Buchanan was a tap dancer.

About the Author

DAVID PARKER is a choreographer and hoofer. In addition, he has lately been writing for Dance Magazine and curating for Danspace, the 92nd Street Y and his own space, the West End Theater, on Manhattan's Upper West Side. His newest show, Misters and Sisters, will open at Joe's Pub at the Public Theater in June.

September 2, 2011

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Why I Choreograph

David Parker grew up in Lynnfield, MA, and studied tap and ballet in Boston as a teenager. He attended Bard College before moving to New York in 1979, where he danced with Stephan Koplowitz, tappers Gail Conrad and Anita Feldman, and the late Amy Sue Rosen. He began showing work at Dance Theater Workshop in 1990, and in 1996 co-founded The Bang Group, which tours internationally. Parker has received commissions from many companies, festivals, and universities, including American Dance Festival, the Juilliard School, and Concord Summer Stages Dance Festival in Massachusetts, where The Bang Group has been in residence for the past 11 summers.

Parker is on the faculty of The Ailey School and Barnard College and has written several stories for Dance Magazine. Last fall, Dance Theater Workshop honored Parker for his contribution to DTW. His newest show, Misters and Sisters, will have its New York premiere at Joe’s Pub in NYC in June.

Wendy Perron, Editor In Chief, Dance Magazine

I choreograph because I know of no other way to contend with the world. For me, choreographing functions a little like Temple Grandin’s “squeeze box.” This wonder, also called a “hug machine,” was invented by Ms. Grandin, who is autistic, after she observed the calming effect such a contraption had on cattle under duress. So, as with the cow before slaughter, choreography allows me to face what lies ahead.

I grew up in a hyperarticulate family, my father being a best-selling author with a Ph.D. in English literature and my mother a professor of early childhood with a passion for socializing. I was mistrustful of words and was a solemn, awkward child with few friends—at least, few corporeal friends. I had a plethora of Pirates, Princes, and Cavaliers with whom I danced in my room behind closed doors, feeling like a singular sensation.
I began dancing formally when I was 16, starting with tap because I had fallen in love with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. While Mother Nature had permitted Fred Astaire and not me to dance like Fred Astaire, she had still given me a good pair of eyes and a mind eager to decipher the rhythms he threw down. It wasn’t only that I longed to dance like him, but I longed to organize everything I knew into beats and steps as he did.

When I went to college, a high school sissy with a flair for 1930s slang and a spiffy pair of tap shoes, I declared myself a dance major and plunged into a study of modern dance. I didn’t find the humor and juice of the dances I cherished from the movies. But I loved the strapping hauteur of the Merce Cunningham technique, the springy nobility of the Limón technique, and the tart bounce of Nikolais. Plus I got to go to New York to see performances.

There I saw Twyla Tharp’s The Fugue, and something exploded in my head. Here was a fully modern, streamlined, pared-down, Pan-Am kind of a dance for three men (originally women) and it made the going great. I thought it a real tap dance (performed in heeled shoes on a miked stage), just without any actual tap steps. It was perversely intricate, louche, and lofty at once. I knew then what I wanted to do.

I grew up and made a series of a capella dances in which the music was made by the dancing itself. These dances featured Velcro costumes, toe-tap shoes, bubble wrap, whistling, harmonicas, singing, actual hoofing, and smacking and clapping. One of them, called Bang, which gave my company its name, featured the unadorned body thuds of two men lying on the floor together and culminated in some syncopated kissing. Audiences found it funny. I found it poignant. I saw it as a love story about men fitting themselves together, sharing a beat, kissing in 5/4 time.

These dances taught me about the cadences of intimacy. They helped me choreograph my way in and out of love, friendship, and sadness. My father died last January and I am choreographing a song-and-dance show set to songs he loved. Jeff Kazin, my longterm muse, and I will sing and dance many of them. We’ll be joined by my two other favorite dancers: Amber Sloan and Nic Petry. Choreography is what makes us a family and there is no better reason to keep doing it. I hope never to stop.

Photo: David Parker, center, with Nic Petry and Jeffrey Kazin. © Stephen Schreiber, courtesy The Bang Group

January 4, 2011

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My Secret Passion

As printed in Dance Magazine • June 2009 • “I’m the greatest star. I am by far, but no one knows it,” sang the shimmering Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl, one of many musicals that brightened my boring suburban childhood. I think of this now because I’m a choreographer and I know that dance, at its most authentic, is a popular art form, but nearly no one else knows it. I’m also thinking about it because I’m working on a contemporary dance piece based on a musical. I’ve waited for this my whole life. As a butterball toddler I “tapped” across my kitchen floor with quarters clutched between my toes while The June Taylor Dancers hoofed on The Jackie Gleason Show. In those days one could see not only Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Gwen Verdon, and Fred Astaire on television variety shows, but also the likes of Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev, Jacques d’Amboise, Edward Villella, and Patricia McBride. High art and low, brought to you all mixed up by Ed Sullivan, Kraft cheese, and Bell Telephone. There they all were, and then quite suddenly, they went away—or so it seemed. This was the 1960s, a time of social and aesthetic revolution that, perhaps unintentionally, liberated us from good old musical comedy along with the pageboy and premarital chastity. Apart from late-night showings of antediluvian movies, the only tap dancing on television in my teenage years was found in the polyester precincts of The Lawrence Welk Show. At 16, feeling the loss of this tradition, I began to study tap with the ferocity of a seminary student poring over the Gospels. I became a devotee of the Astaire–Rogers and Gene Kelly films—especially Singin’ in the Rain, then being rediscovered in revival houses by young cinephiles. I was an autodidact with a Greg Brady haircut. In the time before home video recording I learned to concentrate utterly on what I saw, knowing I had to get it all at once. In the expansion of each prosaic situation into sublime, syncopated evocations of romance, high spirits, eroticism, and competition, I found my métier. I longed to burst free from the buffoonish suburban culture around me and plunge into these rhapsodic numbers. The men especially captivated. Not conventionally gorgeous (with the exception of Kelly), men like O’Connor and Astaire achieved a ravishing beauty in their dances that was heightened by their glinting, jazz-infused rhythm—it means a lot of things when it’s got that swing. I identified with the thrill Debbie Reynolds must have felt pressed shoulder-to-shoulder between Kelly and O’Connor while tap dancing upside down over a sofa. It made me giddy but also pointed toward a kind of masculine finesse and breadth of emotion that sports (which I loathed) didn’t offer. It also opened onto a world that didn’t observe quotidian rules of decorum and conformity. Every living room was a set, every sidewalk a stage. Musicals were democratic, finding art in the common things around us, transforming them as the dances transformed O’Connor and Astaire. Today, the conventional sexual politics of Hollywood’s golden age are much maligned and rightly so. But these entrancing choreographic expressions of love and camaraderie render them moot, or at least beside the point. When Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor jammed together through “Moses Supposes” in Singin’ in the Rain, friendship, eros, amity, and synchrony curled around each other in one thrilling rush of piston-thighed tapping. They forged their bond through rhythm. This then would become the basis for my work. Since I began choreographing, I’ve made all manner of rhythmic pieces, from dances in which two men clad in Velcro suits make music by sticking to and ripping apart from each other to others featuring percussive pointe work, bubble-wrap-popping, barefoot hoofing, and actual tap. But what I’d never done before is face up to my musical comedy heritage. Enter Robin Staff, artistic director of DanceNow/NYC. Staff’s idea was to drop musical comedy themes right into the laps of contemporary choreographers. Like Gene Kelly jumping from the top of a trolley down into Debbie Reynolds’ jalopy, this can be startling. Staff relishes the collision of these genres, and her first match was made in heaven. Fräulein Maria, a rollicking, all-dance reinvention of The Sound of Music, was choreographed by my good friend and esteemed colleague Doug Elkins. In this hilarious and loving show, I have the tremendous good fortune to play Liesl, the eldest Trapp daughter. I am 16 going on 50 but bromidic and bright as a moon-happy night pouring light on the dew. The show has been, to put it mildly, a hit. Her second commission was for me. She saw Jeff Kazin and me sing and dance a number from Annie Get Your Gun called “Old-Fashioned Wedding” at a party. She found it resonant with our current struggle for marriage equality but in a fresh and comical way. In 2008 she asked me to take on the whole show. My version, called Show Down, is, like Annie Get Your Gun, about an initiate, a novitiate even, to Show Business. Which is just how I feel. So far, the process of making it has been like coming home, only without the quarters between my toes—now I’ve got the taps. I asked Staff why she started doing this. Her answer surprised me, for it points well beyond entertainment. “In this time of woe, the world is starting to look to this musical genre again for its richness and ability to transform,” she said. “More than ever, we need a place to escape to these days. We need to recharge beliefs and to strengthen ourselves.” Making Show Down and dancing in Fräulein Maria has recharged and strengthened me, especially my legs—or in Liesl’s case, gams. And, speaking of legs, both shows seem to have them. They’ll keep playing, hopefully at a theater near you. David Parker just finished an encore-run of Show Down at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in NYC. Excerpts of Show Down appear at Summer Stages in Concord, MA, on July 23. Fräulein Maria will be at ADF July 13–15 and Jacob’s Pillow Aug. 26–30. His comic, neovaudeville Nutcracker, called Nut/Cracked, will play in repertory with Fräulein Maria at DTW this December.
August 6, 2009

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Knocked Sideways

As printed in Dance Magazine, December 2008 • Harsh words from critics, now and forever a click away on the Internet, can harrow. This seems pretty plain, I know. But, amazingly, I had never really given this much thought until one day last spring when I wanted to put my head in the oven and kill myself because of a wretched review. Until then, I had never placed much stock in reviews and now I found myself unable to defang one of them. Everywhere I went, I felt it snapping at me from all sides like a terrier. What had become of my poise? Baffled and battered, I reviewed my past for answers. I got my first mention in the press when I was 23. Waking before sunrise on a summer morning in 1982, I sprinted to the newsstand on Saint Mark’s Place (modern dancers still lived in the East Village then) and seized a copy of The Village Voice. A blessing was bestowed. Modesty forbids that I repeat it verbatim. But don’t think I couldn’t. My ego ran with it. I shall make my mark on this land, I proclaimed, and shepherds quaked. I tendered my regards to Broadway with remembrances to Herald Square and sauntered home. Well, youth laughed and wept and lived its heedless hour and of course things didn’t go exactly as I’d planned that morning. I did not crack this town open like a walnut. I have made a career, it’s true—a long one and a good one. I have been and remain a dancer, a choreographer, artistic director of my own company and the maker of dances for many other companies both here and abroad. I also perform with other choreographers whom I admire. I love the whole deal. Through all this I’ve enjoyed, on balance, fairly good press. There have been stabs here and there, but no lasting scars. Although I saw friends and colleagues lain low, hurt and buffeted by negative reviews, I didn’t understand their distress. How fragile they are, I thought to myself. Really, some critics are just serving the canine blood lust of their own readers. Some don’t “get it.” Others merely make fools of themselves posing as dictators of taste. The notion of a definitive critical evaluation is simply a fiction. Then one fine day I got slammed and found myself chewing a hunk of self-pity the size of Georgia. Said slam was in response to an evening-length work that was, for me, something of a departure. I had based much of it on a work I made at Juilliard in 2006 for 24 dancers that was a mingling of classical and percussive dance overlaid with a latent romanticism. It delighted me and I wanted to build on it for my New York season presented by Dance Theater Workshop the following spring. This was my sixth season at Dance Theater Workshop and I felt at home. I thought I was pushing a custard pie into the face of my old work by cultivating something more austere, and, like an elusive lover, more remote. Stealthily I concocted the notion that I should be rewarded for my bravery and for my “risk.” Then the other jackboot dropped. No good deed goes unpunished . . . . It’s impossible for me to read a review of my own new work rationally. I don’t even know if that would be desirable. Reading a review is like eavesdropping on only one side of a conversation between members of the audience. But I was uncertain about what I was doing and I longed for some authoritative insight, so I was uncharacteristically vulnerable to pronouncements. Alas, reviews have no real use in actual creative activity. I find, and found again, my own strength in the creative process itself. No one else, critic or peer, can find it for me. This tidy truth does nothing, however to address the sheer pain of the whole thing. Blame is exhausting to deal with. I felt dispatched by a guillotine tongue. After consulting several martinis and a competent therapist (not simultaneously) I began to gain some perspective. A review isn’t a symbol, a harbinger, or an edict. Critics write them as though they were exposing more about themselves than about any artist. I didn’t learn anything from the content of the review. But I learned enormously from my response to it. I found that I don’t actually believe that abstractions and concepts are more meaningful than specific details. I don’t really want to pull back from a work to experience it remotely. I had been seduced by a lot of high-concept work happening in Europe and around me in New York. Much of it inspires me, but it doesn’t truly have to do with my own generative impulses. I found I could remain creatively impertinent without submitting to current pieties. I began to take more pleasure in the world as an aesthetic place, not just in terms of beauty but in terms of degree of artifice or stylization. And I saw that natural and unnatural, masculine and feminine, gay and straight, ballet and hoofing, and art and entertainment are false opposites. In the work I’ve made since, I’ve dug down into my appetites once again. The self-pity has been gnawed down and swallowed. On track, I’m still headed where I was going in 1982—second star to the right and straight on till morning. • David Parker continues to be sanguine about reviews while working with his company, The Bang Group, on his choreographic reinvention of Annie Get Your Gun called ShowDown, which will enjoy an encore run in NYC in June.
November 28, 2008

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Don't You Just Hate It When...

I don’t like dances which are the same all the way through. It’s a widespread phenomenon and I don’t know why it’s not more often discussed. Some dances start off fierce and flinging and stay that way for their duration. Even a brownie with nuts has various textures throughout and takes a lot less time to eat. I saw one not long ago (a dance, not a brownie) in which a rather large number of people hurled themselves upon each other and the floor in fairly athletic ways for around 20 minutes. That was it. They did this at more or less the same pitch and speed throughout. The basic variables in the work stayed in the same proportion to one another the entire way through. The tenth minute was virtually identical to the 17th and to the intervening 6. While it may be hard to organize such activity for 20 minutes running I don’t know that one should try. Another thing I don’t like is the tendency of some critics to make final, forceful declarations about quality. “Not a major ballet by any standard”, “froth but nothing more”, “masterpiece”, “drivel”, “classic”, “dud”---“this wine is bad”, “these Doritos are stale”, “off with their heads!”. It’s the kind of thing business folk on expense accounts say to impress their companions with their connoisseurship (well, maybe not the Doritos thing). But does this impress? It’s as if dances are being inserted into some imaginary canon and catalogued for the library of congress. On the other hand, I liked Claudia LaRocco’s statement at the end of a review of Katie Workum, Will Rawls and the Labor Union at Dance Theater Workshop where she said something like “art is better off being interesting than sensible”. Katie’s and Will’s work as very lively, very detailed, very tasty, not very sensible and…not a major ballet by any standard. I enjoyed it very much. Give me liberty or give me death. A stitch in time saves nine. You get more bees with honey than with…
February 14, 2007

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My Favorite Dancer

"This slavery to the moment is far more tyrannous than any other constructions I can think of. The artist ceases to ask the personal question 'what is right for me to do?' and asks instead, 'what is right for 1971?'." W.H. Auden interviewed in the New York Times in 1971 I now have a blog. I've sweated over my opening blog entry and cast about for something I thought would be worthy. I decided to write about my favorite dancer. There isn't really anything more important than that, ultimately. This is a dancer who has devloped over time and made his mark for a number of years. In a fast-food culture which erases as fast as it rewards, a dancer that can deepen and ripen over decades is a rare thing. I have a lot of favorite dancers. I began loving Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly (in that order)and Debbie Reynolds (of course), Ginger Rogers, Eleanor Powell, The Nicholas Brothers, John Bubbles, Gregory Hines, Paul Draper, Donald O'Connor and Ann Miller (in no particular order). I love the great English dramatic classicists from the sixties and seventies--Lynn Seymour, Antony Dowell, David Wall, Antoinette Sibley, Monica Mason, Christopher Gable and their predecessors Margot Fonteyn, Robert Helpmann, Michael Somes, Moira Shearer and Svetlana Beriosova. I loved the modern dancers I saw onstage when I first came to New York in eighties--Rob Besserer, Tere O'Connor (yes, as a dancer with Rosalind Newman and in his own work of the time), Ruth Davidson, Penny Hutchinson, Kate Johnson, Ken Tosti, Robert Kovich, Erin Thompson, Shelley Washington, Tom Rawe, Jennifer Way, Richard Colton, Amy Spencer, Alan Good, Christopher Batenhorst, Sara Rudner and on and on. But my absolute favorite dancer is Jeffrey Kazin. This works out especially well for me since he dances in my company and has been my muse for over 16 years. Like other great dancers he melds paradoxes: luxuriant and urgent, innocent and erotic, formal and intimate, commanding and vulnerable, raw and impeccable, freewheeling and scrupulous. He provokes a similarly inexplicable cocktail of emotions in audiences. His formidable technique is never held close or precious but can be shorn of all polish in a blink's time. He has a tail-wagging enthusiasm for performance but can be as imperturbable as a prey-stalking lynx. He is funny but never with apparent concern for a laugh or a joke. He is an artist. The Greenwich-mean could be set by his sense of rhythm. He will be performing tomorrow night, September 6, at Dance Theater Workshop in New York City (www.dtw.org)in one of his best roles, a piece called Hind Legs which premiered in 1995. There's nothing like it. Be there if you can.
September 5, 2006

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