Dancing in the dark

Tap’s aurality is key in Tamango’s video-rich production

By Elizabeth Zimmer

Video and dance co-exist uneasily onstage. Dance cries out for light, while video requires darkness. Performances that use video as scenery, like last week’s presentation of Tamango’s Urban Tap, deny audiences both a full view of the live action, and the depth and grandeur of rich films of Caribbean scenery and Creole life.

That said, Tamango’s co-director and video artist, “Naj” Jean de Boysson, is a master of his craft, a man who thinks big. His multi-screen display of jungle greenery, floating in water or pelted with rain, was gorgeous even at half power, and his special effects, multiplying the scene on stage with a live video feed to create panoramas worthy of Busby Berkeley, did deepen the pleasures of the evening.

When the ensemble’s star, Tamango, came front and center — a black man in dark clothing on a dim stage — it was practically impossible to see him. Thank goodness he’s such an expressive tap dancer that you could close your eyes and still enjoy a transcendent rhythmic and musical experience. The pile of stuff behind him, which I first guessed was a banked campfire, turned out to be a ritual figure on stilts, played by Vado Diomande, a master of “tall mask dancing” from Cote D’Ivoire.

Diomande’s process of rising from the floor to his full height of about nine feet is exhilarating to watch: He lies on his stomach, throws the prosthetic legs over his head, and miraculously counterbalances himself until he’s upright. He did this twice in the course of the show’s 75 minutes, and garnered applause both times.

Three percussionists beat their sticks on the floor and on the sides of big drums; three dancers performed traditional material and displayed their sinuous capabilities behind the video screens, in glamorous silhouette. They came together to follow Tamango through a spiral of light projected on the floor, and to mirror, live onstage, the carnival and the sugar-cane harvest that de Boysson has captured on tape. After a pause for a video dedication to Léon Gontrand Dumas, a poet from French Guiana and a co-founder of the Negritude Movement whose writings inspired the piece, the cast returned and the gaudily costumed Diomande sprinkled Tamango with sand, enabling a gritty dance on a special, amplified platform. During the curtain call Tamango’s very young son was set loose upon the set; called back by a woman barely three feet away, he chose to scamper clear across the stage to join his dad. We hailed the next generation, already infused with spirit.