The Expanding World of Michelle Dorrance
Image: Michelle Dorrance (left) and Tiler Peck (right). Photography by Christopher Duggan.
By Glen Nelson
The citation when Michelle Dorrance was named a MacArthur Foundation fellow in 2015 read: “Michelle Dorrance is a tap dancer and choreographer breathing new life into a uniquely American art form in works that combine the musicality of tap with the choreographic intricacies of contemporary dance. Dorrance uses her deep understanding of the technique and history of tap dancing to deconstruct and reimagine its artistic possibilities…. Dorrance has moved beyond the episodic nature of traditional tap pieces—with solo dancers competing for the most audacious phrase—to craft evening-length ensemble works that tell compelling stories through rhythm and the arrangement of visual information.” At age 36, Dorrance was anointed a MacArthur “genius,” given an unrestricted gift of $625,000, and thrust into the rarified space of the most admired artists in America.
For audiences only casually aware of tap dancing, it is traditionally an art form of one-upmanship: a performer dazzles, then another tries to top it. Fast feet flash and metallic sounds slap. Fine, but Dorrance wanted more. She was trained by tap master Gene Medler in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the daughter of a gifted dancer and teacher and a famous collegiate soccer coach, and she was exposed to living legends of the art form. After dancing with Savion Glover’s group Ti Dii and with the cast of STOMP in New York and on tour, she founded her own dance company in 2011, Dorrance Dance, which now tours in the U.S. and internationally. It is an award-winning staple of the most important dance venues today. She wanted to create a company for tap dance with the range and permanence of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Her ambition transcends celebrity. Dorrance seeks to be relevant today, to connect audiences, through tap, to history, the blues, and the pioneers of the art. She has said, “To be a professional tap dancer in my generation is to be a historian.”
Scholars have pointed to a fusion of Scottish, Irish, and English clog dances, hornpipes, reels, and jigs to sacred and secular West African dances for origins of tap dancing in America. Some research suggests that enslaved Africans and Irish indentured servants in the South observed each other’s dancing. Still other researchers note that urban environments such as the Five Points district of New York City contributed to tap’s development, where multiple, ethnic groups lived in cramped conditions and responded to urbanism of the machine age.
Dorrance is especially interested in tap’s connections to Black dancers. She notes, “Tap dance is the first American dance form. People don’t know that tap dance is older than jazz music. But we’re looking back to tap dance being an alternative when the drum was taken away from the slave. What’s left but your body? Tap dance and the blues come from the same place, and that they both find, from that place of incredible oppression and devastating history, and that they find their way through that oppression and that struggle to be a joyful expression is unbelievable and transcendent.…Those legacies—tap dance and the blues—are alive and rooted in everything today, and so many people know it and so many people don’t.”
If you think of a tap dancer on stage or in film, you likely visualize a single dancer, virtuosic, no doubt, but isolated. Or if they appear in a group, they dance in unison, almost removed from other individual relationships or from storytelling. Dorrance asks for a shift in the audience’s perception of what tap can be, which includes an acknowledgment that the tap dancer is performing to music but also making music, and when multiple dancers get going, that music becomes counterpoint, even harmony, and when those relationships extend over 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, they become narrative sagas. Dorrance has described herself as both choreographer and composer. She is as capable as any great tap dance choreographer of stunning the audience with intricate sound, movement, and textures—her polyrhythms are mind-melting—but she asks a further question: What does the sound mean?
She has choreographed for her company: evening-length works that are conceptual and narrative; works that investigate the possibilities of computer technology, that turn a tap floor into a soundboard connected to digital samples; additional pieces are experiments with dancers in site-specific works that investigate a space’s unique acoustics; and she has created collaborations with dancers who are not tap dancers, at all.
In a series of appearances at dance festivals, Dorrance has pulled together unlikely partners for one-time-only performances. Most notably at the Vail Dance Festival, she has transformed these pièces d’occasion into choreographic laboratories. An example is 1-2-3-4-5-6, premiered in 2016, to music based on a rhythm by Steve Reich. The four dancers onstage represented four dance traditions–they are also a metaphor for a society of isolated tribes coming together: Michelle Dorrance (tap), Robbie Fairchild (ballet, New York City Ballet), Lil Buck (Memphis Jookin, solo artist), and Melissa Toogood (modern dance, Merce Cunningham Dance Company). Without altering the separate performer’s dance vocabularies, Dorrance highlighted what they have in common, how they speak to each other, how they learn from a shared movement landscape. (Watch the YouTube video and prepare for a lightning strike of brilliant invention.) Fairchild was an obvious choice as a collaborator in that piece because he is also a Broadway hoofer, but in 2018 American Ballet Theatre commissioned three short works by Dorrance that left ballerinas in their toe shoes—there’s a hard box inside that shoe, after all—and the experimenting continues.
I was in the audience earlier this year when Dorrance premiered Time Spell with Tiler Peck, principal dancer of the New York City Ballet, performing alongside a host of other ballet luminaries. (When I refer to her as the choreographer of a work, I must note that Dorrance is unusually generous in acknowledging co-choreographers; she spreads the credit liberally, including to her dancers. She is a born collaborator. Speaking to The New York Times about the MacArthur grant, she demurred, “Here’s the truth—I can’t accept this award as an individual. I can’t comprehend that because I haven’t done anything…. I’m not pursuing this for me.”)
Time Spell contrasted dance forms and then melded them, including ballet, tap, and break dancing. This omnivorousness does not come naturally to all dancers. For example, it is ingrained into a ballet dancer’s body from their earliest training to make no sound, whatsoever. Here, the choreography demands as much percussive sound from a ballerina as possible, and from every angle of her toe shoe. Onstage, two musicians vocalized beats in sync with the sounds of the tap. It is no surprise that Dorrance selects sound for her works with up-to-the-minute connoisseurship, including contributions by her frequent composer-collaborator, her brother Donovan Dorrance. The work that night whipped the audience into what can only be described as a frenzy. In an age of begrudging, almost-compulsory standing ovations at the theater, at the end of this work, which was placed in the middle of the evening, people jumped to their feet and yelled. They could not have stood up any faster or made more noise had there been placed electrodes under their seats.
Last year, Dorrance choreographed her first Broadway musical, Flying Over Sunset. It opened December 13, 2021. The show presents a fictional meeting of Aldous Huxley, Clare Boothe Luce, and Cary Grant, each of whom in real life had used LSD for therapeutic purposes years before it was labeled as a controlled substance. In an interview for an accompanying publication by Lincoln Center Theater, Dorrance confessed that she used psychedelic mushrooms as a young person, and she said, “In my last trip, the one that made me quit doing drugs, I had a very spiritual experience where I realized that what I was experiencing—what I was seeing, feeling, hearing, and understanding—was beyond my mortal capacity to understand. And, in my young Latter-day Saint mind, I thought, Oh, this is technically beyond the veil. It’s not that it was evil or wrong, but I felt that I was witnessing something that I was just not meant to see yet. Something that I didn’t have the capacity to fully understand or even to fully handle.”
LDS artists have no greater responsibility to insert their faith tradition overtly into their work than any other professional –plumbers or lawyers, say–even if LDS audience members crave the insight those pairings might provide. I am not the one to write about the connections between Michelle Dorrance and Mormonism—her artistry and her values—but they are there, awaiting examination. I will ask this question, although there are and have been many LDS artists of distinction, has any of them fundamentally changed their art form? Dorrance has and does. As The New York Times very quotably wrote in a review of her evening-length work, SOUNDspace, in 2016, “With each performance of Dorrance Dance, tap expands.”
(October performances of Dorrance Dance will be in Richmond, VA and the Hudson Valley Dance Festival; November in North Bethesda, MD; and a two-week residency in December at The Joyce Theater in New York City.)