Dance : Tappers Team Up

A performance by Fred Strickler or by Rhapsody in Taps usually adds up to a festival of fancy steps, painted smiles and oblivious-unto-arrogant musicality.

The shared program by these local tap institutions, Saturday at Occidental College, showed Strickler growing beyond anti-musical self-indulgence. However, Linda Sohl-Donnell’s five-woman ensemble continued to trample on its accompaniments and to exhibit a deadly dynamic sameness.

In “Untitled,” Ray McNamara sat and drummed on large wooden boxes, supplying a rhythmic backbone that helped focus Strickler’s technical filigree. Strickler’s sense of tap dynamics remained brilliant here--encompassing everything from the most delicately defined chains of steps to sharp kicks against the boxes. And though his rapport with McNamara often looked curiously stylized, their extended clapping coda had some vestige of spontaneity.

The unaccompanied “Tacit Agreement” found him dancing opposite New York choreographer Peggy Spina, who emphasized bold contrasts in the choreography while Strickler stressed intricacy. This was not an evening in which people really connected with their partners, but Spina seemed the least insular participant.

Strickler’s “Chicago Ellington” used recorded music to accompany two solos and three duets for Windy City dancers Lane Alexander and Kelly Michaels--both fast, deft and buoyant. Very classy for all its nonchalance, and musical too, except for one miscalculated duet that inflicted arbitrary percussive clatter on a moody piano solo.

Rhapsody in Taps danced to the mellow tone and subtle interplay of a fine jazz band: Phil Wright, Steve Fowler, Jardine Wilson and Fritz Wise. But Sohl-Donnell seldom seemed to be listening. In “Duet,” the musicians might be exploring sly permutations of “Red Sails in the Sunset,” but the dancers (Sohl-Donnell and Pauline Hagino) simply clomped away at step-sequences cobbled together.