DANCE REVIEWS : Rhapsody in Taps Troupe at Orange Coast

Now in its 11th year, Rhapsody in Taps, a five-woman troupe based in Los Angeles, has built up a loyal audience, as shown by the large and enthusiastic crowd Saturday at the Robert B. Moore Theatre at Orange Coast College.

It’s not hard to see why. The company offers a variety of work, not just tap but modern dance as filtered through an ethnic viewpoint. The dancers are gracious in style, eschewing hard-sell salespersonship, and are willing to experiment with new forms.

Major problems remain, however, even apart from the obviously uneven technical accomplishments of the dancers, Linda Sohl-Donnell (who also serves as artistic director), Pauline Hagino, Marci Juris, Karol Lee and Beverley Scott.

At Orange Coast, they too often seemed to be executing strings of sequences, rather than completed works. Cautious in placement, and punctuating structure in stop-and-start fashion, they didn’t carry through with a sense of momentum or organic inevitability. Often, a dance seemed about to catch fire, but then petered out.

“Toeing the 3rd and Fifth,” which Gregory Hines created for the troupe in 1990, still seemed fragmented and sectional, although it did sit easier and more comfortably on the dancers than at the premiere. The group-tapping has become lighter and clearer.

However, most of the choreography on the program was created by Sohl-Donnell, and the question arose whether the troupe’s problems aren’t inherent in her designs.

An admirable dancer, increasingly fluid in legwork and offering more variety in percussive effects than her colleagues, Sohl-Donnell seems not to have fully mastered the art of creating persuasive, tightly constructed pieces.

The issue came to a head most clearly in “Duet,” a solo dance in which Sohl-Donnell interacted with guest percussionist Brent Lewis, who played a set of 22 chromatically tuned hand drums.

Responsive and on-the-money as her dancing was to his music (a departure, in fact, from a lot of the dancing all evening), it was in the second section, when Lewis began improvising against her steady tap rhythms, that a sense of liberated imagination and flair arose.

One had to wait until the closing group piece, “Banderillas,” for Sohl-Donnell’s company and choreography to come alive in a similar fashion--although again, veteran hoofer Eddie Brown, 73, who has appeared with the company since 1983, gave object lessons in fluttery light, perfectly focused and connected tapping, even if his contributions to the program have grown understandably briefer.

The sympathetic musicians, whom the dancers were generous in acknowledging, included Althea Waites, piano; Steve Fowler, flute and sax; Jardine Wilson, bass; Fritz Wise, drums, and M.B. Gordy, percussion.