DANCE REVIEW : Easygoing Set From Tap Group

It’s certainly a Jazz Tap Ensemble milestone when founder-director Lynn Dally doesn’t dance. It may be another when women wear dresses during a performance.

A back injury sidelined Dally at the Ensemble’s New Year’s Day program in the Morgan-Wixson Theater, and party skirts turned up on three members of the teen-age Caravan project who appeared as guests. (For the record, the skirts looked strange over flat, low tap shoes--and high heels just wouldn’t be P.C. for any New Age rhythm-tap virtuosa.)

Dedicated to the late Eddie Brown, the Friday performance perhaps proved a mite too mellow for maximum impact, and by 1993 Derick Grant really ought to have developed a major self-defining solo instead of always playing second (and third) banana.

Still, Grant provided plenty of improvisational fireworks in the “Taxi” duet, Denise Pennington demonstrated lots of flair (if not much flow) in her “Blackbird” tribute to Brown and the four resident musicians--Doug Walter, Eric Ajaye, Stacy Rowles and Jerry Kalaf--sounded equally accomplished in compositions by everyone from Fats Waller to George Shearing.

It was Sam Weber, however, who made the performance essential viewing with superb displays of daring and control that sometimes pushed beyond the definitions of rhythm-tap.

In “Conception,” for instance, his emphasis on aerial steps--jumps, hops, even turns-in-air derived from ballet--created a stretched, rising trajectory strikingly different from a tapper’s characteristic low-to-the-floor attack. The price, inevitably, was a momentary loss of rhythmic patterning central to tap artistry.

Dancing in place of Dally in the big Ensemble ensembles, Dormeshia Sumbry also appeared in the Caravan project segments and in a Bill Robinson solo she reconstructed from films.