Da Beat’s Sending Dance Back to Basics

In the award-winning Broadway tap-musical “Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk,” capital letters projected above the stage enforce a revisionist view of biblical genesis: “In the beginning there was . . . da beat!” That motto would seem equally at home in four popular shows headed for Southern California or already here.

Like “Noise/Funk,” the all-male, industrial-style “Tap Dogs” (at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater through today) finds bold and sometimes startling new contexts for tap-dancing. In contrast, the hip-hop showcase “Jam on the Groove” (coming to the Wadsworth Tuesday-Oct. 6) and the Irish step-dancing spectacle “Riverdance” (due at the Pantages Theatre, Nov. 15-Dec. 1) both create new respect for subculture idioms that only a coterie audience took seriously not long ago.

And then there’s the show best known to local audiences: “Stomp” (returning for its fourth Southland engagement in March), in which ordinary household objects inspire extraordinary percussive and movement experiments.

However different they may be in their movement languages and points of origin, these dance shows all belong to da beat, body and soul. Call it a strategy for survival. At a time when concert dance has become virtually invisible in the American cultural mainstream, this new trend in dance-theater reaches out to the mass audience by starting over, reconnecting the viewer to the primal heartbeat of dance: percussive rhythm.

Moreover, all these shows reflect a search for new staging formats, new ways of conveying the dance experience with maximum immediacy, rejecting the Apollonian reserve of most concert dance--and the sense of viewing a choreographic museum, exhibit by exhibit. In its place, they offer an experiential, Dionysiac immersion in high-energy muscle power.

“Dance artists have to find new solutions if they want to be out there and seen,” says Margaret Selby, a former producer for the PBS “Dance in America” series and the producer of “Jam on the Groove.” “Right now, most people in America either don’t know what a dance concert is or, worse, they come with a preconceived notion.”

By taking hip-hop, break-dancing and other contemporary forms into the concert arena, “Jam on the Groove” is helping rebuild the dance audience, Selby says. “We get families, teenagers, single women, the gay audience, people from the media--and from the ‘hood. For them, this is the new modern dance.”

“Most young people have no use for theater or [concert] dance,” says Richard Frankel, general manager for “Stomp.” “Young people are used to seeing ideas and emotions more directly expressed in [rock] music and movies. However, ‘Stomp’ expresses itself in such an intense and joyful way that it has arguably sucked them into the theater.”

Both “Jam on the Groove” and “Stomp” developed directly from street performance--the former in New York City, the latter in Brighton, England. Evolving in Newcastle, Australia, “Tap Dogs” also strongly reflects its urban origins. Moreover, most of these shows cultivate an anti-professional stance--an impatience with the traditional training process for dancers and choreographers that grants them acceptance only after their rough edges and much of their individuality have been refined away.

In contrast, these shows glory in their streetwise iconoclasm. Even “Riverdance,” the most conventional in format and slickness, pumps up the intensity and achieves a major breakthrough: changing Irish step-dancing from a historical skill that has survived mainly through competitions--rather like archery--into a full-blooded, expressive theater form.

Indeed, all these shows reinvent or rehabilitate idioms that have become stale or degraded through over-familiarity and commercialization. “Jam on the Groove” repudiates soulless Hollywood, chorus-line hip-hop, while “Noise/Funk” and “Tap Dogs” reject the suave, top-hat-and-tails image of tap along with the mellow, arguably feminized jazz-tap alternative of recent years.

In style, these shows most resemble rock concerts or MTV videos, though they focus on igniting group virtuosity rather than merchandising music or dramatizing star power. Yes, some of them do have stars: Savion Glover in “Noise/Funk,” for example. But however much “Riverdance” originally depended on the prowess of champion Irish American step-dancer Michael Flatley, its spectacular New York success after his departure proves that the show’s the thing.

Nearly as central as da beat to this appeal is the tribal masculinity projected by all these shows--not so much a blue-collar sensibility as a no-collar one, and often no shirt as well. It ranges from the sweaty, macho hedonism of “Tap Dogs” to the comparative restraint of “Riverdance”--though, as Time magazine noted, that show’s unaccompanied “Thunderstorm” septet for men in black T-shirts, tight pants and boots represents its “most consistent showstopper.”

A “Riverdance” and “Tap Dogs” review in the current issue of the British magazine Dance Now sneers at such shows as “boys and their noise.” However, women have dominated contemporary dance for most of this century and there are compelling reasons for at least a temporary change in emphasis. Selby offers one of the best: “For a lot of kids who don’t have fathers in their lives,” she says, “ ‘Jam on the Groove’ made heroes of men.”

Male energy drives these shows and when women dance in them, they’re usually just one of the guys or are used to affirm the manhood of their partners--or serve as changes of pace. Only “Riverdance,” with its cast of 80, finds a central place for femininity.

It’s not that the shows denigrate women, they’re simply intent on establishing a new identity for the dancing male: the image of a rough-and-tumble street guy who plays hard, puts all his weight behind every step he takes in his boots or sneakers and remains much too involved with his mates or blokes or bros to notice the squeals out front when he tosses his shirt away.

That image hasn’t exactly been hard to sell. “One of the reasons these shows are successful is that it’s easy to do two- or three-minute [promotional] TV appearances,” says Marc Routh, executive producer of “Stomp” and co-producer of “Tap Dogs.” “In that amount of time, you give people a good sense of what it is.”

No surprise, then, that all these shows can supply video press kits with clips from a large assortment of daytime interview shows, a few late-night programs and, in the case of “Stomp,” even a guest shot on the 1996 Academy Awards. And that’s network television, mind you, where talk shows sell millions of tickets to movies but concert dance usually can’t get arrested.

The overall result has created surprising repercussions in the local community--principally at UCLA. Between October 1994 and September, the UCLA Center for the Arts presented nine weeks of “Stomp” performances. “There’s been nothing comparable during my 10 years here,” says Michael Blachly, director of the center. “And besides helping us to generate new audiences, ‘Stomp’ took in enough money to allow us to bring in the [Mark Morris/Handel and Haydn Society] ‘Orfeo’ last season,” an opera-dance project too expensive to support itself solely through ticket sales.

Blachly has booked “Tap Dogs,” “Jam on the Groove” and another “Stomp” engagement during the current UCLA season. Meanwhile, several local choreographers and producers say they’re planning to come on board. For instance, Jordan Peimer, a former artistic director at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, has been working with Jacques Heim of Diavolo Dance Theater on the idea of creating a full-evening dance-theater project to premiere in the fall of 1997. “Perhaps a piece that takes place entirely on top of a roof,” Heim says.

Perhaps. But as unfailingly creative and resourceful as Heim has been in the past, his success in attracting the audience that adores “Stomp,” “Tap Dogs” “Jam on the Groove,” “Riverdance” and “Noise/Funk” may ultimately rest not so much on his talent as the generic bottom line:

Whether he’s got da beat. And da biceps.

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Beat and Biceps

“Tap Dogs,” Veterans Wadsworth Theater, Veterans Administration grounds. Last performances today, 2 and 7 p.m. $13-$35. (310) 825-2101.

“Jam on the Groove,” Veterans Wadsworth Theater, Veterans Administration grounds. Tuesday through Oct. 6. Tues.-Fri, 8 p.m; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m; Sun., 2 and 7 p.m. $13-$30. (310) 825-2101.

“Riverdance,” Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd. Nov. 15-Dec. 1. Tues.-Fri., 8 p.m; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m; Sun., 2 p.m. $46-$66. (213) 365-3555.

“Stomp,” Veterans Wadsworth Theater, Veterans Administration grounds. March 4-23. Tues.-Fri, 8 p.m; Sat., 5 and 8 p.m; Sun., 2 and 7 p.m. $15, $39. (310) 825-2101.