Feet Speak Puts Eclectic Stamp on ‘Percussion Jam’

What’s percussive dance? Moving rhythmically to drum recordings or tapping/stamping/clapping out choreography that can be heard as well as seen? Half the participants in “Percussion Jam” left percussion to their accompanists on Saturday during the final performance of the second Feet Speak season at Occidental College. Those, however, who actually made their own music not only connected to a primal dance component but proved innovative as well.

Folklorico specialist Gema Sandoval, for instance, used seven members of her Danza Floricanto/USA company to boil down regional Mexican styles to their percussive essences in her unaccompanied, exciting “Zapateados y Taconeos.” You could see this essay in sustained foot rhythm as her forthright way of demanding new respect for an idiom too often considered solely in terms of local color and audience identity. You could even consider it a sketchbook for a project that might widen the audience for Mexican folklore as “Riverdance” did for traditional Irish step-dancing.

Fred Strickler’s solo “Tacit Understanding” recontextualized conventional tap in the same manner, ignoring flow, musical embellishment or personality projection in favor of brief, unaccompanied formal etudes isolated from one another through silence and stillness--but with spectacular surprises. A sequence might develop from walking steps to amazingly fast, intricate tap-rhythms and then culminate in flamboyant body-slapping, or a single heel tapping furiously, or a daring balance in extension.

Only drummer Eddie Drayton--playing from a Keck Theater balcony between pieces--matched this sense of idiosyncratic percussive invention, though teen prodigy Kimberly Anne Cole displayed charisma galore and fabulous versatility (everything from tiny muscular isolations to big jumps and extensions) in the ballet-dominated solo “Tones,” choreographed by Clifford Breland and Leshaun Dodds.

Nearly as pliant: Michael Mizerany in his alternately liquid and contorted, often disarmingly tender modern dance solo “XY3: Domesticated Male,” a piece largely irrelevant to the evening’s premise but performed strongly enough to earn its place on any program. Equally non-percussive: “Spikes First,’ created and executed by Anne and Jeffrey Grimaldo (a.k.a. Naked With Shoes), but essentially a postmodern collage of fragments thinly linked by style of attack.

A vibrant suite of Iranian tribal dances choreographed by Jamal and Anthony Shay found members of Avaz International Dance Theatre pounding the floor with poles and executing group maneuvers suggesting combat-training exercises. Recorded music formed the primary accompaniment with the percussive poles adding a rhythmic pulse and possible metaphor--percussion as not only the heartbeat of dance but also the throb of warfare.