Savion Glover is no doubt the present-day king of hoofers, but the kind of tap dancing he does is essentially a solo art—a cappella or accompanied by music, preferably jazz. In recent years, though, Glover has hyped up his mission to expand his shows in ways that unfortunately diminish the impact of his thrilling gifts. His current production, SoLo in TiME, at the Joyce Theater in New York through March 22, has him flirting with flamenco, from which he seems to have absorbed almost nothing, his previous one an alliance (surely a forced marriage) with some embarrassingly unqualified modern and ballet dancers.
This is the Glover I recall and conjure up from earlier, simpler days—when he was far more himself: His feet are large—size 12 E or thereabouts—and, in their pedestrian mode, can look heavy and clumsy. Don’t kid yourself; they’re the fleetest human pedals imaginable. In quiet little soliloquies, the faster they get, the more crisply and delicately they strike the floor. When they slam down bluntly, full strength, you feel that the glass on the theater’s exit signs, luminous in the dark auditorium, is in danger of shattering.
You wonder why, most of the time, he doesn’t smile at his audience—or even look at these admirers. Or if he does, he makes that conventional performer-public connection look dutiful or downright scary, as if he were facing the guillotine. A friend of mine proposes that he regards his dancing as a meditation—therefore internal and private. I agree.
Then there’s his sullen streak. You get glimpses of it in his performances. Once, interviewing him backstage before a show, I got a full-brunt dose of it. The only eye contact he made with me was in the split-second glances of a cornered animal. Not looking up from his generous bowl of messy Chinese take-out, he responded to the most innocuous (I had been warned) questions, mumbling as few words as possible. For all his God-gifted feet could articulate, his tongue was tied. He was very young back then, and I decided to treat his behavior as the default mode of an adolescent, but I couldn’t resist thinking, Didn’t your mama teach you better manners? And you a star, too.
By the way, his smile is irresistible. Well, he smiles a lot more these days, though still largely when he gets himself into the zone by communicating with a musician—in the case of SoLo in TiME, with the bassist Andy McCloud, who exudes enormous dignity, the gentle sense of humor that is born of experience, and the ability to recognize a soul mate when he meets up with one.
Glover had amazing teachers and mentors when he was first coming up in the business—Gregory Hines, predominantly, and a good handful of the men we fondly called the “old hoofers” (the Jimmy Slyde, Buster Brown, Chuck Greene, Nicolas Brothers crew), who enjoyed a golden sunset a decade or two ago. Thus sensitized to the importance of tradition, Glover generously included two acolytes in this show; I thought his protégé Cartier Williams showed promise, though Glover is an impossible act to follow.
In the first half of SoLo in TiME, Glover thankfully stuck to his last, so to speak, demonstrating the marvels of speed matched with clarity that we’re used to reveling in, the easy isolation of parts of his feet so that they alone seem to constitute a whole orchestra, the split-second switches between gentle and emphatic and the emotions they evoke, the constant flow of irregular rhythms, and the disarming hunched-over position from which his long arms and large hands swing loosely.
The second section opened with a fabulous solo in this vein, with Glover making his feet sound like a time bomb relentlessly ticking away, then a cascade of huge marbles rolling down a spiral stone staircase. But then the show segued into flamenco territory, personified by a female singer in red ruffles (Conja Abdessalam, known as La Conja and celebrated on her own turf, where she dances too). But though she and Glover had a pair of duets—that is, they danced facing each other though never connecting physically, emotionally, or style-wise—they seemed to have absorbed nothing whatever from the association, neither body language nor dance rhythms. I blame this largely on Glover who is, after all, the boss here, and because he upstaged the lady throughout; the most we saw of her was her obdurately upright back.
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