MISTRESS OF CEREMONIES: Dianne Walker officiated at Tapestry 2006.
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This year’s Tapestry Dance Champion Award went not to a dancer but to a devoted musical collaborator, Paul Arslanian. Friday’s performance at the National Heritage Museum in Lexington honored the pianist and composer who led the classy combos accompanying Dance Inn’s annual productions. To the audience’s delight, Arslanian revealed that he’d once been a modest tapper himself. In video footage, he performed alongside Cameron Richman, Honi Coles, and members of the Jazz Tap Ensemble, which he helped found on the West Coast in 1979.It wasn’t really surprising to see the spry young Arslanian hoofing on video. From its roots in African dance, tap has always embraced music and dancing as two facets of the same expressive impulse. Traditional African dancers can sing and play drums; drummers join the dance. Toward the end of Friday’s performance, choreographer Drika Overton stepped back to play a set of congas, and dancer Jon Peiffer took over at the piano so Arslanian could join the shim-sham finale.
It’s not just that performers can exchange roles but that the music and the dance feed each other. “Paul taught us dancers how to listen to music, and how to play our notes,” said Dianne Walker in tribute.
Tapestry shows are always full of camaraderie and enthusiasm. The local headliners were on hand: Mistress of Ceremonies Dianne Walker; dancer Josh Hilberman; Arslanian and the combo, Joe Fonda on bass, Erik Lawrence on sax, and drummer Ron Savage; and Dance Inn director Thelma Goldberg with her Legacy Dancers. Drika Overton’s New Hampshire–based dancers and other guest artists performed. The emphasis this year seemed to be on young talent, with a guest trio featuring Joseph Wiggan, Luke Hawkins, and Kelly Kaleta.
Arslanian and cohort provided the jazz and Latin motor for the dancers. I always like hearing the old tunes again — “Just You, Just Me,” “Moonlight in Vermont.” At some point in almost every solo, the dancer would nod to one of the musicians and start a duet, where one player lays down a rhythm and the other answers with an embellished version. These call-and-response encounters can get competitive, but Friday night they were all good-natured and mutually appreciative.
The other nice thing about these tap shows is seeing once again how much variety there is in the tap genre. There were unison routines, including the biggest, Honi Coles’s choreography to “Take the ‘A’ Train,” for the 17 young Legacy Dancers. There was Josh Hilberman’s relaxed virtuosity and Joseph Wiggan’s more intense, unpredictable syncopations and down-into-the-ground slides and stomps.
Then, when Arslanian’s “Drika’s Waltz” had segued into the African-influenced “Mandiani” and then into the concluding shim-sham, a row of chairs suddenly appeared and the whole cast did a hilarious hand and foot number, sitting down.
The next night, chairs played a big part in Still Time, a wonderful group dance directed by Judith Chaffee, on the concert of Margot Parsons and DanceVisions at Boston University Dance Theater. One by one in a dim light, five women entered and occupied five old-fashioned rockers. Each one settled in differently and established her own sense of time and place. They drew the chairs together in little clusters; you thought of folks in a retirement home or on the balcony of a seaside hotel — moody, chatty, cantankerous, all in it together.
