Tamango’s fandango

The tap/jazz auteur is the Bates Dance Festival highlight

By Tanya Whiton

“Tamango” and Urban Tap can be seen at Bates College’s Schaeffer Theatre starting July 26. Call (207) 786-6161. Check the listings for other Bates Dance Festival offerings.

Herbin “Tamango” Van Cayseele and Urban Tap are transforming a uniquely American dance idiom into an inter-cultural conversation. Caravane — the full-length work Tamango and his collaborators will be performing July 26 through 28 at the Bates Dance Festival — explores the interaction of global rhythms with a talented ensemble of dancers, musicians, video artists, and DJs. Together, they create an encompassing, multi-media experience.

At the center of this gypsy-like collision of cultures is Tamango’s inspired, elegant tap dancing.

His own influences are diverse. Born in Cayenne, French Guiana, the grandson of a traditional vodoun healer, and sent to France at an early age to attend school, Tamango was a bookish, shy kid who rarely interacted with his peers. Then, while attending art school in Paris, he discovered jazz, and shortly thereafter, tap.

“I was hit by jazz,” he said in a recent interview with the Phoenix. “I heard the music, and that’s what got me, that’s what led me to tap.” It was clear after only a few lessons that he’d found his medium. After brief study at the American Center in Paris, Tamango’s metamorphosis from reclusive young man to interactive, risk-taking performance artist and producer began. He quickly grew impatient with learning routines and with what he saw as an outdated, narrow perception of tap as a mode of expression. “The people that think of dance don’t actually put tap into dance,” he says. “[They] have the wrong idea of what tap is supposed to be. It’s very individual, it’s an instrument.”

So rather than learn steps to “piano [music], old stuff, corny as hell,” he hit the streets, performing for anyone who’d stop, stand, and watch. “In the street I was pushed to actually create something. I’d sing, play an instrument, talk to people, organize things, create an audience, make them stay by any means.” He busked in Europe for years before landing in New York City, and during those years, perfected his skills as both barker and showman — the improvised, immediate nature of street performance still inflects his highly kinetic, musical style. When Tamango moves, it’s as if he’s responding to a rhythm already present in his environment, a charge for which his lithe, sinuous body is a conduit.

In a mid-June Urban Tap concert in Portland, sponsored by the Center for Cultural Exchange, Tamango stirred a reserved crowd into a foot-stomping call and response with a story-song. He glided between cellist Rufus Cappadocia, percussionist Bonga, and beatbox vocalist Kenny Mohammed, shuffle-slam-skimming the floor. Though he performed with a small cross-section of his usual crew, Tamango managed to articulate a larger world outside the rarified air of the Portland Performing Arts center: a world in which hip hop, kung fu, and stilt dancing impact and revitalize each other, in which any art form is a malleable, changeable, eternally morphing aspect of culture. (Note: As the Phoenix was going to print, word came in that beatbox freestylist Kenny Mohammed will not be performing with Tamango at the Bates Dance Festival or on upcoming tours. They were tight-lipped.)

“Try to say what I say with my feet,” he exhorted the sold-out house. “It’s very important that my feet hear your voice.”

Tamango’s version of tap is a physical dialogue between his own body, the various instruments his collaborators play, and the audience. The beat of his tapping is essential to the mix, but he responds less as a vehicle for rhythm than as a catalyst. With his arms outflung, torso swiveling fluidly over his hips, Tamango is not about footwork, though he is deft and graceful. He is about connecting with the crowd, and the give and take of the musical jam.

“The people I work with feed off what I project,” he says. “I’m the connection between them.”

This live dynamic between he and his fellow performers is infused with the in-the-moment exhilaration of jazz improvisation, with all its accompanying risks: if the players are not completely attuned to each other, the flow is broken, the audience disconnects.

ýhe highpoint of the June show was a tap/beatbox face-off between Tamango and Mohammed, who started by trading riffs and then quickly escalated into a tongue-in-cheek sound clash. Mohammed is amazing — he made beats and sounds that seemed impossible, and with precision. Rufus Cappadocia and Bonga are astonishingly adept players as well, effortlessly following the changes set in motion by each transitional moment in the performance.

Many of these transitions were initiated by Tamango’s taking the mic, telling a snippet of a story or simply speaking to the crowd. His tendency toward vague spiritual statements, like “This is about the rhythm of the light,” — a habit which in conversation lent a certain sort of gravity to his pursuits — proved distracting on stage.

“If you accept a performer for his dancing, you have to accept him for his talking,” he said in his interview. But unfortunately, his spoken presentation lacked the extemporaneous beauty of his tap dancing. As a dancer, his meandering style had a charm and conversational tone that made his point about unity and soul far more eloquently than his words did.

Though he’s been hailed as a member of the new generation of tap dancers, Tamango doesn’t much identify with the tap scene in New York, or with the acknowledged masters of the form: Gregory Hines, Jimmy Slyde. In some ways he’s received more support from the modern dance community — where improvisation is de rigueur — than from his fellow tappers. He’s been awarded a Bessie, several grants, even been offered a position teaching improvisation at the New School in NYC, but what he’s really after is the creation of a new form, a hybrid combination of dance and music that represents his vision of how cultures influence and transform each other. He is a producer, and his skill is in selecting artists who will contribute yet another unique flavor to the Urban Tap ensemble.

These artists and influences come from everywhere: Africa, India, Brazil, the streets of Manhattan, Montreal. Again, Tamango’s experiences of the past shape his current project — for four years, he ran a jam with tap and live instruments at Deanna’s in the East Village, which became, in his words “a temple.”

Caravane, which ran for three weeks at New York’s New Victory Theater this past February, thematically combines facets of Tamango’s personal history as a busker, a producer, a child of many cultures. The show’s improvisational format is structured only by the idea that nomadic cultures pick up and incorporate parts of the local cultures they come into contact with.

“It’s not me,” he stresses, referring to the collaborative process of creating the show each night. “It’s almost a reaction to our system of thought, how we create things. It’s a collective, it’s multi-media. I think that’s why people actually feel when they see my work. People want to see more of it, but they don’t know how to do it.”

ýhe difficulty inherent in teaching people to improvise in a classroom/studio situation is not one Tamango wishes to untangle. Speaking about his upcoming residency at the Bates Dance Festival, he de-emphasized his role as a teacher, saying: “It’s an opportunity [for the students] to see a performer, not a teacher. It’s a chance to see someone making work.

“Improvisation is not something that you talk about — it’s physical and it’s metaphysical, it’s always about another thing, another person, something that does not belong to you.”

At the show back in June, his approach to tap as a percussive instrument was the unifying factor in the performance. Tamango displayed a willingness to let his own body become a part of a collective experience that was both moving and profound. When one of his taps fell off mid-step, he laughed, held it up and said, “Technology — how embarrassing! Well, you do what you can with what you’ve got.” And then he kept on dancing.

Tanya Whiton can be reached at twhiton@ime.net.