The Uptown Rhythm Festival will mix styles, including tap, swing and flamenco, that are flourishing despite problems of rehearsal and performance space.
The Uptown Rhythm Festival will mix styles, including tap, swing and flamenco, that are flourishing despite problems of rehearsal and performance space.
Fans of the sometimes disrespected genre known as dance music have a quip: What other kind of music is there? A similar crack could be made by artists put into a category called rhythm dance. What dance isn’t in some sense rhythmic?
The new Uptown Rhythm Dance Festival, at 92NY and Works & Process at Guggenheim New York from April 21-27, addresses the question from the opposite direction: What do top artists in tap, flamenco, hip-hop, swing, kathak and Appalachian clogging have in common? And what connections might spark if they were programmed side by side?
“We’re talking about percussive dance,” said the tap and swing dancer Caleb Teicher, a curator of the festival. “This is dance that has a deep relationship to the floor, dance that is expressive through musical phrasing and rhythm and a lot of African American diasporic ideas of call and response and improvisation.”
The need for such a festival arises in part from the needs that percussive dancers share. Most prefer live music and sprung wooden floors, which they consider instruments. Most require floor microphones, sensitive sound design and a rehearsal space where they’re allowed to imperil the floor. Most still face some measure of condescension or exclusion from the rest of the dance world.
“A lot of mixed bill programming is very happy to have three contemporary dance or ballet companies,” Teicher said, “but if there’s one percussive dance or street dance company on each program, that would be a lot, and there certainly wouldn’t be two.” Space in New York where such dancers can rehearse has been shrinking, and Tap City, the annual festival that the American Tap Dance Foundation put on for nearly 25 years, ceased last year.