tap-on, tap-off
Monk's Mood
Thomas F. DeFrantz and SLIPPAGE
Joyce SoHo
December 11-13, 2009
Foremost African-American dance history scholar and tap dancer Thomas DeFrantz presents Monk’s Mood as a wordless, danced, biography. At Joyce SoHo December 11 we explored the mind of jazz great Thelonious Monk. Eto Oro created the visuals and manned the laptop. With newish Miditron and Isadora technology, by stepping on ten triggers placed around the platform, DeFrantz selects from one hundred random images and songs. His tap dance is a spontaneous improvisation or live choreography.
The technology purportedly allows anyone to jump in to the game…
The late jazz musician appears in clips projected on the cyclorama, tapping his foot at the piano. DeFrantz expands on that with his dance. He portrays Monk’s restlessness, his smoothness, and the joy in his music— to a rhythmic soundscape of Monk compositions. Billie Holliday was his muse. She’s represented in the score, and in a physical, framed portrait. DeFrantz succeeds in bringing added dimension to his biography, with his combination of elements.
DeFrantz’s inserts personalized arabesques, lovely, centered, turns, and balletic manèges into his tap, which is slightly clunky, like Monk’s jazz piano. His multiple turns and backward stomps, feet moving all the time, offer dance pleasure. In black and white wing tips, in the later scenes, DeFrantz sweats and flags. Monk is tired.
In one passage, DeFrantz reaches his foot across the performing area in a lunge. Under the pretext of reaching for a spilt vase of roses, did he simply want to change the music? Does his intention really matter?
Fifty minutes of tap is strenuous. DeFrantz had to change shoes mid-performance. During that time, the images stopped moving and the stage was quiet. Yes, well, the dancer has to be on stage to activate the stagecraft. It is the ultimate solo. According to DeFrantz, the whole “platform” (technology and all) is transportable and any dancer would do.
When he struts backward, centerstage, or tips back on his toes, his head back, his arms and face open, he resembles the young Monk seen in the vintage clips behind him. He looks at ease and balances in buoyant backward dips, like the ones Michael Jackson made famous.
However, the MIT professor is not just strutting his stuff. SLIPPAGE, DeFrantz’s group of MIT creators, is demonstrating in-use technology for dance. MIT pioneered open source policy.
Monk’s Mood mashes up high and low tech. What could be humbler than the Joyce SoHo stage with its taped together temporary platform, well-handled vintage black and white images, scratchy recordings of modern Jazz, and tapping?
The technology purportedly allows anyone to jump in to the game. Making the art and craft of dance available to all is so 21st Century. The boundaries between gaming and art, formula and spontaneity, continue to blur.