CriticalDance Forum

Expect the unexpected at the Urban Tap performance Thursday.

Actually, artistic director Tamango would prefer that you have no expectations at all.

"I don't really like expectation, as a philosophy of life," he said in a telephone interview, "because everything is subject to change, especially my type of work. Because when you work with improvisation, I just want to grow all the time. So I just expect people to just watch and not expect anything that they know. For me, art is definitely about just being open to see and to receive."

'CYCLE' ON TAP AT PERELMAN

Tom Di Nardo

Tap is to dance what jazz is to music, an art form necessarily improvised on the spot. <a href=http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/living/5272817.htm target=_blank>more</a>

Smooth Urban Tap at Kimmel Center

By Merilyn Jackson
For The Philadelphia Inquirer

When the world dance and music company Urban Tap performed Full Cycle this weekend at the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater, it looked neither urban nor tap - at least not American inner-city tap. <a href=http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/5308970.htm target=_blank>more</a>

Tamango's first solo begins with familiar enough time-steps, side-slides, heal-scuffs and arrests, but soon taps a different terrain, instructing the audience not to be dazzled by those familiar dazzling phrases.

"I'm still working" he says, "This is a musical journey," holding up his hand to prevent applause at what he knows is the easy stuff. He immediate creates an intimate atmosphere of reflection that unfolds into a freewheeling, and sometimes jarring, improvisational rhythm and dance jam session.

Tamango Comes 'Full Cycle' With Tap, Hip-Hop, Jazz

By Judy Magid
The Salt Lake Tribune

Choreographer/tap dancer Tamango and Tamango Urban Tap group bring a new performance, "Full Cycle," to Kingsbury Hall this weekend in a dazzling fusion of tap, hip-hop, Brazilian capoeira (martial arts/acrobatics) and jazz. <a href=http://www.sltrib.com/2003/apr/04082003/tuesday/45941.asp target=_blank>more</a>

Cultural Grafting
by DEBORAH JOWITT for the Village Voice
published: April 4, 2007

... he [Tamango] has tried to bring his Creole heritage and its African roots into tapping. Mostly, as in his most recent show, Bay Mo Dilo (Give Me Water), that means incorporating musicians not usually associated with tap, like Eric Danquin and Daniel Doulos from Guadaloupe and “Bonga” Gaston Jean-Baptiste from Haiti. The remarkable Vado Diomande offers the acrobatic stilt dancing associated with West African ritual (have you ever imagined you’d see a masked figure nine feet high do a somersault as a preparation for standing erect?).