There are certain performers whom, had you only known, you would have caught in the first moments of their careers. Maybe you would have been among the jive-talkin' hep cats at the club when Miles Davis first explored bebop. Or stood in line at the Paramount to discover Frank Sinatra discovering George and Ira Gershwin. Maybe you wouldn't have missed the chance to catch Rudolf Nureyev before he left the Kirov Ballet. If only you'd known.
Starting tonight at the Lyric Opera House, the man Gregory Hines calls "the greatest tap dancer ever to lace up a pair of Capezios" is in town.
To describe 29-year-old tap dancer Savion Glover as the best at what he does is to place him in a category he has already exceeded. Glover has redefined tap.
Gregory Hines, one of the tap masters who began "fathering" Glover when he was just 12, says that Glover is "All the way out ... in a zone ... a no man's land where risk is fun and the air is fine and rare and few breathe it. Tap dancing must move forward from what Savion has established. It can't go back."
Audience response to even a taste of what he does is instructive: Watching Glover "hit" - a word he has taken and made his own - on Cingular commercials delays countless trips to the fridge. He choreographs Nike's Freestyle basketball spots, all hip-hop rhythms and basketball wizardry, and kids talk their parents into buying a $125 pair of tennis shoes because the Freestyle tape comes with them.
Tonight through Sunday, Baltimore audiences can catch Glover's latest stop on the revival tour of his 1996 Tony Award-winning show, Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk. He starred in the show for the nearly four-year run on Broadway and won the Tony for choreography in 1996 at 23.
Glover revived the show, he said, because of his commitment to what he calls "edutainment." Not everyone can go to New York for a show, he said, and "I want to bring the tradition of dance to our generation. I want them to see that the whole cast looks like them; we're dressed like them. You don't have to be in a tuxedo to do it. I want them to know who the pioneers are."
When Glover hits the stage, you don't know in the moment that you may be a witness to dance history. You feel in the thunderous opening sequence that you may be taken on an odyssey: beats you never heard before, rhythms that move you in ways you've never felt before. What you hear when he dances is musical and sensory; it touches what is primal. His feet tap out fast, furious, syncopated rhythms with such speed that, as Davis once said about bebop: "The beat might fall anywhere."
At the recent opening night performance at Washington's Warner Theatre, the excitement was palpable. Still, for his part, Glover seems to play for his audience, not to it.
"When I'm hittin' - hittin' is bringing the best you got - when I'm hittin', I'm not thinking about what the audience thinks they want to see," Glover has said. "I'm thinking about ... can I get to the next sound from where I am? Is there a turn there? ... Am I fighting gravity?"
Glover's sense of tradition is evident in his work. His roots come from the masters of tap: Jimmy Slyde, Buster Brown, Chuck Green, the late Honi Coles. Noise/Funk's original producer, George C. Wolfe, has described Glover as a "living repository of rhythm."
Glover attributes the genesis of the dancer he has become to his relationship with these guys, most of whom he first met when he traveled to Paris at 12 to star in Black and Blue.
In his autobiography, Savion, My Life in Tap, Glover says these men taught him the rules, "to hold the dance in high regard, to revere its history, its community, its etiquette, its respect-your-elders tradition."
He's passing it on. His now 12-year-old protege, Cartier Williams, whom he calls "Coop," absorbs steps from Glover's repertoire and "spits" them back, in dancer's parlance. In Noise/Funk, he plays a character called "The Kid." Keep your eye on The Kid.
The only female dancer in the show is his understudy, Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, a woman he describes as "the best female dancer of our generation" and who "came up with me," he says. Other dancers include an 18-year-old high school senior from Flint, Mich., and 18-year-old Maurice Chestnut.
And, throughout, there is Glover. Even if you don't know street vernacular (and wish the kids didn't either), you may find yourself hootin' and hollerin' by the end.
To borrow a line from the show: "If your shim don't shammy like it used to," go see it. You may be getting just a glimpse of what's to cme.
As Gregory Hines puts it: "I feel that tap dancers don't really reach their prime dancing years until around their mid-40s. Imagine Savion ... in his prime."
Performance
What: Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk
Where: Lyric Opera House, 140 Mount Royal Ave.
When: 8 p.m. today and tomorrow; 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday; 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sunday
Tickets: $16.50-$51.50
Call: 410-481-SEAT