Chicago StageStandard Dance Review by Angela Allyn, July 30, 2014 4 stars out of 4
If you were going to create a museum exhibit about an art that exists using live bodies, right now, over time, you would curate a collection of prime examples of that art form, drawn from a number of nations and generations. If you were going to create an exhibit about the body as a musical instrument at this point in human history, you would end up with the Chicago Human Rhythm Project at the Museum of Contemporary Art, an evening which is in part a gathering of everyone passionately committed the art form loosely known as tap dance, and in part a showcase of the premiere creators of the joyful noise of feet against the floor. …
Just when you think you are sated, we come back for the second half which begins with sand being sprinkled onto a square on stage. Backlit, it is impossible to say HOW the sand begins to form a sculpture, moving in space. And then the dancer appears doing what is an old British dance hall specialty: the Sand Dance. A soft shoe number created in sand, miked for affect like a snare drum played with brushes. Guillem Alonso of Spain, the maestro of the Sand Dance.
Daniel Borak returns with Ursina Meyer for a lovely duet set to Bach’s Suite No. 2 in B Minor—when was the last time you saw tap dancing to classical music?
There was no way of knowing when the kindly Victor Cuno took to the stage that we were in the presence of living history. And who would notice when his hysterically funny There is Something Fishy About the French would be so appealing? This Paris based artist is absolutely the foremost teacher of classic technique having personally studied with Henry LeTang, Honi Coles and Buster Brown. As he plays the piano as he taps !!?#?!!! He is himself a museum of an entire art form, a wonder of the world.
JUBA! DEFIES DEFINITION Aug 1, 2014 | By Lynn Colburn Shapiro
You can’t beat JUBA! MASTERS OF TAP AND PERCUSSIVE DANCE for sheer scope and variety of performance styles, techniques, aesthetics, and, well, people on stage in Wednesday’s opening night, sponsored by The Chicago Human Rhythm Project (CHRP) and The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). That very diversity beats any effort to nail it down with a definition, and maybe that’s just the point. Rhythm is the express currency of tap dance, unique among dance forms for its use of the body to invent and produce the infinite and ingenious variety of patterns and riffs on the human heartbeat at the center of it all, fueling the human engine. … Humor punctuated the evening with Guillem Alonso’s “Sand Dance” a visual and auditory treasure, and French Tapper Victor Cuno’s rendition of Noel Coward’s “Always Something Fishy About the French.”
