{
download_links:[
{
label:'MODS Bibliographic Record',
link: 'mods.xml',
meta: 'XML'
},
{
label:'METS Object Description',
link: 'mets.xml',
meta: 'XML'
}
]
}
Tapage [biography]
Tapage, a tap performance company formed by the French-born Olivia Rosenkrantz and Japanese-born Mari Fujibayashi, was created to bring a unique voice and choreographic approach to tap, incorporating dramatic intensity and rhythmic complexity with contemporary gesture.
Rosenkrantz, upon moving to New York in 1988, studied modern dance with Murray Louis and Alwin Nikolais, tap dance with Brenda Bufalino (whose American Tap Dance Orchestra she joined in 1991), and had five years of experience with Ka-Tap, a North Indian music and dance ensemble that blended jazz with tap, and in which she performed with the Indian tabla master Samir Chatterjee, who nourished her choreographic interest in crossing rhythm tap with the music and dance styles of other cultures.
In New York, Rosenkrantz met Fujibahashi, who moved to New York in 1989 as the first tap-dance artist to be awarded a grant from the Japanese government for artistic studies abroad. Like Rosenkrantz, she danced with the American Tap Dance Orchestra and with Manhattan Tap.
Tapage's aesthetic was stunningly demonstrated In Morango…Almost a Tango, which was performed at the New York City Tap Festival's All-Stars/Tap Internationals program in 2005. Rosenkrantz and Fujibayashi made their entrance dancing one behind the other, as if they were inseparable twins, and circumscribed a large square brightly lit on the dark stage. They tapped while making meticulous pivots of the head, sweeping the arms, and leaning their torsos on the diagonal. Projected behind them were black-and-white home-movies of each dancer as a baby. The films presented a narrative of girls learning to walk, clap hands, and skip across the grass into the loving arms of their mothers. Before these enormous images they tapped out strict phrases of rhythm, turning their work into a drama. Explosive, sensual, and emotive, Tapage set rhythm tap within a multicultural mélange of Asian, European, and American postmodern sensibilities.
Tapage had continued in this multicultural theme with Collages I-III (2001), a series of performances crossing percussive dance with jazz, classical music and traditional Japanese culture; Revueltas (2001), an homage to the Mexican composer Sylvestre Revueltas; Collages II (2004) with the singer, guitarist, percussionist Claudia Gomez; Anxiety (2004), with the string quartet Stanislas; and Dansaq (2005), a collaboration with the Mexican musical ensemble Cuarteto Latinoamerico. The international press has called the work of Tapage mysterious, poetic, captivating, daring, sensual and moving.
[Source: Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]