Michelle Dorrance and her company Dorrance Dance on stage in Vail, 2016. Photo by Erin Baiano.
Michelle Dorrance
The 2017 Artist-In-Residence brings curiosity, energy and musicality to the stage
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By Sarah Silverblatt-Buser
atch her if you can: Michelle Dorrance is a tap dancer for the 21st century. From performances in San Francisco, Hong Kong, London, and a premiere event at the Guggenheim Rotunda in New York City, the Vail Dance Festival is fortunate to welcome her as our 2017 Artist-In-Residence. For two weeks, the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant recipient infuses the Festival with her quick wit and nimble physicality. Equal parts choreographer, mover, and music maker, Dorrance first made her mark as one of the only women cast members in the famed musical STOMP. And while the days using brooms and lighters to create complex rhythms may be largely behind her, Dorrance continues to pursue new music-making methods. For ETM: Double Down, which will be presented on August 10 at Beaver Creek’s Vilar Performing Arts Center, Dorrance collaborated with longtime friend and company member Nicholas Van Young to incorporate his electronic tap boards, brilliantly building an instrument out of the dance floor to make music with a live band. “The crux of my inspiration is music,” says Dorrance, “the music of our dancing, of tap dance, period.” A deep respect for music has always characterized the Vail Dance Festival, so it is fitting that Artistic Director Damian Woetzel chose to
highlight Dorrance as a groundbreaking choreographer vitalized by sound. Curiosity is another feature shared by the Festival and Dorrance, who describes herself as being driven towards “experimentation, exploration, and collaboration with other artists.” Recalling a project she did with the Martha Graham Dance Company, Dorrance recognized the opportunity as “a blessing to be able to work with those bodies and those sensibilities … creating percussive work for non-percussive dancers.” Beyond genre-bending, Dorrance finds fascination in the wide range of gender roles and ambiguity available to tap dancers. “There is this great and strange partnership between men and women, women and women, men and men, that allows dancers to both dance in a social coupling form and then also side by side,” says Dorrance, “and it’s also really nice to live in a world of androgyny.” With an improviser’s ability to make something out of anything, Dorrance’s creations for the stage embody a boundless notion of play. It is her reciprocal approach when working with collaborators, distilling mutual exchanges of inspiration into constant creative fuel, that reveals Dorrance’s bottomless well of potential. In this way, Dorrance and her eclectic company bring audiences to a new realm of imagining what is possible.
The crux of my inspiration is music”
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Michelle Dorrance