A Dorrance Dance Production
The Center Will Not Hold is born from “a little room”, a short duet created and performed by Ephrat Asherie and Michelle Dorrance in December 2022. The expanded and reimagined work now includes a collective of singular performers deeply rooted in one or many of the following street, club, and vernacular dances: house, breaking, hip hop, tap dance, Chicago footwork etc.
The work features original music composed by Donovan Dorrance with live percussion by world class drummer/percussionist, John Angeles. The Center Will Not Hold marks the first Dorrance Dance Production and launches the company into a new stage of supporting the development and touring of new works that continue to deepen the relationship between tap dance and the forms that have a direct relationship to its lineage.
Review by Stephen Gilchrist
In ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, John Keats concludes that the urn will say, to future generations of mankind: “‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.’ – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”. What is ‘Beauty’? What is Truth’? Are they objective or subjective? Is there more than one truth depending on your perspective?
In dance, can there be ‘Beauty’ without what my companion called ‘heart’ or emotion? If I had the opportunity I should like to have asked Michelle Dorrance, the creator of a breathless and extraordinary evening, at a post-show Q&A.
Michelle Dorrance is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of her award-winning tap dance company Dorrance Dance, and has been called known as “one of the most imaginative tap choreographers working today” (The New Yorker), but if you think this was a ‘Tap Dog’ evening or a night of nostalgia harking back to the golden days of Broadway, you would be wrong, but I would hope, not disappointed. She has developed a show (in which she also performs) in which there is a not inconsiderable amount of tap, with a mashup of other contemporary and social dance types. The style is uncategorisable. We saw, hip hop, street dance, house, breaking and other modes of current dance fads. And it is wrapped up in a presentation, which if it doesn’t tell a tale, presents a production of technical excellence in every respect. There is ensemble synchronicity worthy of Fosse, duets, patterns, shapes, shadows, all moving at a furious pace for 60 minutes, dressed in black and against black, under superb lighting designs and effects by Kathy Kaufmann.
The choreography is by the performers, numbering ten, who can all dance everything, apparently, and often acrobatically so, but each of whom has a speciality style. The show is danced to a music score which is percussive based and percussive led (original music, Donovan Dorrance with additional snare composition by John Angeles). John Angeles provides live drumming of a quality of which the great Buddy Rich would be proud.
It is a startling evening but is it truthful or beautiful? The dancers are clearly truthful to their themselves especially so in their own specialities (and the tap is superb). There are no ‘tunes’, costuming is black and there are no lyrical romantic dances. In fact, the title adopted by the creators properly reflects the nature of the show, ‘The Center Will Not Hold’, (and no, my spelling reflects the American origin of the work!) a visceral phrase seemingly emanating a sort of power, some kind of undefined tension which is difficult to analysis with any specificity.
Upon research I discovered the phrase derives from a poem by W.B Yeats called ‘The Second Coming’
‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…..’
Written after World War I, the influenza pandemic, and during the Irish War of Independence, the poem reflects a world falling apart, where the traditional “centre” could no longer maintain order.
And this is the key to the piece. Dancers perform uniformly, they divide, they display chaos. The tap is sometimes angry, enraged, and intense.
In answer to the question I posed, I found there was great beauty in the evening and great truth in the discipline of dance. Beauty, I have discovered, is entirely subjective. And why shouldn’t I find a beauty in The Center Will Not Hold as well as the classic ballets of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov?
Maybe the evening lacked ‘heart’ but it was explosive, muscular, and undoubtedly influential on current and future choreographers and truthful to the power and discipline of dance.
Photo credit: Christopher Duggan
Creative Team
- Michelle Dorrance — Co-creator / choreographer
- Ephrat Asherie — Co-creator / choreographer
- Multiple additional choreographers (approx. 13 total contributors)
- Donovan Dorrance — Original music
- John Angeles — Live percussion / musical performance
- Kathy Kaufmann — Lighting design