If you want to go to a truly extraordinary dance show, one that you can tell your grandchildren you saw, get over to Savion Glover’s “Om,” which is playing through Saturday night at the Joyce. As has been said for years, Glover is the greatest tap virtuoso of our time, perhaps of all time. Even as a skinny little boy (he made his Broadway debut at ten), he left you agape. And, perhaps for that reason—that he never had to woo us—Glover had a problem with charm: namely, that he didn’t show much. Maybe he was just shy, or maybe, as seemed to be the case in his biggest show, “Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk,” he was a pissed-off young man. Maybe, too, he hated the application of so much fuss—the posters, the superlatives—to something that must have seemed to him (more than to a dancer who went professional at a later age) something like the very center of his being. In any case, he not only didn’t smile; often he wouldn’t look at the audience. He did the show while watching his shoes or the band. And the fact that the people he wasn’t looking at were mostly white made the whole situation more edgy. We went there to love him, and he wouldn’t love us back, or even like us.
But Glover is older now—forty—and, when I saw his show “STePz” last year at the Joyce, it seemed to me that maybe all that sorrow was over. He showed us his face; he had a sweet sort of bounce in his step; he seemed glad to be up there with the other dancers. I said to the friend sitting in front of me, “I’ve never seen him so happy,” and my friend, who knows Glover’s work a lot better than I do, said, “I don’t think he’s ever been so happy.”
Then, a week ago, “Om” opened at the Joyce. Was he nice again? Did he smile? No, but neither did he frown. It seemed he was past all that. This was a thrillingly introverted performance, consisting, basically, of an hour-and-a-half-long solo for Glover. You wondered how he managed it, physically, and he did, in fact, get a little help. For a brief stretch at the beginning of the show and then again at the end, his colleague Marshall Davis, Jr., came out and tapped unassertively, supportively, at his side. Davis also appeared for what I would guess was about ten minutes in the middle of the show, and took over the footwork while Glover turned toward the wings and just sort of bobbed in place. But, for the rest of the time, what we got was just Glover, in a pair of white shoes. All the old great qualities were there. (Really, there are just two: his astonishing rhythmic invention and his astonishing skill.) But the length of the solo made a huge difference.
As in other performances, often Asian or African, that go on for a long time, the duration of the experience ends up either defeating you—some people walked out—or transporting you, either cutting the rope or stretching it super-fine, till it sings. Certain rhythmic patterns that Glover came up with made me think of something visual—a locomotive, a whirlpool—and, of course, they were always audial. But eventually I seemed to enter a kind of pan-sensory spell. Instead of getting sights or sounds or even emotions, I felt I was hanging in the air above them all. This is what Kandinsky and the other mystical-minded artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were looking for, and it’s apparently what Glover is looking for, too.
The stage of the Joyce, already small, was cluttered with big photos of Glover’s heroes (Gandhi, Gregory Hines, Bunny Briggs, et al.), platforms on which his dance students struck Zen poses, and more votive candles than you’ve ever seen in your life. I believe that the show would have been improved by the removal of all this stuff. Still, I was touched by how personal it all was—how unslick. And if the baggage cut back, a little, on the intensity of “Om,” a show this intense has a wide margin. In the press release, Glover stated his intention: “Because of my relationship to the dance and how it relates to spirituality, I’m hoping through this production of ‘Om,’ the audience will understand more the importance of the divine—ONE.” I think I did.
Photograph by Richard Termine.