Dorrance is the recipient of this year's $25,000 Jacob's Pillow Dance Award, which will be presented at the Pillow's 81st-Season Opening Gala on June 15.
Michelle Dorrance isn’t just one of the world’s best tap dancers.
She’s a musician.
And not just because she learned how to play the bass while on tour with STOMP.
She plays an instrument every time she takes the stage as a dancer.
According to Dorrance, all tap dancers are musicians. And their instrument is their feet.
"Every time we pick up our foot, we're responsible for music," Dorrance said during a recent interivew. "The possibilities are endless. And that's why this form (of dance) is so exciting. What inspires us is there's such a connection with tap and music."
“Everything we do is music,” Dorrance added. “Everything we do is movement. We are simultaneously musicians and dancers.”
And when Dorrance says everything we do is movement, she means it. She conducted the interview as she walked down the street in New York City on her way to visit fellow tap dancer Harold Cromer.
Dorrance is the recipient of this year's $25,000 Jacob's Pillow Dance Award, which will be presented at the Pillow's 81st-Season Opening Gala on June 15. Dorrance will also perform at the gala with special guest Aaron Marcellus. Other performers that night include New York City Ballet star Wendy Whelan, Dance Theatre of Harlem and the dancers of the Ballet Program of The School at Jacob's Pillow in a world premiere created by Helen Pickett.
The Pillow's regular schedule starts June 19 and runs through Aug. 25. Other groups performing this summer at the Pillow include Dance Theater of Harlem (June 19 - 23), Companhia Urbana de Danca (July 10-14), 3E Etage: Soloists of the Paris Opera Ballet (July 31-Aug.4), Wendy Whelan (Aug. 14-18) and the Martha Graham Dance Company (Aug. 21-25).
Dorrance will join some elite company when she receives the annual dance award. First presented in 2007, other recipients include some of most innovative choreographers: Bill T. Jones, Merce Cunningham, Alonzo King, Crystal Pite, Annie B-Parson and Paul Lazar, co-directors of Big Dance Theater.
"I am truly honored to receive the Jacob's Pillow Dance Award and humbled to be in the company of such legendary recipients," Dorrance said earlier this year. "This award allows me the freedom to inspire new directions in my work."
Those new directions will be on display when Dorrance Dance performs July 24-28 at Jacob's Pillow. (All shows are nearly sold out so act fast if you want to see them.)
Normally, the idea of creating a tap dance without the music first was completely foreign to Dorrance. "Until about a year ago, music drives so much of what we do," she said recently.
Not anymore. Instead, Dorrance has experimented with creating new dances without the music first - or without any music at all sometimes. The change in approach has been liberating for Dorrance. "I could do anything I wanted," she said. "The world was at my fingertips."
For the performances in July, Dorrance collaborated with musician, performer, and composer Toshi Reagon, who will perform with a live band during the Dorrance Dance performances. According to Dorrance, Reagon asked Dorrance to create the movements first. Reagon then created the music.
The process continues to be a challenge, Dorrance said. "I'm narrowing everything I want to do down," she said.
Sometimes, Dorrance has been starting with "a time signature or a certain phrase," she said. Other times, Dorrance created something new for the July piece based "on some movement line."
Dorrance spent three weeks working on the movements for the new piece. She added she planned to spend another three weeks in the studio with her dancers working with the musicians. During the second stage, Dorrance said she expected to make a lot of revisions once she hears the music. "I have to be willing to let it go," she said.
"I'm definitely not against editing but I often do it quickly," Dorrance said, adding, "I'm really excited about it."
Dorrance has been excited about dancing since she was four years old growing up in North Carolina. "I started everything when I was that young," she said. "I took every form of dance."
Dorrance's mother M'Liss Gary Dorrance was a classically-trained ballerina who performed with the National Ballet and Eliot Feld. But Dorrance didn't follow in her mother's pointe shoes. By age eight, Dorrance's passion for tap dancing took center stage. She also excelled in tap dancing classes taught by Gene Medler, the founder and director of the North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble, a nationally renowned tap dancing school that toured the country.
Medler began taking the ensemble on the road soon after he started attending tap dance festivals around the country in the 1980s, when Dorrance said tap dancing was branching off in different directions. After Medler attended one tap festival in Colorado, Dorrance said "he came back and said, 'We're going to change everything'."
Traveling to those festivals exposed Dorrance to new innovations in tap dancing as well as some of the elder statesmen and women of tap dancing dancers like Diane Walker and Robert Reed.
"It was amazing," Dorrance said of her early training and traveling to festivals. "It was a blast."
Soon after, she moved to New York City in 1997 at the age of 17. Nowadays, many people feel the same way when they watch Dorrance dance. That might explain why The New Yorker hailed her as “one of the most imaginative tap choreographers working today.”
And most of all, Dorrance can dance.
Watching her perform, you're struck by her fast-paced footwork and fancy free attitude. No wonder The New York Times hailed Dorrance for her "wonderful comic timing and compellingly synchopated physicality."
That might also explain why she's worked with some of the best tap dancers in the world. Dorrance was a founding member of Savion Glover's dance group TiDii. She's also performed with Jimmy Slyde ("The first time I saw him, I lost my mind," Dorrance said.), Peg Leg Bates, Brenda Bufalino and Sam Webber.
Talking about such well-known tap dancers, Dorrance's voice often became more animated, as if she was talking about her close friends. That's because in her case, they are truly friends.
"These people became like a family and it (the world of tap dancing) is such a small community, it does feel like one,." she said.
IF YOU GO
ÂÂEvent: Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival
When: June 15 - Aug. 25
Where: 358 George Carter Road, Becket
Cost: Free to $75
For more info: Call (413) 243-0745 or visit www.jacobspillow.org