In a preview for Jumanne Taylor’s Supreme Love in the Chicago Tribune, Lauren Warnecke details the waves that Supreme Love made in the dance world in 2016 and its revival now:
Hoofer Jumaane Taylor’s masterwork Supreme Love is back for a two-show revival this week. Last performed in Chicago in 2016, Supreme Love was Taylor’s first major, full-length project. And it remains a talking point in the dance world — a launchpad that cracked open Taylor’s choreographic oeuvre and raised the bar for tap dance.
Supreme Love runs April 20-21 at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago. It concludes a petit season of just three engagements for the Dance Center. Staycee Pearl and FLOCK appeared in February and March, respectively…
…Supreme Love, a work that interrogates jazz music — specifically that of the bebop era — [investigates] John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.”
The dawn of bebop presented tap dancers with an existential fork in the road. Its rhythmic complexity, wholesale commitment to improvisation, fast tempos and experimental harmonic structures were difficult for dancers to interpret. Mainstream “Broadway tap” stuck to easy-on-the-ears dance hall tunes, while jazz musicians liberated themselves from the need to provide slower, more predictable chord progressions and tempos.
Taylor is certainly not the only person committed to rejoining tap with its roots in jazz music, but he does it better than just about anyone else.
