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Most people tap with their feet. Roxane Butterfly began her July 31 performance at Joe\u2019s Pub with a little soft shoe of the hand. It paved the way for the unconventional fare to come: Her confessional, spoken word musings; her call and response, improvised, rhythmic exchanges with the pianist Frederique Trunk and the upright electric bassist\u00a0Hill Greene; her impromptu finale in which three tap friends hoofed it with the bell bottom wearing lady. Overall, the proceedings had the air of a beatnik revival.<\/p>\n
Through Butterfly\u2019s performance format was anything but tight and her costume was anything but chic, this dancer is no flake with her taps. Her mentor Jimmy Slyde, the bebop tap master, gave her his seal of approval, when she moved to New York from France to immerse herself in America\u2019s dance patois. After achieving some well-deserved and hard-worn name recognition in the city\u2019s fiercely competitive dance scene, Butterfly told us that she began to feel the weight of life on and off stage: \u201cI don\u2019t know how I managed,\u201d she said, \u201cto remain in New York for 20 years and remain somewhat romantic.\u201d New York\u2019s tap scene, with its emphasis on virtuoso speed, can be crushing. So Butterfly moved on. Today she calls Barcelona her home, with the understanding that she still spends a good portion of the year on the road.<\/p>\n
For her New York homecoming, Butterfly\u2019s one nightstand at Joe\u2019s Pub started as a reflective affair. Not only did she explain to the audience why she left Manhattan, she gave us a taste of her rocky love life. Channeling the voice of what appeared to be her lover, she said, \u201cI hate falling in love with you white bitch. I hate mixing my blood with yours.\u201d Wow. Talk about a theatrical bombshell. I instantly felt like a voyeur. But just as quickly as Butterfly flitted into this heavy emotional territory, she slid out, launching into a solo that was the best of the evening: growing in rhythmic complexity, wholly improvised, and one that was prepossessing without being a grand stander. <\/span><\/p>\n Butterfly isn\u2019t one of those performers who agonizes about every little choice she makes. Some times I wish she would. Her poetry\u2014\u201cwhen morning creeps into night, aching with shame you hear the blame\u201d\u2014leaves a lot to be desired. But her generosity of spirit is infectious. When she invited three of her former tap performer colleagues on stage, she didn\u2019t get annoyed when one of them, the virtuoso tapper Tamango, began hogging the tiny space with his hard-hitting sounds. She also didn\u2019t seem to mind that the evening was going in a completely different direction\u2014away from a feminist act interspersed by nuanced interchanges with her musicians\u2014and toward a reunion of \u201cLa Cave,\u201d the underground tap dance scene from the 1990s.<\/p>\n Butterfly\u2019s hodgepodge format worked fine at Joe\u2019s Pub. The place has history, and so does Butterfly. At the end of the evening, she announced that the baby crying at the show\u2019s beginning was hers. In the future I expect to see baby Butterfly on stage with momma. My only hope is that the two will focus more on tapping than on letting their lips fly.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n