By Megha Bhattacharya
For the first time ever the little Red Dot is thumping with the ‘foot-tapping’ beats of highly acclaimed Dein Perry’s Tap Dogs. This award winning Australian group, comprising of six uber brilliant dancers, are celebrating the 20th anniversary of this show that seamlessly puts together forty-seven different routines of tap dance and its variants.
The Tap Dogs start the show by guiding the audience through the annals of very basic tap dancing. Progressively, as they perform more complex routines with robotic precision and coordination, they transform the otherwise excruciatingly boring and industrial looking construction site setup into a canvas for their comical cavorts all along conversing candidly through their tapping feet. Exploiting the various props, which ranged from basketballs and musical octo-pads to welding grinders and ladders, they held the audience’s attention with hypnotic grip occasionally interacting with the them as well.
The finale ensued the same amount of creativity when they decided to create music by tapping their feet on a tray of water. The addition of this unlikely element brought out one of the essential qualities of a tap dancer – his fluidity, giving all tap-dancing novices in the audience, an offbeat essence of this genre of dance.
The dancers were ably supported by two talented female drummers of the group, who supplemented most of the routines with their congas, tom toms, bongos, timbales and assorted drumming of the scaffoldings.
After a relatively slow start, the Tap Dogs seized the show with rising fervor and ended the show at a heroic crescendo, which was fittingly applauded with a standing ovation and a chant for encore. In totality Dein Perry’s Tap Dogs, directed and designed by Nigel Triffitt, are excitingly creative and amazingly enjoyable. Catch the last show on 1st June 2014 at the Marina Bay Sands MasterCard Theatres.
