There are very few dance events that you can enjoy with your eyes shut, but Bare Soundz is in a genre of its own. As the title suggests, this show is all about the sound, and it is often only by closing your eyes that you fully appreciate the staggering virtuosity deployed by choreographer-dancer Savion Glover and his two fellow tappers. There is no music in the performance - no live band, no recorded tracks. But the melodic and rhythmic variety achieved by the men's percussive footwork is astonishing.
Performed on three amplified platforms, their dancing can sound as brash and clamorous as a steel band, or as elegantly distinct as the sound of a trotting horse. Its rhythms can clatter like rolling marbles, or fall like gentle rain. All this you can get by listening, but what you need to open your eyes for is the lovely physical rapport between the three men.
Glover, with his flying dreadlocks, rapt face and magic footwork, is the obvious star. But lanky Marshall Davis Junior and stocky Maurice Chestnut play off him in bravura style, counterpointing his dancing with their own cross-patterns, or tapping in unison with him.
Their style is neither Gene Kelly nor Fred Astaire; much of the time they are focused inscrutably on their feet, bodies crouched, arms swinging for emphasis and balance. When Glover is tapping out his most intricate beats, he looks as though he's barely doing more than wiping his feet. But there is some clever acrobatic stuff, too - gleeful high kicks in the middle of a show-off riff, crazy skidding manoeuvres where the dancers nearly slide off their platforms.
Bare Soundz may be the most minimalist of concepts, but in performance it is completely exhilarating.
