Dancing Shoes

"A Very Swing Out Holiday" brings the joy

Caleb Teicher, by Steven Pisano.

The first thing you see in “A Very Swing Out Holiday,” now playing at the Joyce, is a slightly raised curtain, behind which a bunch of feet are happily zipping around. A jazz band wails out a series of jazzified Christmas songs. The feeling is immediately festive, inviting. This is a party you’d like to be a part of. (And you can, after the intermission.) As the curtain lifts, you see a group of 13 dancers, dancing alone or in pairs, each doing their own version of the Lindy Hop, the dance associated with swing. The show, created by a “braintrust” made up of Evita Arce, LaTasha Barnes, Nathan Bugh, and Caleb Teicher—all dancers—plus Eyal Vilner (bandmaster), is, on one level, just that, a dance party, backed by an exquisite band (the Eyal Vilner Big Band), arrayed in rows onstage, and featuring the glistening, warm voice of Imani Rousselle. On this stage, music and dance have equal value. As it goes along, the show offers a sampling of all that Lindy Hop can be, in the hands of imaginative, original artists. Samantha Siegel moves like a figure made of rubber, her body twisting and curving and bending to the music.LaTasha Barnes performs an explosive duet with the drummer Evan Hyde, deconstructing rhythm with her arms, shoulder, back, derriere. Two dancers, their names chosen from a hat, do a sweet, flirtatious pas de deux. A man in a Santa Claus suit does a funny butt-dance, and Teicher dances on pointe, or slides and skates, forward and back, legs flying. The dancers pair up in different ways, indifferent to gender, and share in the partnering; in other words, everyone leads, everyone follows. The couples dances are sometimes infused with tango touches—the close embrace, the busy footwork. For me, that works less well; tango is complicated and precise, like chess, a quality somewhat at odds with the physical freedom and expansiveness of Lindy Hop. Toward the middle of the show, the energy quiets down, for a solo, both cerebral and Buster Keaton-like, by Nathan Bugh, set in silence to his humming of Auld Lang Syne. Then the temperature rises once again, building toward a finale full of lifts and tosses, jumps and splits that make you want to stand and cheer. And that’s just part one. After intermission, the audience joins in, dancing to the big band. A joyful evening.

Samantha Siegel and Breonna Jordan, by Steven Pisano.

After the show: Caleb Teicher after part I of “A Very Swing Out Holiday,” with teh members of the Eyal Vilmer Big Band. Part II is a dance party.