DANCE REVIEW : Tap Group Kicks Up Heels With Master Dancer

What’s an all-girl tap group to do when guest master tapper Eddie Brown calmly steals their thunder by making everything look so easy? At their Orange Coast College performance in Robert B. Moore Theatre Saturday night, LTD/Unlimited Dance Co. produced one winning solution.

“Duet” snappily wedded the suave timing and athletic, economical style of company artistic director Linda Sohl-Donnell to the bongos-to-the-third dimension sound of Brent Lewis on his mountainous set of melodic drums. Created last year by the two performers, “Duet” offered rhythmic tautness, clean contours and a keen interplay between dancer and musician--elements often missing elsewhere in the program.

“Crossroads,” Sohl-Donnell’s other 1987 work, has a diffuse texture spun out of numerous on- and off-stage comings and goings and lots of turns sprinkled with stylized poses for four dancers. One is Beverley Scott, whose height makes her ultravisible in a company of four smaller women. Unfortunately she also stands out because of her too-soft attack, the lack of easy mobility in her upper body and an unfocused stage presence.

Karol Lee seemed on the verge of relaxing into Sohl-Donnell’s newly revised version of “Eclipse,” a sinewy piece with lots of reaches and leans and abrupt changes of direction.

Sohl-Donnell’s best non-solo pieces were built around useful props: sticks tapped with a martial-arts flavor in “Stickato” and a trio of chairs in “Dark Eyes.”

The men in the band kept the dancers good company, taking off on their own for an easy ride on Duke Ellington’s “Caravan.” But the centerpiece of the evening was, of course, Brown’s lean, skittering presence, a vision from the glory years of rhythm tap.