Chvala channels his inner Fred Astaire at Harkness

Clockwise from left, Karla Grotting, Joe Chvala and Peter O’Gorman

By Elizabeth Zimmer

Minneapolis rhythm artist Joe Chvala stormed Hell’s Kitchen last week with what amounted to a chamber ensemble. Three people — Chvala himself, his longtime dance colleague Karla Grotting, and resident composer Peter O’Gorman — essayed percussion-based works of enormous variety, from subtle to flat-out funny. The crowd cheered, and the post-performance discussion percolated as new and long-time fans pulled information out of the artists.

Out-of-town talent is a notoriously hard sell in Manhattan, where a couple dozen local groups compete with visitors for audiences every week. Absent from the city for more than a decade, the Midwestern trio was greeted like royalty, and more importantly, their work was received with rapt attention. Opening with O’Gorman’s “Serif,” the three black-clad performers loomed studiously over their collections of brushes, ranging from tiny to huge, choosing sets with which to caress the black marley. O’Gorman acknowledges that he’s not trained as a dancer or choreographer, and the physical landscape of the work was rudimentary, but the aural experience literally swept us away, whipping the air into little yelps and making sandy sounds on the floor.

O’Gorman also belongs to Mary Ellen Childs’s percussion troupe CRASH, and brings to the Flying Foot Forum’s arsenal handmade box drums called “cajones” — in this case, a nested set, each of them miked, that emit wonderfully rounded, reverberative sounds in a duet with Grotting called “Flow.” In this performance the dancers made all the music, and the composer danced. Some of the riffs evoked the strange harmonics of Meredith Monk.

It wasn’t until the second half that anything resembling conventional tap dancing appeared, with Chvala and Grotting in red and green plaid jackets and matching socks evoking everything from the upright, almost military stances of Irish step dancing to get-down tap riffs evocative of vaudeville. The hipster valence fell away in this piece, titled “Hambone and Friends,” with the pair telling hoary jokes and Chvala unveiling his inner Fred Astaire, to whom he manages to project an uncanny resemblance.

Completing the program were Childs’s “Sight of Hand,” which transmuted kids’ clapping games and baseball coaching signals into an entertaining trio; “I Saw Esau,” in which flashlights provided all the illumination for a trio that might have evolved from colonial times, and “Trines,” in which pinkish curtains descended, framing what looked like triangles on steroids, dangling pyramids played with wooden sticks. As O’Gorman held down the background with his eccentric trap set, the other two sent body parts poking out from behind the curtains, tap danced, and played little riffs on the triangles.

The whole evening was, if anything, underplayed; these artists have serious chops in two disciplines. While it was fun to watch, the program would have worked almost as well on the radio.