By Debra Cash

Whereas tap dancer Caleb Teicher is all idiosyncrasy, the Trinity Dancers wow by their perfect unison.

Counterpoint – Caleb Teicher and Conrad Tao, presented by the Celebrity Series of Boston February 7-8 at Boston Arts Academy Theatre

Jig – Trinity Irish Dance Company, presented by Global Arts Live February 8 at Berklee Performance Center

“We met as teenagers, just a few years ago,” dancer Caleb Teicher said as they opened Counterpoint in the gracious new Boston Arts Academy Theatre near Fenway Park this past weekend. Teicher and Conrad Tao “play different instruments” – tap shoes and a piano – but both are percussive instruments wielded with offhanded charm by virtuosi.

With Teicher dressed in a white jumpsuit and Tao in a black suit and shirt, together comprising a single expressive taijitu they launch into counterpoint at its most canonical by starting with the Aria from Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” As he will across the evening, Tao plays with density and clarity, leaning into singing melodies even when the score is at its most architectonic.

Tap dancers have been exploring classical music for close to a century: think of Paul Draper balletic experiments, Leon Collins’s Flight of the Bumblebee, and “Classical Savion” facing off to Stravinsky. Teicher gives Bach a conversational, searching air, their feet scraping the floor’s surface as if to say “remember, there’s wood down here” and occasionally wafting away into space and silence as if drifting from the thread of the conversation.

Tao gives the prickly choral fracture of an early waltz from Arnold Schoenberg an amused “now you see me, now you don’t” reading, but it’s Art Tatum’s “Cherokee” that really gets things going. Teicher’s feet are as fast and crowded as the notes generated from a player piano, while they flash a smile that says “who, me, I’m just doing my thing.”

I was happy to see the 2001 Coles and Bufalino Soft Shoe, described by Teicher as “a 32 bar nugget of beauty,” revived on this program. Teicher learned it from Brenda Bufalino, who recently celebrated her 87th birthday, and is still performing, with a show at the Guggenheim this spring. The work is built on collage, with tap elements pasted together at odd angles to create lively, unexpected juxtapositions. Here, Teicher’s long legs made a big impact.

Teicher also learned David Parker‘s Mozart Turkish March, a sung-through, body percussion romp that segues from formal to swinging until it looks like something Carl Stalling might have envisioned for a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Caleb Teicher in Counterpoint. Photo: Celebrity Series

But it’s Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” that summons Teicher and Tao’s full arsenal and reminds one — if anyone needed reminding – that Gershwin wasn’t just a genius composer, he was a genius showman. While Tao plays with alternating fire and ice, depending on where he thinks the emphasis is most compelling, Teicher makes sure that the music journeys through a series of distinct episodes: a funny, off-balance sequence holding their foot; a series of jokes about sliding into a split; and a tremble that grows to thunder in Teicher’s tap shoes.

Chicago-based Trinity Irish Dance Company is a very different sort of project: an attempt, as the program notes tell us, to use “Irish dance as an instrument and a metaphor.” Seeing an evening of contemporary Irish dance the night after a tap performance is instructive: Irish dance is the stream that met West African polyrhythms to create the amalgam of the distinctly American dance form we know as tap dancing.

The stage spaces in the two performances were very different. Where Tao and Teicher were in constant visual communication with each other, their domains separated only by the border of the piano’s black flank, here an ensemble of dancers — I counted seven women and two men –were enclosed in a small rectangle facing the audience, their backs to the four-person band.

The Trinity Irish Dance Company. Photo: Lois Greenfield

Where Teicher is all idiosyncrasy, the Trinity Dancers wow by their perfect unison, feet moving in complex crossings as intricate as the proverbial Celtic knot. Classical Irish dance is vertical, with the torso kept as still as possible, so that sometimes it seems that the dancers are levitating from the ground. While the adult dancers in their hard shoes may have exchanged their competition sequins and capes for flared-bottom unitards (not my favorite look, even on such lithe performers) the Trinity dancers’ technical vocabulary remained pristine.

The band, led by BRENOSHEA (Brendan O’Shea) fell into some maudlin folk-rock and a Bono cover, but Irish fiddle tunes always are toe-tappers. By the time the dancers returned dressed in black with arm- bands and went full “Riverdance” I was more impressed by the athleticism than moved by it.

Nonetheless, you had to love the small group of local Irish dance students invited up on stage to show their stuff. Mastery is why we cherish live performances —and I felt lucky to experience Teicher and Tao’s sophisticated artistry — but I’ll remember a ringleted 5 year old redhead named Kyra dancing across the stage and concentrating like her life depended on it for a long time.

Debra Cash is a founding Contributing Writer for the Arts Fuse and a member of its Board.