In October 732, Charles Martel, “martel” meaning “hammer”, beat a Berber army under Abd al-Rahman ibn Abd Allah al-Ghafiqi, wali d'al-Andalus somewhere not far from Poitiers in Francia. His war hammer is said to have changed the world. But Charles didn’t get the moniker until the ninth century, when the chroniclers were looking back.
Candice Martel, on the other hand, seems to have been born with her hammer already in hand and, in the way family names are often à propos, she has put together her Électro-Tap show – tap dance for the electronic age – to put the spotlight on the percussive and instrumental qualities of the human body.
Looking over Martel’s other accomplishments, “breaking on through” – as Jim Morrison meant it in 1967 - has been pretty much her career. Fifty-something, her creative CV limns a genuine child of 1968, feeling around for better perspectives – it’s our “way of seeing the world” that makes a world.
And also, Candice Martel’s creative efforts remind me, just when I need it, just how much realizing individual perspectives beats politics, or, rather, how politics is always striving, but never quite succeeding, in choking off the constant swell of individual perspectives.
We’re seeing that now, aren’t we? With so-called “traditionalist” political movements pushing for the eternal reign of an angrily capricious Yahweh, brainchild of an ugly 19th-century man who believed, left to grow, Natural Selection would prove him a monkey, just as the kids at school said? Just the other day, didn’t a phone call between the unplumbably stupid Donald Trump and the ineffably cynical Vladimir Putin, involving the fate of millions, wind up with a vow to work together for traditional values in film? As long as the children of ’68 beaver away at their perspectives, and they will, vows like that will come to nothing much. At least it can be hoped.
Candice Martel trained in classical dance and tap dance as a girl, started her career at 16, when she was chosen for the Grand Théâtre de Genève, a Swiss equivalent of a national opera.
Since 2019, Martel has been working on Being born a girl, a video series mixing dance performance, documentary and anecdote, which looks at what being a born girl means in different places, in man and woman eyes and in time. “Girl” shapes not so much as a way of being born but more as web a body gets caught up in.
In 2022, Martel put herself together with acrobat and actor Yannick Thomas of Cirque le Roux and writer Julie Gilbertto do L’Invisible spectacle de toutes ces vies empêchées. (“The invisible spectacle of unlived life”), which deals with the “created invisible world”.
Julie Gilbert puts it like this in the show’s note:
*We hide a caste society
Under a class society
They say: Just Do It
They say: Just Take The Elevator
Yes, let’s take the elevator!
The elevator’s really small
You gotta stand tall in it
You gotta be clean in it
And what do we do with everybody else?
Kids cut down by un-love?
Kids who stink the street?
Nothing for them?
In l’Invisible Martel and her partners try to show the skeins of invisibility in the body.
Dealing with the created invisible world is the great challenge of our time, I believe. As spectators are able to get glimpses of the invisible world, they learn to guess its shapes in the visible world. Changing perspectives!
Électro-Tap is set up as, essentially, a rock-music show that feels somehow educational. A spectator can scrutinize, hope to try it out at home.
Martel stands center stage, fronting the band, synthesizer, guitar and sound controller. Also front, to the left and right of Martel’s sphere, are two large, mat-style « tap » boards. Using the board to spectator right, she tap dances, at first, as playing the leading instrument of the band.
The face-off with the guitarist put me in mind of the friendly rivalry of battling instruments that happens often enough in rock acts. But also of 1940s-movie-style tap dance in which the tapping can recall call-and-response singing with added drama from the physicality of tap. And, finally, also I am reminded of a break-dance battle.
In each of these incantations, the individual (or the individuals) take the forward place. I think that’s why Karine, my compagne, who was with me, couldn’t find the Electro-Klezmer music – the body is the thing to look at and listen to, not the band. And for me, at least, the music I’ve always associated with tap – and I’m talking about old memories of then passé musical comedy stuff, not renewed experience – was that jazzy-bagpipey-vaguely-snakecharmer Klezmer sound, anyway. The Electro-klezmer just does not make it through to body-distracted consciousness.
In what I note (but which is not necessarily true) as part-way through, Martel, with deliberation, takes off her shoes and, on the left tap mat, uses her bare feet to become, in the light of what has come at first, both the sound and the sound vector, an instrument. Karine liked this part best – and I with her.
Through Martel, Karine and I identified ourselves with the sound and producing the sound, as syncing the senses to an after-work-out body buzz.
Our self-identification as sound and instrument is for me the mark of Électro-Tap‘s success in what I think is a venture to get spectators and listeners interested not just in tap but in its invisible contents: in Électro-Tap, tap dance performance is pointing the body as “sound and sounding”. Think of the way the body and neck of a guitar both produce heard-sound and shape it. Think of the guitar as playing itself, feeling itself and adding free input from senses and emotions, as well as responding to what is heard.
Let’s go try out Electro-tap.
____
I saw Électro-Tap, created, choreographed and danced by Candice Martel, with original music composition and live synthesizer by Mikaël Charry, guitar by Thomas Naïm, with assistance from Gladys Gambie and sound engineering by Adrian Bourget at Carreau du Temple on 11 June 2025. Électro-Tap, and the accompanying workshops led by Candice Martel were done in partnership with Atelier de Paris‘ June Events program.
*Smelling the delicious odor of Adrienne Rich, I quickly, and guilelessly, gobbled down Julie Gibert’s lovely poem. I own any resulting bad digestion.
On cache une société de caste
Sous une société de classe
On te dit : il suffit de le vouloir
On te dit : tu n’as qu’à prendre l’ascenseur
Et bien sûr on voudrait le prendre cet ascenseur
Mais l’ascenseur est tout petit
Il faut se tenir bien droit dedans
Il faut se tenir bien propre dedans
Et alors qu’est-ce qu’on fait des autres ?
Des enfants amputés d’amour
Des enfants qui puent la rue
On fait rien ? »
~ Julie Gilbert