Tap Dogs pound out lean, mean dance routine

When you think of tap, mostly you think the likes of Fred Astaire or Gregory Hines. But if it’s Tap Dogs, the wham-bang sextet that performed Thursday to a busting-at-the-seams full house at the Maine Center for the Arts, you’d have to think more along the lines of the Sharks and the Jets. Except get rid of Jerome Robbins and add Mad Max, the Beastie Boys and maybe a steelworker for that extra je ne sais quoi.

Then you’d have tap for our times. Tap that’s rough. Tap that pounds. Tap for the Iron John era. And you’d like it. Or else.

Tap Dogs has that in-your-face quality to it. This is industrial-strength dance that takes place on scaffolding, wooden platforms, tin grates — a kind of life-size erector set miked to such a degree that the tapping has a gunshot quality. The dancers wear jeans, torn shirts, muscle T-shirts, cutoff shorts, work boots. Their lingo is monosyllabic and their energy is explosive. They climb ladders, hoist girders, zing-slide across the floor. One guy hangs upside down and dances on a ceiling plate, and the six of them perform hip-hop beats on synthesized floorboards or do a water play that sprays the audience. In a grand finale, they pull out welding torches and shoot sparks into the air while one comrade does a silhouetted tap-a-thon.

This is guy stuff that’s out to prove one thing: White men can dance.

Created five years ago by Dein Perry, an Australian dancer and former mechanic, Tap Dogs has the same phenom quality of Riverdance and Stomp. It features the workingman, who is sweaty, grunty and lives percussively with feet like power tools.

Sound macho? It is — proudly and relentlessly. And there’s just enough humor and talent to make these dudes lovable, too. Maybe not for more than 90 minutes, but that’s enough time to show that it doesn’t take glitz and glamor to create a sensation. It takes muscle — and certainly, among these guys, body fat is virtually nonexistent.

The members of Tap Dogs celebrate male physicality with a punch. They bully each other, slap each other, and then tap it off ’til they’re all smirking again and the audience is cheering and the tappers are drenched from exertion. This is not an emotional event. It has more to do with technical precision, personal power, raucous rhythm and things that go bump. Or thump. Or rat-a-tat-tat.