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French Guiana's Creole in Miami: Dancer Tamango's magical feet are on a cultural trip

In the village in French Guiana where Tamango was born, the sound of tibwa, a tap-ti-tap-ti-tap rhythm, was as ubiquitous as summertime crickets in the U.S. countryside. Forty-odd years later, after tap dancing through Europe and New York and across the United States, Tamango finds himself dancing once again to the rhythm of his birth.

''It was interesting that the whole rhythm odyssey brought me back to using the rhythm of our tradition in Guiana,'' Tamango said last week from White Oak, the arts colony in Northern Florida.

He was there with his company Urban Tap, rehearsing Bay Mo Dilo, which will premiere at the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts Studio Theater tonight. The title means ''Bring Me Water'' in French Guiana's creole.

Memory and instinct have taken Tamango on a long, unlikely odyssey from his South American village to acclaim as one of the most inspired dance artists of recent years. A tap dancer whom critics have compared to Fred Astaire, Tamango's real gift is finding the connections between different African-rooted dance and musical forms. He incorporates Haitian drummers, Brazilian capoeiristas, U.S. jazz musicians, and more into his work and his troupe.

''One is tempted to call him the best dancer of any kind around,'' The New York Times wrote in 1999. ``The world is visibly his stage.''

That has been true since he started dancing. Sent to Paris to live with his father when he was 9, Tamango was adopted by a baron who lived in the same building.

''From the Amazon to the center of Paris, it was like going to Mars,'' Tamango remembered. ``But when you're a child you have no choice.''

At 21 he began studying with Sarah Petronio, an American tap dancer. ''It changed my life,'' Tamango said. At first, tap was as foreign as Paris had been. ``I had to redefine me -- to walk with the rhythm was really hard. Then when you get it you are blown away.''

He and a small group of dancers performed in the streets of Paris and Europe. In 1988 they tossed a coin to decide between Rio de Janeiro and New York. The Big Apple won, but only Tamango stuck it out.

He worked his way up from dancing for change on the Staten Island Ferry to jazz clubs and experimental spaces. Then he hooked up with a network of old-school hoofers who taught him to listen to his body and the rhythm.

''They don't tell you there's a proper technique or this is correct, just listen and react,'' said Tamango, who's in his early 40s. ``So I started to improvise and make it up in a sense that a musician could understand.''

It was Tamango's capacity for listening that brought him his own success. He started bringing together a disparate group of dancers and musicians in a sophisticated global vaudeville that enchanted audiences and critics. Carnival Center programming director Justin Macdonnell commissioned Bay Mo Dilo soon after starting to work in Miami in 2003.

''He's really an extraordinary artist,'' Macdonnell said. ``He's fantastically curious about the world and he's seen a lot of it from many different points of view. That's why I emphasize the extraordinary cultural journey he's taken, because I think it is revealed in his work.''

In Bay Mo Dilo, Tamango has focused on the Afro-French-Indian culture of French Guiana and other French colonies. He'll incorporate a dance called kasse ko, or broken body -- a style that imitates staggering exhaustion or drunkenness; images of water, which run through the Guianese Creole language; and traditional African tales retold by slaves. He also draws from a book of folkloric stories by Leon Gontrand Damas, a 20th century poet who fought for rights for blacks in the French colonies.

''Most people don't know what our culture is about . . . I have never really seen French Caribbean expression in America,'' Tamango said. ``To me, it was very important to bring that culture forward.''

But he is not only trying to reconnect to his own dimly understood roots. In a broader sense, Tamango is also working with the notion of a universal culture stemming from humanity's evolutionary beginning. He's filling out the instinctive connections he senses between Haitian drumming and African-American tap, the reasons why a boy from a South American village was able to find the beat of the world.

''If you're interested in knowing where mankind comes from, we go from Central Africa and go north and then spread into the world,'' Tamango said. ``So from that you see why we all do the same thing. We don't create anything new; it's a repetition of our memory and adapting to our environment. That's what I know from my studying of rhythm.''

What: Tamango's Urban Tap in Bay Mo Dilo (Give Me Water)

When: 8 tonight through Saturday

Where: Studio Theater, Carnival Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

Cost: $15 and $45

Info: 305-949-6722 or www.carnivalcenter.org.