Once Ms. Dorrance has warmed up the connections between viewers’ eyes and ears, she can guide them into complexity, simultaneously increasing speed and subtlety of timbre. Her solos on Tuesday were as virtuosic and musically cogent as any lover of the jazz tap tradition could desire.

Ms. Dorrance is a part of that tradition, but she has patently made it her own. In the jazz tap lineage, and in the African-American aesthetic at its root, hot feet are contrasted with a cool upper body, masking difficulty with regal ease. With Ms. Dorrance, the counterbalance is between footwork of extreme rhythmic precision and a wild, unkempt physicality that dramatizes the sound production. Her low squat would be appropriate for skiing down the mountain behind the Vail stage. The stance goes way beyond the flexible knees that tap requires. It’s an intensification.

And the intensification is in the direction of idiosyncrasy, which the gawky Ms. Dorrance both embodies and encourages in her dancers, especially in solos that help offset a machine-dance quality that hardens some of the ensemble sections. This is a matter of cultural range and relevance. If Savion Glover linked tap to hip-hop in the 1990s, it is Ms. Dorrance who has discovered how to tap not just to jazz and the blues (as she did smokingly on Tuesday), but also to the melancholy of Radiohead; how to turn a cover of Adele’s “First Love” into a dance of frustrated communication between two young men. With each performance of Dorrance Dance, tap expands.