This, however, is technique deranged. Mr. Glover’s trademark is to display astonishingly rapid-fire meters that nonetheless lack rhythm or melody or any serious play of dynamic contrasts. Very occasionally he slows down to tap out a phrase you can identify. One of them on Monday seemed to go “Do-wah, diddy diddy dum, dum, dum,” almost like the 1960s pop song by Manfred Mann. This is when a real tap musician would make the relative simplicity of the moment into something special, but Mr. Glover’s inflection stayed flat: he couldn’t caress the phrase into life.

Image The tap dancer Savion Glover in his show at the Joyce Theater in Chelsea. Credit... Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

And he couldn’t dwell on it for long. He needs the stratosphere of extreme speed, but he won’t make that stratosphere absorbing for an audience. On Monday he seemed shut off, performing on some private trip that was not intended for us (though he did call on his mother in the audience).

Within the first minute he reminded me how, in opera, coloratura singing can be musically exhilarating and expressive but can also be mindlessly dull. In particular I understood how, a century ago, the famous soprano Selma Kurz was known in Vienna as “the singer without an ear.” A critic once wrote that “even her legendary trill is mechanical,” and that applies to Mr. Glover’s dancing. He takes one rhythmic figure, repeats it too many times, then starts again with another. Often he accelerates or decelerates, but without skill in phrasing. The play of dynamic contrasts that is meat and drink to so many less famous tap dancers (among today’s, I would cite DeWitt Fleming Jr., Lee Howard, and Jason Samuels Smith, but there are many others) seems out of Mr. Glover’s terrain.

I’ve been talking principally of how Mr. Glover sounds as a tap soloist, and in one section of “SoLE PoWER” he stresses the point by dancing in the dark. But his sound is the only remarkable thing about him, and those with appetites for endless jazz cadenzas may find more interest in it than I can. In visual terms he is a washout. (He looks better with his feet in close-up on film; too bad his Joyce show doesn’t include a screen to amplify the feet visually as well as aurally.)

His shyness of the audience is remarkable from someone who has danced for presidents and whose name sells whole seasons: he’s happier to be tapping away in profile than facing forward, and happiest with his back to us (which is how he starts this show). At times he talks using a mike, but he does so facing the back, and against a surrounding wash of taped music that’s loud enough to drown half his words.