Slender and tan, with clear blue eyes and a smooth, seemingly boneless gait, he looks as if he just stepped off a dance floor in Ibiza.
Rooted in traditional African movement, military drills and spoken word, stepping is a dance that involves synchronized, percussive body movement, made popular by black fraternities and sororities in the United States.
White lines marked off the court inside Arthur Ashe Stadium, but Serena Williams arrived to defend her United States Open title as if stepping onto a dance floor, wearing a party dress from a Woodstock reunion.
They have witnessed a gruesome, deadly assault, the inadvertent final step in a dance begun by Mirko and a pair of shadowy child pornographers who feed him increasingly violent hard-core magazines to seduce the children into sadomasochistic scenarios.
Every step on a dance pad has to be planned and executed with the proper timing while focusing attention on the arrows on the screen.
A little-remembered factoid: Before Kelly became famous, he taught children their first steps at a dance school.
Shifting patterns are more important here than the steps, in a dance that grows and changes from a racing swirl of eight dancers, led by Lizabeth Saenz and Elliot Mercer, to a quieter close for elegiac totem bodies.
The same sovereignty of imagination that transforms experience into an "original" work of art may be brought to bear on the realization of the words and notes on the page or the steps of a dance in performance.
The Royal Ballet-trained Thompson clearly has a prodigious memory, not just for the steps in a dance but for the minutiae of body placement, transitions, and focus.
As a beat fades in, his shoulders and knees pick it up, until he is stepping high in a dance you might identify as African.
