Dance Review: Twyla Tharp’s Gold Mine

I saw the anniversary evening as being about Twyla Tharp’s perennial themes and preoccupations.

Twyla Tharp 50th Anniversary Tour at the Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, presented by the Joyce Theater, New York City, through November 22.

Photo: Sharen Bradford - The Dancing Image

A scene from the Twyla Tharp 50th Anniversary Tour. Photo: Sharen Bradford – The Dancing Image.

By Marcia B. Siegel

NEW YORK—Contrary as usual, Twyla Tharp celebrated the 50th anniversary of her groundbreaking choreographic career by making two new dances instead of reviving any old ones. The new works pitted formalism (Preludes and Fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier) against low comedy (Yowzie to riffs on classic American jazz). Each half of the evening began with a substantial danced Fanfare to brass pieces by John Zorn.

Despite the obvious contrast between the two dances, I thought of them as two parts of one community. In fact, the parts were populated by the same dancers. Tharp hasn’t had a permanent dance company since the end of the 1980s, when she folded most of her dancers into American Ballet Theater. She’s worked with “project” groups since then, temporarily assembling dancers to fulfill her eclectic needs. The troupe on the 50th tour was comprised of a few stalwarts, John Selya and Matthew Dibble from the last Tharp and Dancers group, Rika Okamoto and Ron Todorowski from incarnations of her Billy Joel show Movin’ Out, and nine others from the whole dance spectrum, Radio City Music Hall to New York City Ballet.

Preludes and Fugues offers selections from Bach’s encyclopedic study of musical form, recorded by David Korevaar and Angela Hewitt. In her 20 dance excerpts, Tharp visualizes the music’s larger apparatus instead of following it note for note. One fast fugue features dancers running with tiny steps. A two-part prelude has two couples dancing different movements in counterpoint. Sometimes the music is meditative but the dance rushes on.

The movement is classical but not on pointe, with a loose, Tharpian jazziness, punctuated by swings, turns, lifts, and jagged shapes that bring the momentum to a full stop. Men wrap their arms around their partners’ waists and whirl them away as if in a ballrooom. The lifts are acrobatic: women are swung between their partner’s legs, they twist around their partners and are dragged along the floor, they’re hoisted high above the men and curl their upper bodies over them. Fleeting fights, chases, flirtations pass through the action. It’s all unexpected, nonstop, and nearly untrackable.

Late in the game, there are hints of a larger order. Around the 15th section, about four couples regroup to form facing lines of men and women. There’s a brief interlude of Sufi spinning, not long enough to bring down the blood pressure. The original couple dance downstage, backed up by two other couples as if in a classical ballet. This may be the section Tharp has referred to as a tribute to George Balanchine. There’s an extended disagreement between a small woman and her partner. At the end of it he falls to the floor; she kicks him and stalks off. Out of another imbroglio, several people are lying on the floor in a Martha Graham contraction behind a couple doing slow stretches.

Gradually the chaos resolves itself as the small groups reappear and the movement themes are recapped. Preludes and Fugues begins and ends with the Prelude that formed the base for Charles Gounod’s familiar Ave Maria, but Tharp doesn’t recapitulate the circling duet with which it began. Instead, the 12 men and women who have been linked in fairly stable duos and trios join together in one communal circle.

Preludes and Fugues is the subdued side of Tharp. Santo Loquasto costumed the men in beige shirts and pants with a thin gold belt, the women in pastel colored short dresses. Yowzie releases the extrovert in Tharp, the coarse side that she probably equates with popular culture. The costumes are a mélange of patchwork and primary colors, strategic extraneous fabric and head-wraps, that partly obscure the dancers’ faces and forms. The music is also a mix. Henry Butler’s jazz piano improvises on Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton (both composers used in the past by Tharp), and orchestrations by trumpeter Steven Bernstein and the Hot 9 that dip into salsa, tango, and foxtrot, and the Pink Panther.

Once again, Tharp parses the dancers into consistent groups. Though you can’t always recognize them, they act out roles: the spacey couple (Okamoto and Dibble), the two ballerinas in slinky red sheaths and furry black sombreros (Savannah Lowery and Kaitlyn Gilliland), the campy runway models (Daniel Baker and Selya), the feisty small woman (Amy Ruggiero). The dance idiom is a circusy blend of jazz, burlesque, and slapstick, with coarse jokes, flexed feet, and precision-timing slung into the audience’s face. The characters pursue and rebuff each other through seven musical composites, but there didn’t seem to be any consoling wrapup. The audience adored it.

Photo: Sharen Bradford - The Dancing Image

A scene from the Twyla Tharp 50th Anniversary Tour. Photo: Sharen Bradford—The Dancing Image

In place of the bygone dances she didn’t bring back, Tharp has woven references to them into the intricate fabric of the choreography. I caught echoes of Eight Jelly Rolls, Push Comes to Shove, Deuce Coupe, Nine Sinatra Songs, Sue’s Leg. The audience may not recognize these references, but it gets the singularity of the Tharp idiom, which seems, all along, to have been about fellowship even when it’s ostensibly about romance. Tharp was years ahead of the rest of the world in fusing ballet, modern dance, and the vernacular, but she never has resorted to the audience-grabbing devices like the crotch display, long-held decorative poses, and duets specializing in erotic suggestion that are so common today in the crossover contemporary dance.

Tharp has told interviewers about the “meaning” of her new dances. The Bach is about the world as it should be; Yowzie is the world as it is. Well, possibly, but I saw the anniversary evening as being about Tharp’s perennial themes and preoccupations. She’s always been a master at digging out individual dancers’ talents, a genius at integrating dance styles, and a stager of the process by which the confusion of youth can mature into the harmony of growing up.

Tharp’s 10-week tour ended last weekend at Lincoln Center, without a stop in Boston. She probably relished the idea of throwing the party in George Balanchine’s house.


Internationally known writer, lecturer, and teacher Marcia B. Siegel covered dance for 16 years at The Boston Phoenix. She is a contributing editor for The Hudson Review. The fourth collection of Siegel’s reviews and essays, Mirrors and Scrims—The Life and Afterlife of Ballet, won the 2010 Selma Jeanne Cohen prize from the American Society for Aesthetics. Her other books include studies of Twyla Tharp, Doris Humphrey, and American choreography. From 1983 to 1996, Siegel was a member of the resident faculty of the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

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