On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance COMPANIES IN TRANSITION BY LAURA A. JACOBS One of Twyla Tharp's early and difficult works, The Fugue, is a dance for three without music that presents structure as rhythm and vice...
...And the daughter's ride of escape on her true love's back denotes childlike innocence, momentary freedom, psychological power, the transport of fairy tales...
...Since the dancing is held low, and since Tharp has used her shortest men, Ballareseems miniaturized...
...Dancing to distant Latin music, a couple pauses in suspended aerial lifts that recall Chagall's floating lovers...
...This is not the Tharp we know...
...Throwing the whole book of ballet steps and connectives at Baryshnikov, Push seemed to say that nothing lay beyond his reach...
...Whether she is working in dance, film or theater, Tharp is always charting a body's effort to keep balance in a world that here rocks and rolls, there languishes in angst, and everywhere pursues private desires within the larger context of public dreams...
...Ont senses that she meant to build this ballet from the ground, or pointe, up...
...Handling them tenderly, like rare erotic objects, the men share the ballerinas intuitively...
...Almost 40 minutes long, Room has been enthusiastically received...
...Glass brings a piano into his score and two ballerinas begin a pair of pas de deux, but with three men...
...As Coupe ages it looks more and more a minor masterpiece...
...Glass' music supplies Tharp with a resilient, coasting, readily dramatic track for bringing out her dancers in their sporty black, white and red Norma Kamali jumpers and flipskirts...
...While the rest of the program read like a retrospective, these two works, disappointing yet promising, signaled the future...
...Especially unforgettable is the mother, a voluminous symbol of evil wearing red satin robes that rustle down her sides like lava...
...While impressive, the result is a ballet that looks excessively fast and fussy...
...Snatched up by her mother, her limp feet flutter terribly...
...In Pilobolus' wordless telling of it every gesture is evocative, every visual sensation has the weight, age and pungent detail of legend...
...Although Tharp herself danced in Fait Accompli, it had a momentum beyond even the choreographer's reach...
...Near the middle, there is a moment when a dancer balances on one foot, wobbling, wavering, but not falling...
...Was Tharp just playing her part, or was she plumbing the dark side of collaboration...
...Notably absent are the physical qualities that typically have given her choreography its intelligence, its airy attenuations and witty dislocations: The only dissolves here occur when dancers pass through the backdrop, and the only fineness is in the introduction of pointe-work...
...Forthischoreographyalone, In the Upper Room is important...
...Watching In the Upper Room and Ballare you might forget that Tharp has brilliant ballets in her past...
...One was less interested in which steps were hers than in which impulses...
...Room moderates that momentum, as if to get its bearings or to revise the message of Fait...
...It not only represents a familiar Tharpism— bones becoming cartilage, convictions melting into emotions—it may be the secret source from which her esthetic springs...
...Back in 1973 Tharp created Deuce Coupe for the Joffrey Ballet...
...There seems no escape from her mountainous presence...
...The ballet technique faces the world on a Euclidean grid of spheres and angles...
...Also in transition is Pilobolus, the 16-year-old dance/mime troupe named after a fungus...
...In ballet, balance is a given...
...Later, Tharp collaborated with Jerome Robbins at the New York City Ballet on Brahms/Handel, a work of escalating variations on a theme shared by two groups of dancers...
...Ballet dancers didn't need to understand the Tharp sensibility of inchoate rebellion, and even if they had wanted to they would not have been able to adopt that loose-jointed aplomb (in Baker's Dozen Tharp dancers are so loose they could slide under a door...
...Suddenly, the versatile cynic has become a fledgling traditionalist...
...There you have what Pilobolus does so well: It draws us into the physicality of its metaphors, the very foundations of dance...
...Classical dancers looked glib in her creations, but touchingly glib, like debs daring to cuss in public...
...The rest of Tharp's BAM repertory consisted of contemporary classics like Baker's Dozen (all creamy, ineffable nostalgia) and Nine Sinatra Songs (impeccably crafted sentimentalism), as well as The Fugue (striking baroque minimalism...
...But now that Tharp has reorganized her dance company, revitalizing its ranks with trained ballet dancers, her personal vision may have to realign itself...
...The acclaimed, apocalyptic Golden Section continues to strike me as rewed-up disco dancing...
...Of all the dancers, the "ballerinas" move about most freely and at highest risk, yet their status in the dance is mostly unclear...
...Surrounded by newer dances when the The Fugue was offered during Tharp's recent monthlong run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), that brief passage emerged as a skeleton key to her universe...
...Tharp the social critic was represented too by The Catherine Wheel III, a trenchantly edited third version of her bilious narrative dance...
...A bracing gust of reality, she brought her brand of self-questioning to the orderly, often complacent domain of ballet...
...Then there is the handful of ballets Tharp made for American Ballet Theater (ABT), with Mikhail Baryshnikov her primary catalyst...
...Perhaps Tharp meant to play of f the crude (that would account for the dragon lady red toe shoes of the women who do the pointe-work...
...Tharp's career has often meant the slackening of threads, the cutting of strings...
...She is not afraid to give the appearance of going nowhere...
...Pilobolus has begun moving in a subtle theatrical direction, using elaborate costumes and props to enhance its attempts at narrative...
...In the Upper Room has a score by Philip Glass, and Ballare's music is a Mozart sonata for two pianos...
...As amazing as these interlocking counterbalancing bodies can be, I almost always leave a Pilobolus concert wanting something more...
...in a sense, it is ballet's soul, momentarily relinquished only to gain the joy of its recovery...
...The ballet ends a puddle-jump from where it began...
...An Italian verb meaning "to dance, " ballare can also mean "to shake or wobble," as a chair might...
...Here Tharp took the stance of provocateur rather than anarchist...
...It is not as if she hasn't made ballets before...
...The wobble is there, in the women's off-center swells and bent-kneed swivels, and it helps Tharp find herself in a system of balance alien to her own...
...Recently it showed off its exquisite Return to Maria La Baja at the Joyce Theater...
...More often than not she brings threesomes down the stage in crudely hewn step sequences, or has a line of dancers perform a series of leaps in canon...
...In this dance, as consciously classical as Room is not, Tharp has choreographed just about every beat and phrase in Mozart's music...
...Indeed, the symmetries and variations echo Brahms/Handel...
...Still, Ballare's classicism remains "in the diminutive," perhaps because its rhythmic equation —one step per beat—is severely inhibiting...
...She learns more from a wobbling chair than most choreographers do from alifetime's apprenticeship...
...With its Beach Boys music and splashes of graffiti it had the buoyant melancholy of that last big bash before graduation...
...The imagery Pilobolus has created over the years has often been no less amorphous than it is enchanting, a panorama of moving bodies that link up into Rube Goldberg contraptions one minute, blossom into natural phenomena the next...
...It is testimony to the piece's potency that many of these details stay with you...
...Nevertheless, for Tharp the construction is unusually banal...
...On Dance COMPANIES IN TRANSITION BY LAURA A. JACOBS One of Twyla Tharp's early and difficult works, The Fugue, is a dance for three without music that presents structure as rhythm and vice versa in its spiky, repeating step phrases...
...As a visitor to the Joffrey and ABT, Tharp was an outsider looking in...
...The two dances she premiered at the BAM, though, contained pointe-work and have thus been categorized as ballets...
...They have the same aerobic muscularity, the same backdrop of sliced black cloth from which dancers mysteriously appear and disappear, and the same eerie, Spielbergian side- and spotlighting...
...Concentrated and caustic, Wheel has finally found its form, and it received ember-hot performances this winter (David Byrne's fire and brimstone score is superb...
...The daughter's tiny, barefooted steps, almost on toe, express her singing inner soul...
...Ballare is thus part of an educational process and helps explain why Tharp is continually fascinating...
...Room has obvious ties to a dance Tharp premiered on Broadway three years ago, Fait Accompli...
...Push Comes To Shove is a major masterpiece, perhaps about the anarchy of genius—in this case Baryshnikov's—or about the abyss that the glorious order of classical ballet dances happily over...
...Another couple then enters into the filigree of arches and crossways, whose unquestioning fluidity seems the pattern of a strange sect building its utopia...
...Tied to the music, Tharp has kept the women's pointe-work chirrupy and mostly à terre...
...Whatever the case, Robbins and Tharp did a great job mimicking and boosting each other...
...That may, of course, be the point...
...Antagonism barely crept in at first, but as virtuosity steepened it flooded the piece, and the dancers literally went rolling through the air...
...Audiences are attracted by its unremitting kinetic excitement—the action never lets up...
...The classical dancer is a living puppet held rapt by an invisible thread down through the center...
...One sequence, however, is so arresting and lucid that the rest of Room mists around it...
...Tharp is in transition...
...The aerobic jogging, stamping and leaping of Fait are recycled in a more balletic framework...
...The story, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is about a demonic matriarch who forces her daughter into prostitution...
...Ballare follows in the mode of Push Comes to Shove, except it is a measure more serious...
...In Battare's adagio, glances between the dancers add up to a kind of Edwardian gravity that is dispelled in the freer, less meddlesome third movement...
...Tharp's style was all doodles, shrugs and shooting stars, putting one in mind of Salvador Dali's melting clocks...
...Themen in white slacks and women in flowing white chiffon are set against a blue dappled background that suggests a garden at twilight—a dollhouse garden...
Vol. 70 • March 1987 • No. 4
