Broadway Ballet

...Throughout the ballet, the mix of everyday gesture and dance movement, and the contrasts of sleaze and sublime, convey the true-to-life...

...The final product is a rehearsed improvisation with beginning and ending added as afterthought...

...More than the music, it is the lyrics that help structure this ballet...

...But once the curtain rises, the musicians' platform ascends—and the stage is reserved for dancers...

...Each scene may feature one or two of the main characters, quite often with ensemble dancers enhancing visual interest...

...Both in technique and in emotion, the Elizabeth Parkinson-Keith Roberts duo for Brenda and Tony is the stronger...

...Although Tharp might spend hundreds of hours improvising raw material for a ballet, she insists that her works have visual unity: a beginning, middle, and end...

...The effect is so powerful that the audience is transported by turns to a battlefront, a midnight bar, a high school reunion...

...Brenda's sensuality toward her new choice, Tony, stands in contrast to the sweetness of Judy, who is engaged to James...

...They consider themselves dancers on par with the company, apart from the audience...

...Joel's "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" features two of his friends, Brenda and Eddie, from his high school days in the 1970s, which the ballet transposes to the 1960s...

...The result of the choreographic process is that Tharp's ballets may not lean on any particular score...

...A memorable performance is given by Ashley Tuttle as Judy in the scene danced to Joel's song "The Stranger," in which three men who lurk in the shadows lift and toss her about...

...Instead of visual unity, the ballet may be organized according to the structure of the music in a way that may be incomprehensible to the audience...

...The secret is that Movin' Out is not a "show" at all...

...That is why, in the year 2000, the Dance Heritage Coalition and the Library of Congress elected to honor not any particular one of her works, but rather to honor the choreographer herself among the First 100 of America's Irreplaceable Dance Treasures...

...The effect is that the work is more understandable...

...Performed by artists of national stature, the effect is powerful...

...Billy Joel-centered publicity for Movin' Out concedes to popular biases against ballet—and these biases stem in part from the attitude of dance-makers themselves...

...In other words, violence and sex—this is where I can trump language," she commented in an interview with Newsday...

...But its depth has not been sufficiently appreciated...

...Her reward is enormous success...

...The second act concerns the spiraling of emotions: estrangement after war, anger, bereavement, reconciliation, inspiration, friendship...

...Many choreographers are satisfied if they express themselves, caring little whether the audience understands their work...

...Depth comes from the choreographer's process and philosophy as well as innate talent, and the typical choreographic process inhibits visual unity...

...This does not bother most dance-makers because they practice their art from inward-inspired forces, by themselves, for themselves...

...BY JUDITH GELERNTER Would you consider taking two hours to see a Broadway show filled with music by an aging pop star...

...She does not dismiss reviews but responds to them...

...Tharp's philosophy and dance-making method allow her to adopt different styles, work independently of music, edit her creations, see her works as one in the audience might see them, and . . . in her quest for classicism, create a narrative tied to human experience in a way which is also universal...

...In the first act, at a Long Island high school, Brenda and Eddie split up...

...You will not be over-awed by a masterful but ultimately meaningless routine, or by a dance-maker whose overall aim is for his dancers to look pretty...

...Why shouldn't modern dance, an art form born on American soil a century ago, be able to draw crowds without relying on pop stars...

...After Movin' Out opened in Chicago, she used the reviews to help edit and erase ambiguities before opening in New York...

...Most dance-makers create dances by improvising to music and then paring down this raw material to make a ballet...

...The Movin' Out narrative forms a natural line leading to a conclusion where Brenda and Tony reaffirm their love and Eddie regains the equilibrium he lost in wartime...

...In addition to her standard spins and slides, Tharp creates original steps as easily as a poet might coin words...

...The boys join the war effort, and James is killed in combat...

...dance, classical ballet, jazz, and street dance...

...The battlefront scene is realized by troops holding invisible guns, exploding shells simulated by light flashes, and combat fury from the musicians...

...The light plasticity of Tittle as the strangers toss her is singular and striking...

...All it requires is a theme with a beginning, middle, and end...

...Tharp, on the contrary, writes in her autobiography Push Comes to Shove that she aims always to hold the audience's interest...

...Publicity represents it as a new musical because ballet doesn't draw the crowds that Billy Joel's fame does...

...Tharp, by contrast, finds that she can better judge her works when she sits in the audience...

...There are two casts, to save the dancers from exhaustion...

...Movin' Out is done in toe shoes and sneakers, on the floor in break-dance acrobatics and in the air with lifts exuberant, lascivious, graceful, whatever is appropriate...

...The dancers in Movin' Out are professionally trained in ballet, the most rigorous of dance styles, and several have careers with Twyla Tharp Dance...

...Raw material for a Tharp ballet might be inspired by a photograph or object, by a feeling required by the narrative, by the music's mood or by other people's choreography, for example Michael Jackson's moonwalk by William Marrie as Eddie...

...What I wanted to do was tell a story that would require being told in movement...

...Marrie was recently killed in a motorcycle accident and will be missed...

...She proves this point in an introductory passage to the televised version of In The Upper Room in which she dances the same several-minute sequence to two tunes with entirely different moods...

...Why do so many ballets fall short of profundity...

...In fact, it doesn't really require any plot (think of George Balanchine's Jewels...

...If the ballet seems to meander in the middle, it is because it was not created to lead to an end...

...Others focus not on Billy Joel, but on the Broadway tradition, and some reviewers have criticized Movin' Out on account of its plot...

...The action is based on real people and world events...

...Aesthetics is significant, but it should not stand without some backbone of logic...

...She is described as a crossover artist for her use of steps from many genres, and she enjoys a palette of steps wider than that used by any of her peers...

...After examining Tharp's mature works, you will not be misled by the enthusiastic but aimless prancing of modern avant-garde dance...

...Standing ovations demonstrate that audiences do not need persuading to enjoy Movin' Out...

...Others, who have greater fondness for Joel, would gladly go to hear his music performed, even if not by Joel himself...

...In response, the playbill expanded the plot description from a cramped two inches on the cast-and-credits page to a prominent full-page feature...

...War destroys the perfect couple of Judy and James, shatters Eddie's sanity, and rents Brenda and Tony's loyalty...

...Twyla Tharp has remarked that many of her ballets were made to solve a particular problem...

...Some of those who grew up with Billy Joel's songs, featured in this season's hit Movin' Out at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, disdain the show, thinking it little more than MTV outfitted for Broadway...

...Whether in film or theater, on the concert stage or now on Broadway, her greatest ballets will endure...

...This is satisfying because it allows viewers to shift their gaze to the ensemble for a moment without losing the sense of a prolonged duet central to the narrative...

...It is a full-length ballet performed in choreographer Twyla Tharp's unique idiom, mixing modern Judith Gelernter has contributed to the International Dictionary of Modern Dance, Dance Research Journal, Ballet Review, and A Core Collection in Dance...

...Ballet does not require a profound plot (witness the enchanted swans and nutcracker toy...

...Eventually Brenda and Tony reconcile, and Eddie learns to control his inner turmoil in a sort of psychological journey that validates the red, white, and blue American-road-sign look of the Movin' Out logo...

...What she has learned over the course of making more than a hundred dances brings mastery to the art...

...All styles coexist naturally within her idiom...