Twyla Tharp at PNB

Photo © Greg Gorman

Editor's Note: PNB's Twyla Tharp showcase continues through Sun. Oct 5. McCaw Hall: 301 Mercer St. (Seattle Center), 441-2424. $25-$155. Thurs.-Sat., 7:30 p.m.; Sun., Oct. 5, 1 p.m. Sandra Kurtz saw the show over the weekend, and here's her take:

All Tharp, and Then Some
By Sandra Kurtz

Forty-plus years ago, when Twyla Tharp first began to choreograph, the dance world was arranged in some pretty orderly boxes. Ballet was based on the classical heritage descended from the Renaissance, modern dance was an intensely personal and expressive form created by a series of inspiring gurus and performed by companies of acolytes, folk dance was a mildly theatricalized version of traditional forms, and jazz dance combined stylized movement with vernacular music. Today almost all those categories are exploded, and Tharp has been at the center of the blast. She’s combined styles and genres, layered profound meaning and eccentric behaviors, dressed austere patterns in designer costumes and brought an astonishing intelligence to the most sensual of art forms.

Tharp didn’t create contemporary dance single-handed, but she was an integral part of the birth, and is one of its most skilled practitioners. She is the proximal reason that Pacific Northwest Ballet dancers, classically trained but widely experienced, can perform Paul Taylor as well as Marius Petipa, and that PNB director Peter Boal can mix Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine in a season. Look in a dictionary for a definition of "crossover" dance, and you’ll likely see one of her dances there, vibrating on the page. From the early days of Deuce Coupe (premiered in 1973 with the Joffrey Ballet and her own company) where she included a dancer performing an alphabetical list of ballet steps in the middle of a Beach Boys maelstrom, she’s been crossing traditional barriers.

The "All Tharp" program that PNB is dancing right now doesn’t quite run the gamut of her repertoire, but that’s only because it would take many more works to pull off that trick. In this package, we get Tharp the pattern-maker, the social commentator and the shrewd manipulator of popular culture. Which isn’t to say there aren’t astonishing patterns in her commentary and pop culture references in her most classical endeavors — the most consistent feature of Tharp’s work, from concert dance and Broadway to film and video, is its multitude of layers. This is one of the reasons her work plays so well to a wide variety of audiences — there’s always something for everyone there.

Opus 111, one of two world premieres in this program, opens with a pair of dancers marking time, very like Tharp’s In the Upper Room, which PNB danced last fall. But while that work jets along on the back of its Phillip Glass score, this one responds to the pastoral quality of the Brahms quintet it’s named for. Groups of couples come and go, sliding, spinning and tumbling together, seeming close to the ground even when jumping. Carla Körbes and Batkhurel Bold are the opening couple, and several times through the dance they bookend the stage, reinforcing the spatial and kinetic symmetry that gives the work part of its satisfaction. But it’s laced with little folk and jazz details like shimmys and flat-footed strides, and spliced together in complex repeating patterns that echo and comment on the structure of the score — it’s a high wire 21st century version of a 19th century genre painting.

The other premiere, Afternoon Ball, is all about the characters. A trio of street dwellers barely able to cope with their shifting relationships and a more affluent, settled couple — on one level it’s a depression-era musical, albeit with a post-modern score by Russian composer Vladimir Martynov. In the opening night cast, Olivier Wevers and Kaori Nakamura dig into their roles as two thirds of the twitchy trio, but guest artist Charlie Neshyba-Hodges is phenomenal as the final member. He served as Tharp’s rehearsal assistant for several years, as well as dancing in her two recent Broadway shows (Movin’ Out and The Times They Are A-Changin’) — he embodies the complexity of her work at its trickiest, and to see him balance multiple rhythmic patterns while four different body parts go in forty different directions is a lesson in human kinetic potential. He is the closest thing the group has to a ringleader, but when the others seem to abandon him his breakdown is equally impressive. Stanko Milov and Ariana Lallone waltz through the scene intermittently, bringing with them all the cultural references that romantic dance style suggests. They don’t seem to connect with the trio, but just as this begins to look like an examination of class distinctions, Lallone enters dressed in white, a benevolent manifestation of the angel of death. Tharp has compared Afternoon Ball to the classic tale The Little Match Girl, which also ends with death and transfiguration. But alongside this set of references there’s a small loop back to dance history as well, as the final tableau is a moment from George Balanchine’s Serenade.

Nine Sinatra Songs closes the program here, as it probably closed many performances when Tharp first made it in 1982. Underneath the recordings of Sinatra standards like "My Way" and "That’s Life," under the Oscar de la Renta costumes and the engaging characterizations is a rigorous examination of the duet form. Seven couples work out how two people dance together — how they hold each other, lift each other, maneuver around each other and come back together. So much of the easy sensuality of the work feels improvisational that it tricks us into thinking they’re all just playing around. But every twitch and shimmy has been carefully chosen, lovingly practiced and faithfully reproduced in each performance — as Tharp dancers have said in the past, even their eyelashes are choreographed. By a woman who pays as much attention to the flutter of an eyelid as to the rotation of the universe.

Topics: Ballet & Dance

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