AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE
Last summer Twyla Tharp stopped dancing, disbanded her dance company, and joined American Ballet Theatre as artistic associate. The company’s all-Tharp program featured four dances, including Tharp’s signature The Fugue and the brand-new The Bum’s Rush. The seriousness and genuineness of the company’s commitment to Tharp is obvious. Their dancing–especially the stylistic contrasts between those ABT members who were once in Tharp’s company and those whose training was primarily traditional–suggests that the process of mutual adjustment and accommodation is anything but easy.
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Quartet’s opening, especially its unaffected terre a terre steps for Gregory and Harvey, is engaging. But suddenly something snaps, and the dancing is severed from the score. The more the four dancers hurry to get caught up in the music again, the further they lag behind. The dance encourages us to expect some sort of correspondence, some sort of give-and-take, between the four dancers and the four instruments; if we’ve seen much of Tharp’s work, we may expect a peculiar or even an intermittent correspondence, but a correspondence nonetheless. Unfortunately certain qualities of last Saturday’s labored performance–especially the four dancers’ apparent haste and unease–obscure that structural tie between movement and score.
The Fugue juxtaposes slow, sustained movement and queer, quick quivers, movement that is percussive and lyrical by turns. A dancer drops to kneeling in a flash, and then it takes several minutes for him to lower his torso to the floor; when the phrase is repeated by another dancer, the torso moves with unexpected swiftness. Arms wheel and swing; arm swings lead into pelvic swings. The Fugue closes with a movement phrase that has reappeared throughout the dance–standing on one bent leg, the dancer extends his other leg to the side, then suddenly slaps the floor with a flat foot–creating a comfortable sense of closure.
Like its score, In the Upper Room uses simple material repeated in increasingly complex patterns. In the opening, electronic pulses of sound translate to plain and uninflected prancing, a movement executed by different dancers at odd moments throughout the dance. In the harsh shafts of light and bright clouds of smoke created by Tipton’s design, the dancers appear out of nowhere, dance a few phrases, and disappear just as quickly. Tharp often layers the dancers in a close approximation of the score: two duets in the dimly lit background recall the underlying rhythms of the score, while new choreography–another duet–unspools at the front of the stage to accompany a fresh musical variation.
