AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE
Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs has metamorphosed several times. It was premiered by Twyla Tharp Dance in 1982, then recast for ABT in 1984 as Sinatra Suite, a work for a single couple rather than seven. This year the seven-couple original was given its ABT premiere.
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Nine Sinatra Songs is a very different dance from Sinatra Suite, which I saw ABT perform several years ago. Tharp’s reputation for raffish wit, and Baryshnikov’s performance then–his easy pop sensibility and sly sense of humor–made me think it an elegant in-joke: Sinatra? Ballroom dancing? You’ve got to be kidding! Of course Tharp both was and was not kidding; but as I recall, the sense of fun was strong enough that the cruelty of the dance to “That’s Life” struck a jarring note.
ABT’s performance may have enhanced my sense that Nine Sinatra Songs is serious business. These dancers gave it a silky, gracious treatment, their timing especially subtle and accomplished. Tharp’s choreography often anticipates the lyrics, so that just before Sinatra sings “step,” a dancer steps, or just before he sings “not in a shy way,” a dancer looks shy. It takes a liquid, intuitive timing and just the right sense of respectful parody to anticipate rather than broadcast what’s coming. Susan Jaffe and Kevin O’Day were beautifully electric in “Strangers in the Night”; in “All the Way,” Christine Dunham and Michael Owen perfectly captured the thoughtful, formal negotiations of a mature couple on the verge of something very serious.
In the Upper Room muses rather than pronounces; it makes nothing absolute. The dance doesn’t look meditative at all–it’s tied so closely to the almost too intense Glass music that the effect is more of feverish, almost unmotivated energy. But this is also what makes In the Upper Room so moving–the sense that choreographer and dancers are striving toward some object that remains enigmatic.
