Dance critics like to use the word “language” in describing the identifiable steps, movement chains, and tonality associated with choreographers of stature. At sight, you know it is Balanchine, Taylor, or Cunningham. You know it’s Fosse or Cole. But that metaphor does not often move to the next level, viz., whether (or not) in drawing upon his or her proprietary dance language, a choreographer succeeds in conducting an actual conversation. In the so-important revival of “Diabelli,” a little-seen work by Twyla Tharp dating from 1998, an unfettered dance maker demonstrates the witty, brilliant, tender, and zany chatter that Tharp, herself a loquacious person, could foster at the top of her game in response to great music. In this case, to Beethoven’s masterful “Diabelli Variations” (1823), a notorious, fifty-minute-long monster of a solo piano outing delivered con brio by Vladimir Rumyantsev at a baby grand in the orchestra pit. Those lucky enough to listen in on Tharp’s razor-sharp dance-banter will emerge elated. The reconstruction of “Diabelli,” seen at the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Performing Arts Center last weekend, is the happening event of Tharp’s current 60th anniversary tour headed to New York City Center. Despite its unfortunate pairing on the program with a contemporaneous Tharp work, “Slacktide,” to one of Philip Glass’s less compelling scores, nothing could topple the majesty of “Diabelli.”
Bless her, Tharp has studiously prepared thirty-three discrete vignettes (it’s a lot) with smooth transitions between. One of the two audiences I sat with processed the segmented structure with respectful silence. The next day, I returned for an audience with an insistent bozo (it only takes one) who punctuated the hour with interruptive applause, such a pity. (Some of the more adventurous tidbits do merit spontaneous applause.) Tharp responds to Mr. B’s (er … Beethoven’s) musical morsels, from somber dirges to rolling arpeggios, with classical balletic rigor graced by her inimitable tongue-in-cheek fillips.
“Diabelli” is a work, foremost, of crafty leaps and lifts that pop in almost magically. With no foreshadowing, a dancer appears in space clean split leap. A woman held between two men like a plank is carried off stage like a surfboard. A female dancer soars to land on a male dancer’s shoulder—how? how?
The music is sublime. A grand chord progression mounting the keyboard is matched by a girl whipping around her partner’s torso with momentum, pausing only to telegraph distinct shapes. He holds her at his side, as though a sword inside a sheath, or cozy in his arms like the rescue of a damsel in distress. One fanciful “trip around the world” ends in a swan dive.
“Diabelli” is filled with walks, some seem imported from Monty Python’s Department of Funny ones. A parade of minimalist ones, simple walks that sink into plie, provide an amuse-bouche for the nearly nonstop meal to follow. There’s a militaristic march with hands on hips. There’s a courtly quadrille that evokes rustling satin skirts and men in powdered wigs. To Beethovian chord-blocks the dancers go small, making little hops in place, hands tightened into fists and held behind backs.
Did I mention turning? Tharp’s “A” troupe spins in so-difficult backward attitude turns. Spectacular for their balance and beauty as, with nary a visible wobble, they revolve in near slow motion. What we see is the elegant “C” curve of the well-trained dancer’s attitude position.
“Diabelli” screams for smart costumes. Tharp, alas, sends great dancers before the public in dated black body-hiding jumpsuits with clownish little dickies painted with fake men’s ties. This is a diminution: of the dancers, of Tharp’s noble choreography, and certainly of her baby-boomer audience who go squinty after fifty minute of watching darkness. What was Tharp thinking? It brings the memory of the terrible togs in which she (and Santo Loquasto) dressed Baryshnikov in “Push Comes to Shove.” And the tasteless ones of her 50th anniversary tour.
Thus one felt despair that the second work of the program, “Slacktide,” opened on a dark stage populated, yet again, by dancers in black. “Slack tide,” at least this work had a Latin-adjacent backdrop projection in orangey-red. To a bubbly, if derivative, score of faux South American music by Philip Glass, replete with the breathy gaita, the South American wooden flute, Tharp at 83, dispatched a diluted version of her prior magisterial “Diabelli,” only lacking the pleasing formal structure — and it seemed under rehearsed. You hate seeing sallow dancers, blood drained from faces by the deluge of technical demands toward no particular end. And, only in “Slacktide”’s nod to a brown culture, did I notice the #sowhite personnel of this dance troupe. The (divine) exception was Brazilian-born Renan Cerdeiro of Miami City Ballet. God is he a great dancer.
We recently saw the “Harry Potter” stage show with its “time turner” machine zooming characters across the calendar. Here’s your chance to board a dance time turner and revel in a great choreographer’s works, yes, all the way from the last century!
Arts journalist Debra Levine is founder/editor/publisher of arts●meme.