Dance critics like to use the word “language” in describing the highly 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 often does not get extended to the query of whether or not, in drawing upon his or her proprietary dance language, a choreographer conducts 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,” a notorious, fifty-minute-long monster of a solo piano outing dating from 1823 that is delivered con brio by Vladimir Rumyantsev from 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 60^th 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 my audiences processed the segmented structure with polite 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 applause.) Tharp responds to Mr. B’s (er … Beethoven) musical morsels, from somber dirges to rolling arpeggios, with classical balletic rigor graced by her inimitable tongue-in-cheek fillips.

It is a work, foremost, of crafty leaps and lifts that appear almost magically. With no foreshadowing, a dancer pops in space in a clean split leap. A woman held between two men like a plank is carried off stage like a surfboard. A female dancer soars through space 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 whipped around her partner’s torso with momentum, pausing only to telegraph distinct shapes. She is held at his side like a sword in its sheath, or cozy in his arms like the rescue of a damsel in distress. Her fanciful “trip around the world” ends in a swan dive.

“Diabelli” features walks 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 calls for 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 sends her “A” troupe through backward-spun attitude turns. Spectacular for their balance and beauty as, with nary a visible wobble, they revolve in near slow motion . What’s on view is the elegant “C” curve of the highly trained dancer’s attitude position.

“Diabelli” screams for smart costumes. Tharp Instead 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 50^th anniversary tour.  

Thus one felt despair that the second work of the program, “Slacktide,” opened on a dark stage populated by dancers in black. At least this work received 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 work. It was much the same dance as “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 composition of this 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 able to zoom characters across the calendar. Here’s your chance to board a dance time turner and revel in a great choreographer’s works, yes, from the last century!

Dance critic Debra Levine is founder/editor/publisher of arts●meme.

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