American Ballet Theatre's Tharp Trio at Lincoln Center, May 30-June 3 Does anyone dare to call Giselle dated? I doubt it. It’s a centuries-old classic that’s had numerous facelifts. I don’t often wish myself back at its premiere in 1832. However, feeling a twinge of nostalgia for something in your own not-so-distant past can be enriching when contemplating it anew. I wrote my review of … [Read more...]
Juilliard Dancers Predicting Spring
Watching the Juilliard School’s annual Spring Dances, I think of young racehorses turned loose on a course. The Juilliard performers aren’t as young as those ballet dancers who join companies while still in high school; after four years at the school, they’ll graduate with BFAs. However, all that they’ve learned, and are still learning, is on the line in these performances, and often, they’re … [Read more...]
Twyla Tharp Dances Again
Twyla Tharp Dance appears at the Joyce Theater, September 19 through October 8 What do I admire—love— about Twyla Tharp’s best choreography? Its scrappiness, its heroism, its tenderness, her masterly way with form and dynamics. She knows how to make a tight, punchy barrage of little steps erupt into a slow soar, how to turn a canon into a fugue, how to let unison slide into diversity and … [Read more...]
Moving Architecture
American Ballet Theatre presents ballets by Tharp, Lang, and Millepied. Goethe once wrote this: “Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music.” For Havelock Ellis—one of the writers on the arts that Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey found inspiring early in the twentieth century—dance and architecture were the sources on which the visual arts were built. Watching one of … [Read more...]
Twyla Tharp: Past, Present, Future
Twyla Tharp presents one new creation and two golden oldies at the Joyce. Watching Reed Tankersley perform the long opening solo in Twyla Tharp’s 1980 Brahms Paganini confirmed my sense that Tharp considers dancers as heroes. In this work, which closes the program at the Joyce Theater billed as “Twyla Tharp and Three Dances,” Tankersley, alone onstage, performs Book I (a theme and fourteen … [Read more...]
Bracing Winds from Miami
Miami City Ballet bursts into Lincoln Center. Ten years ago this summer, Miami City Ballet performed at Jacob’s Pillow. This is what I wrote in the Village Voice: “Miami City Ballet’s dancers tear into Balanchine’s works with such appetite for speed and scale that you wonder how they stay in control. Their legacy is clear. They came to Balanchine through Miami’s artistic director Edward … [Read more...]
Twyla Tharp: Fifty Years of Making Dances
Twyla Tharp ends her 50th Anniversary Tour in New York City. Twyla Tharp premiered her first work, Tank Dive, on April 29, 1965, in room 1604 of Hunter College’s Art Department (where she was not a student). It was the only dance on the program and lasted four minutes, which she considered to be the longest amount of time she thought she could fill to perfection. Besides, she noted in a … [Read more...]
Perspectives on Classicism
American Ballet Theatre opens it Lincoln Center season with ballets by Morris, Ashton, and Tharp Ask a choreographer bred in modern dance to create a ballet for an esteemed classical company, and what ensues? If the choreographer in question is Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp, the resultant work often both honors tradition and knocks it around a little. This seemed true at American Ballet … [Read more...]
Up and Coming Meet the Masters
Juilliard Dance presents works by Tharp, Lubovitch, and Feld. Suzanne Beahrs Dance performs at Danspace. I count Twyla Tharp’s Baker’s Dozen among the world’s great dances. When I saw it in 1979, performed by her marvelous company, I thought I’d die of pleasure. How could I not hustle uptown to see Juilliard Dance’s annual challenge to its super-talented students, when Baker’s Dozen was … [Read more...]
November Potpourri
Seeing American Ballet Theatre during its too-brief season at City Center (nine works and eight performances in five days) could give spectators who devour the company’s spring shows at the Metropolitan Opera a new slant on the dancers. No tutus or tiaras on view, no see-me-ace-this displays of virtuosity, no hordes of elaborately costumed courtiers standing around watching some princess do what … [Read more...]