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<\/a>Is that a familiar leg? (L to R): Ron Todorowski, Amy Ruggiero, and John Selya in Twyla Tharp’s Yowzie<\/em>. Photo: Ruven Afanador<\/p><\/div>\n Twyla Tharp premiered her first work, Tank Dive<\/em>, on April 29, 1965, in room 1604 of Hunter College\u2019s 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 1976 interview, the event was free. Who would have dared complain?<\/p>\n This year Tharp celebrates her 50th<\/sup> anniversary as a choreographer. Over the years since 1965, she has\u2014like one of her heroes, George Balanchine\u2014not only made dances for her own company, as well as for others; she choreographed Broadway musicals; and worked in film and television. During the early part of her career, she could be identified as an obstreperous postmodernist breaking the mold of conventional structure, and if you didn\u2019t like what she made, that was not a problem she cared to address. Her onstage manner and that of her dancers was severe. Eventually, she decided that communicating \u201csomething to everybody\u201d (her words) could be rewarding; eventually her dancers smiled occasionally.<\/p>\n Some of my many favorites among her pieces are those in which she pondered, questioned, and explored what ballet, popular dance, and modern dance might have in common and the ways in which they differed. I think back on her The Bix Pieces<\/em> (1972), with its lecture-demonstration component; Deuce Coupe <\/em>(1973), in which, initially, her dancers and members of the Joffrey Ballet shared the stage; and Push Comes to Shove<\/em> (1976), which dissected the virtuosity of the recently defected Mikhail Baryshnikov and taught him how getting down could hobnob with bolting into the air and spinning indefinitely. In the culminating work in this group, the brilliant In the Upper Room <\/em>(1986), set to a score by Philip Glass, two \u201cteams\u201d (one wearing sneakers, the women in the other sporting red pointe shoes) showed their stuff, met, mingled, and danced their way to heaven.<\/p>\n The permutations of the style that she developed in work after work could result in fierceness, as they did in the battle scene she created to Billy Joel\u2019s \u201cSaigon Song\u201d in her greatest musical, Movin\u2019 Out. <\/em>And near-vaudevillian wit and comedy infused other creations. Her approach to lyricism could, without sentimentality, break your heart. You see these qualities and more in the two new works that make up the bulk of the program that she and a company of terrific dancers put together some months ago. Its tour ends with a brief New York season, presented by the Joyce Theater at the former New York State Theater.<\/p>\n John Selya in Tharp’s Yowzie<\/em>. Photo: Ruven Afanador<\/p><\/div>\n In both Preludes and Fugues <\/em>and Yowzie<\/em>, as well as in First Fanfare<\/em> and Second Fanfare<\/em>, which\u00a0 precede each of these, you see a tribe of extraordinary dancers, who give every step, every prodigious burst into the air, every fusillade of rapid footwork the air of ease. No big-deal preparation, no watch-me-now presentation. Tharp veteran John Selya can launch himself from a stroll into an uncanny twisting leap with the nonchalance of a man switching on the morning coffeemaker. These dancers have impressive and impressively variegated backgrounds; some have danced with major ballet companies, others come from modern dance, still others have Broadway credits. All of them can do almost anything\u2014from Selya and Rika Okamoto (once in Martha Graham\u2019s company) to Reed Tankersley, who graduated from Juilliard in 2014.<\/p>\n First Fanfare <\/em>brings the dancers on and off the stage in a series of amicable sorties. The recorded music, John Zorn\u2019s \u201cAntiphonal Fanfare for the Great Hall,\u201d blasted out by seven members of the Practical Trumpet Society, summons them in batches. Tharp is introducing us to the dancers, as well as preparing us for the works to come. So Matthew Dibble and Nicholas Coppula, the first to take the stage, later reprise their first material and add a battery of fouett\u00e9s, <\/em>whipping that outstretched leg around to froth the air (I\u2019ve forgotten whether they both did this echt-ballet feat or only one of them). On the less elegant side, Daniel Baker wrenches his body around and skids across the floor. Tankersley sports like a bumblebee around two tall, long-legged beauties you might recall from the New York City Ballet (Kaitlyn Gilliland and Savannah Lowery). All the dancers show us their speedy, pointy footwork, as well as their shrugs, collapses, and \u201cwhat\u2019s that all about?\u201d gazes.<\/p>\n Tharp has offered a terse introduction to the program: \u201cSimply put, Preludes and Fugues <\/em>is the world as it ought to be, Yowzie <\/em>as it is. The Fanfares<\/em> celebrate both.\u201d I\u2019ll stave off arguing with this for later. She mined the 48 preludes and fugues that make up J.S. Bach\u2019s Well-Tempered Clavier<\/em>, Books I and II and chose a reasonable number (more preludes than fugues), shifting the order as she pleased from recordings by David Korevaar and by Angela Hewitt. Bach composed these pieces as exercises for fingers in all the major and minor keys, but what exercises! Tharp sees dancers as heroes, their discipline and skills and trust of one another standing for an ideal world. She and Johann Sebastian are well matched.<\/p>\n Twyla Tharp’s Preludes and Fugues<\/em>. L to R: Daniel Baker, Amy Ruggiero, Nicholas Coppula, and Eva Trapp. Photo: Ruven Afanador<\/p><\/div>\n The choreography for Preludes and <\/em>Fugues doesn\u2019t announce itself, however, as idyllic or \u201cbeautiful\u201d all the time. Nor is it \u201cstoryless\u201d(a term Balanchine preferred to \u201cabstract”) as, say, In the Upper Room <\/em>is. It can be bold, sweet-natured, smooth, bouncy, witty, rowdy, dramatic, often at practically the same time. And all of it displays Tharp\u2019s remarkable gift for varying dynamics; she captures marvelously the shifting speeds, directions and emphases that mark our lives. Her musicality is fine-tuned to musical structure, but she\u2019s not wedded to the rhythms\u2014 pouncing on them occasionally, marking their high points, but often dipping into them the way you might dip into a stream when you walk along its banks, sensing its changes in flow.<\/p>\n The first of many sections in Preludes and Fugues <\/em>is a duet for Selya and Savannah Lowery. Lighting designer James F. Ingalls gives them a bit of blue, and they behave like a couple of people alone and tender in a ballroom. Often holding each other in the traditional grip, they swirl in the music in ways both fluid and complex, mixing in a whiff of a tango here, a polka there, with a non-waltz waltz as a touchstone. In contrast, the second section, a duet for Dibble and Amy Ruggiero is rapid enough to render them giddy; a flurry of lifts, and they\u2019re away.<\/p>\n Some of the moves are eccentric. Tankersley lowers Ramona Kelley to a prone position one jerk at a time, and men sling women around in ways that can be peculiar as well as breathtaking and intimate. There are a few allusions to courtly behavior (Baker kisses Okamoto\u2019s hand, although neither of them makes a big deal of it). Human urges enter the picture. Now it\u2019s Ron Todorowski who\u2019s smitten with Lowry and Gilliland, who stalk in at one point, and he can\u2019t make up his mind between these goddesses. They\u2019ll have none of him, even though he kneels and opens his mouth in a silent howl; he exits shuddering and twitching.<\/p>\n Twyla Tharp’s Preludes and Fugues<\/em>. L to R: Daniel Baker, Amy Ruggiero, Rika Okamoto, Matthew Dibble, Ron Todorowski, Savannah Lowery, Kaitlyn Gilliland, John Selya, Nicholas Coppula, Ramona Kelley, Eva Trapp, Reed Tankersley. Photo: Sharen Bradford – The Dancing Image<\/p><\/div>\n In Preludes and Fugues<\/em>, Tharp, as is her wont, often presents an image of a busy society, with trios or quartets or duos engaged in different simultaneous activity. That this density looks energized instead of confusing may be attributed to her masterly choreographic skills. Discussing her Brahms-Haydn<\/em> in a 2001 interview, she pointed out that \u201cthere is a true support system between the foreground, the middle ground, and the background\u201d and added that it took her twelve years to learn how to manage triple counterpoint like that. She also expertly sneaks unison out of complexity. Suddenly in Preludes and Fugues<\/em>, four dancers stand shoulder-to-shoulder. Suddenly all the men are together facing all the women, and you can take in the full range of muted colors in Santo Loquasto\u2019s semi-Grecian dresses. And suddenly, near the end, to that prelude of Bach\u2019s that Charles Gounod poached as the underpinnings for his \u201cAve Maria,\u201d all twelve dancers are in a circle, spinning in place and spinning around it, their palms pressing down on the air.<\/p>\n Preludes and Fugues <\/em>finishes back where it began, with Selya and Lowery, alone together with the night and the music.<\/p>\n O.K. so I don\u2019t quite see this amazing piece as presenting the world as it ought to be. And I don\u2019t see Yowzie<\/em> as the world as it is. The latter is a gutsy, bawdy, beautifully organized vaudeville of behavior that\u2019s delivered with heightened theatricality. I get what Tharp is driving at, but if this represents the world as it is, we\u2019d all die young, drained by our efforts.<\/p>\n An image from Second Fanfare<\/em>: Matthew Dibble and Rika Okamoto. Photo: Sharen Bradford – The Dancing Image<\/p><\/div>\n After the intermission, she warms us up with Second Fanfare, <\/em>which she set to Zorn\u2019s \u201cIn Excelsis,\u201d performed by the American Brass Quintet. The dancers appear in rowdy silhouettes against a glowing red curtain, and loom behind it as giant shadows. It\u2019s a shock when they appear in Yowzie<\/em> wearing astoundingly gaudy costumes by Loquasto that give a new slant to the term Broadway applies to its chorus dancers: gypsies.<\/p>\n Tharp has learned much from her work in musical theater, and these dancers know how to time a glance, make a shrug count, do a double take, play drunk, exit with an implied wink. They\u2019re not playing to the audience in predictable ways, but they are drawing on theatrical traditions. And they have characters to play and stories to tell. The music takes us back to another era. Three of the seven recorded selections played by Henry Butler\/Steve Bernstein and the Hot 9 are by Jelly Roll Morton; one, \u201cViper\u2019s Drag,\u201d is by Fats Waller, and Wesley Wilson wrote \u201cGimme a Pigfoot.\u201d Butler contributed the remaining two selections.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>