From “AfterTime” to Tharp’s “In the Upper Room” we made a leap less than forty years backwards, and yet what an eon shift it seemed! Perhaps it is showing my age to be so attached to a work that, in many ways, captures the nineteen-eighties, from its commissioned Philip Glass score (composed before his music’s near-ubiquitous use in dance) to the striped Norma Kamali costumes that progress to ever greater pops of bare skin and red (Kamali being the designer of the red swimsuit worn by Farrah Fawcett in the pinup that adorned 10 million teenage bedrooms).

The thing about “In the Upper Room,” though, it is that it’s also timeless, a fog-drenched chamber of formal brilliance that holds a transcendent spirit of interconnection we might even call holy. Which thought sent me right back to the apocalypse vision of “AfterTime” as I Googled a factual question about “In the Upper Room,” and forgot to append “-ai” to my search query in order to shield myself from AI-generated results. And so, there at the top of my screen was an AI summary I hadn’t asked for, full of sensitive human insights about “In the Upper Room,” but devoid of any human attribution. Ah! AI had strip-mined Jack Anderson’s review of “In the Upper Room’s” first New York performance in 1987. Well, I grew up on Jack Anderson’s reviews as a baby dance writer, so I decided to honor his intellectual labor. After all, it’s tricky to review a new ballet as complex as “In the Upper Room,” and to do so on an overnight deadline. How to remember what you’ve seen with just one viewing? How to filter all your first reactions and land on an honest response that might age well?  

As it happens, Jack Anderson had the presence of mind to immediately call “In the Upper Room” “a work of substance.” He captured its wild mix of dance idioms, its swinging swagger, its panoply of moods, from silly to mysterious. He did think that the middle sections felt fragmented, and that the ingenious evolution of the costuming saved the ballet’s traction. Watching and rewatching PNB’s rendition, staged by original cast member Shelley Washington, I’d ever so slightly disagree. 

The more Chaplin-esque sections for the sneaker-clad dancers Tharp called “stompers” were the highlight (PNB’s dancers do camaraderie and loose-limbed rhythm so well). Meanwhile the passages for the “bomb squad”—the dancers in ballet footgear, including bright red pointe shoes—needed sharpening, but damn this is hard material, and Clara Ruf Maldonado and Yuki Takahashi heroically managed to nearly synchronize much of the time. The spectacular full cast finale was the weakest section, with a few fumbled lifts near the end. And radiant Leta Biasucci and Lucien Postlewaite were the solid center throughout, hypnotically able to shift between a surreal slow motion quality and sparkling syncopation. 

Which is to say that PNB’s “Upper Room” was less sharp than what I’ve seen in person from Miami City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre (and on video from Tharp’s original cast; how I wish I had gotten to see the revival with dancers hand-picked by Tharp in 2022!). But the muddier parts were certainly forgivable: although PNB first danced “Upper Room” in 2007, this is the first time they’ve tackled it in a decade. I hope they’ll bring it back next year and keep growing in it.