Timeless Twyla

Let’s start with the obvious, or maybe to some this notion will be highly disputable, even offensive. OK, then, let’s start with what kept repeating in my head as I walked out of UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, synapses abuzz with the wonders of Twyla Tharp Dance’s 60^th anniversary “Diamond Jubilee” program: My God, Twyla Tharp really is the most brilliantly inventive choreographer now alive on the planet.

Performance

Twyla Tharp Dance 2025 Diamond Jubilee

Place

Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, California, February 10, 2025

Words

Rachel Howard

Twyla Tharp Dance in “Slacktide” by Tharp. Photograph by Studio Aura

Tharp repertory doesn’t consistently come to California—we have to catch-as-catch-can from visits by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and others—so having her company at Cal Performances for its fourth stop on a 21-city tour was a rare treat, and an eager crowd filled the hall on a Super Bowl Sunday. The dancing from a virtuosic 12-member ensemble was unflaggingly spectacular. The live music, delivered from the pit first by pianist Vladimir Rumyantsev and then by the Chicago ensemble Third Coast Production, was spectacular too. But most spectacular of all was the mind that holds the choreography and the music together, shining through every surprising but oh-so-right phrase of movement.

You could see this mind most clearly and dazzlingly at work in the opening “Diabelli,” created in 1998. How to choreograph Beethoven’s subtly subversive, endlessly nuanced, nearly hour-long set of inventions sprung from another composer’s absurdly simple waltz theme? Perhaps only Tharp could do it. And as in Beethoven’s musical inventions, Tharp’s response proceeds matter-of-factly and simply. Ten dancers wear black pants and tops with little faux concert-attire tuxedo dickies. The lighting is basic, the stage bare, and the dancers are just being themselves, dancing. They start in couples and groups of three, arms pulling to their waists with clenched fists as they walk in a posture of grand dignity that, like the music, teeters on parody. As rolling hips, virtuosic turning combinations, and upside-down lifts enter the mix, the logic of their partnering could lead anywhere, like sentences with perfect grammar but wildly unexpected content. Social contexts appear and dissolve—sometimes the dancers clump together, gossiping about other groups among them, but this doesn’t become a scheme of meaning. The dance has no narrative line, and no statement beyond exploring the endless shades of how human beings interact with one another.

Twyla Tharp Dance in “Slacktide” by Tharp. Photograph by Studio Aura

As is her trademark and her irrepressible instinct, Tharp’s movement nimbly quotes from all across human culture. There are sections of vigorous folk hand claps, others with prancing arm gestures taken straight from ballet’s tradition of Hungarian character dancing. Even more mind-boggling than Tharp’s vernacular dexterity is the fluid, deep sensitivity of its response to the music. Perhaps my favorite section comes in a late variation when pairs of dancers waggle their knees as they shake jazz hands above and toss each other about—they’re jitterbugging. As a musician friend pointed out to me after, although Beethoven’s variations were composed nearly 200 years ago, the reference is entirely apt: twentieth-century jazz musicians picked up those rhythms from Beethoven as an influence.

The tonal fluctuations of both the music and Tharp’s response are immense. Miriam Gittens (an artistic associate at Gibney Company) and Alexander Peters (currently a principal at Miami City Ballet) dance many of the most tender and trusting duets, with astounding connection. The overall accent lands on the lightly comic, though, and one of the most memorable sections is a duet for Renan Cerdeiro and Oliver Greene-Cramer where one keeps stepping up like Mr. Tough Guy on the variation’s strong chords, and the other steps up and brushes him off on the higher-octave response—a perfect comic reflection of the music to rival anything in Mark Morris’s oeuvre.

Twyla Tharp Dance in “Slacktide” by Tharp. Photograph by Studio Aura

But we haven’t even gotten to the big news on this program yet, the brand-new dance: “Slacktide.” It marks Tharp’s return to working with the music of Philip Glass, nearly 40 years after her landmark “In the Upper Room.” (After a slow-motion ensemble opening, the dancers entering as though moving through water, “Slacktide” actually launches with the exquisite Marzia Memoli hoofing it up in bouncing phrases from “In the Upper Room.”) “Slacktide” is not as consistently formally mind-blowing as “In the Upper Room,” to my eyes on a first viewing. But it does feature a mind-blowing part for Reed Tankersley, a frequent Tharp dancer who danced in her 50th anniversary tour a decade ago.

Tankersley is a stocky dancer, his non-balletic lines emphasized in the costume design by Victoria Beck, who dresses him in knee-length soccer shorts while many other dancers wear sleeker full-length pants. Tharp uses him deliciously against type, shooting him as though out of a cannon onto the stage for the slinkiest, most fluttering flute parts in the score. And damn if he isn’t the slinkiest dancer—and the most grooving. In jumps that seem to break the very air and ribcage rolls the turn his body to liquid mercury, he is possessed by the music, so seemingly lost to both himself and the audience that the spectacle is almost disquietingly intimate.

The music is a particularly entrancing Glass score, “Aguas de Amazonia,” a 10-part suite, lightly rearranged here, originally written for a group of musicians in Brazil who created their own original instruments, and inspired by the different rivers in that country feeding the Amazon. (If you can catch one of the tour performances that includes live music from Third Coast Percussion, do, because the flute playing by Constance Volk is unbelievable.) The river/Amazon theme has no connection to “Slacktide.” Instead, in interviews, Tharp has said the dance is about time—how it speeds up, slows down, is dependent on our relativity and perceptions. A “slack tide” is a moment when the water is still, not moving in either direction of a tidal pull. And at the final peak of Tharp’s “Slacktide,” Tankersley throws his body into another dancer’s hands for a lift—and the whole ensemble magically freezes as the rhythms of Glass’s score rush on.

The lighting design by Justin Townsend, a strong glow from the back wall that makes the dancers move in and out of silhouette, is integral. The deeper truth embodied in the whole dance, to me, is in the dialectical tension between temporality and eternity. The reality of time is ever-shifting and contains both. And yet, the brilliance of what Tharp did seems like it could exist in some protected space-time pocket forever. Maybe I just want that to be true.

Rachel Howard

Rachel Howard is the former lead dance critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. Her dance writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Hudson Review, Ballet Review, San Francisco Magazine and Dance Magazine.

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