by Leigh Witchel
Unlike Twyla Tharp’s last season at City Center, her current chamber season at The Joyce looked forward as much as back.
It started with a glance in the rearview mirror. Ocean’s Motion, made for the Spoleto Festival in 1975 to Chuck Berry, came early in Tharp’s career, but after breakthroughs such as Deuce Coupe. It followed that work’s pop jukebox formula, but in a more modest format.
The jukebox structure may have appealed to Tharp because it bridged concert, Broadway (Grease had been running for three years at that point) and pop culture, but it also gave her control of the structure; she had the option to hit shuffle.
Nearly half a century on, the work looked more nostalgic than avant-garde. The dancers all wore period costumes by her long-time designer Santo Loquasto: high school jackets, letter shirts and cheerleader outfits. The dancing melded 1950’s social dance with Tharp’s own slouchy vernacular.
It started with an argument between Miriam Gittens and Jake Tribus that moved into a group number. The opening led into a female trio that segued into a male duet, all both loose and tight: posing and slouching, but then moving into footwork and spinning at top speed.
Tharp’s small company, several of whom were repeats from her City Center show, were experienced and moved well. The section to School Days was a tight unison dance for the quintet, again looseness into hyperactivity.
Ocean’s Motion was amiable fun. Reed Tankersley did a short, strutting solo to Nadine, Daisy Jacobson, sporting a ponytail, opened Too Pooped to Pop with a cha-cha. Ocean’s Motion echoed Berry’s swagger, confidence and humor, as someone chewed gum and Gittens blew a bubble while the saxophones wailed. Combined with the designs, the high spirits felt like a distillation of Grease.
The quintet shimmied to Havana Moon, which led to a reprise of the opening. The opening was added after the premiere; the order of the numbers was changed and a duet to Memphis was removed. Evidently Tharp hit the shuffle button on the jukebox.
Even moving things around, Ocean’s Motion didn’t feel as if it were trying to go to any specific destination, and it didn’t. It was a diverting collection of hits that went by quickly. The piece was a low-key way to introduce an audience to her style, less pretentious that the later pop pieces Tharp did when she was hell-bent on entertaining us.
Daniel Ulbricht’s work for Tharp at City Center displayed him rejuvenated. Tharp obviously noticed; she had him alternate her new solo Brel with a favorite of hers, Herman Cornejo. Cornejo got the opening night (and the photos, alas, there are none of Ulbricht in the part) but Ulbricht gave a performance that augurs a great second chapter for him.
He wandered in wearing a simple black outfit: a scoop neck shirt and pants, and began a soliloquy to Quand on n’a que l’amour built of reaches and hesitations, expressions then sudden races through double assemblés. Ulbricht ate the solo up, tearing through the jumps charismatically.
The jukebox moved into another of Jacques Brel’s greatests hits, and Ulbricht came forward, forward, bereft as Brel begged us not to leave him. From there, Ulbricht kicked and slid into Amsterdam, with a tour jeté to fly off.
He returned a few moments later for Les Marquises, the steps ticking in the rhythm of the song, and then into Marieke, which started loosely but exploded into a huge manège of jetés speeding round the stage. Ulbricht left in a final double assemblé.
Like Ocean’s Motion, Brel is a jukebox, but unlike it, it’s a vehicle. From Mikhail Baryshnikov to Ethan Steifel to Herman Cornejo, Tharp has a type, and Ulbricht fits it. In some ways, Brel recalled the Leonid Jacobson vehicle that brought Baryshnikov into the public eye, Vestris. It mixed virtuosity and character depiction, and relied on similar quicksilver mood changes. Here, Tharp dumped the sorrow of Ne me quitte pas for the vigor of Amsterdam as soon as the record changed.
It’s marvelous that Ulbricht got to sink his teeth into Brel. He never gets something this juicy at New York City Ballet; his physique, which isn’t long, slots him as the sidekick, the supporting character. If the work traded on jukebox clichés, he still couldn’t ask for a more flattering solo.
After intermission came a world premiere, The Ballet Master, which may have had a story. John Selya, a longtime dancer for Tharp, played a passionate choreographer. Selya mounts Tharp’s work, so he’s already been a stand-in for her, here he played the role on stage.
Tharp used two unrelated pieces of music, Simeon Ten Holt’s 1980 a capella quartet Bi-Ba-Bo and Vivaldi’s violin concerto per la Solennità di S. Lorenzo to create a sort-of bifurcated work. To Ten Holt’s nonsense syllables, Tribus and Tankersley began a jam-packed, endless phrase, one of Tharp’s the-entire-lexicon-in-one-breath-while-hopping-on-one-foot combinations. That kind of frenzy can be what’s thrilling about Tharp, but here, it felt airless.
On a bare stage, with the Joyce’s brick alcove at the back visible, Selya observed the men, his long hair unkempt, wearing a green velvet jacket and a long, florid scarf. He looked part Noël Coward, part Samuel Beckett.
The guys kept going. Gittens entered, the men lifted her, she left and they kept racing. Selya nodded and moved sympathetically with them. He was a ballet master in the older sense of the word, the title Balanchine adopted and the current artistic directors of New York City Ballet no longer use.
As current dancers would understand the term, a ballet master is there to make sure the work looks its best. Selya watched the dancers and nodded encouragingly; he was looking at his steps, not their dancing. So let’s say choreographer.
Cassandra Trenary, swathed in pink, bourréed in at the back. Selya reacted to her vision, but it wasn’t clear why. Tharp was trading on conventions but in such lightning shorthand it was difficult to parse how she was using them.
Ulbricht came in as a stage manager, dressed in an argyle sweater. After his big solo turn in Brel, it was easy to assume this was a non-dancing cameo, but you would have been fooled.
In another hint that Selya was Tharp, he encouraged Tribus and Tankersley to box. Trenary drifted in and out, dutifully reappearing when the music slowed down.
The women danced more Tharpian slouches and ballet poses. Tharp fixated on ballet’s externals, a pose or a flourish, like someone speaking a foreign language, aggressively. The full group participated in the rehearsal, and a lift unraveled. Selya became frustrated.
The music segued to Vivaldi, the dancers reappeared in a favorite of dance costume designers: period undergarments. Until now it looked as if, like Ulbricht’s role, Selya’s role would be limited to simple movements and mime. Uh uh.
The rehearsal was now a performance. Ulbricht came in, dressed as Sancho Panza, Selya became Don Quixote. Ulbricht flourished and ran off, then Trenary reappeared again, presumably as Dulcinea, though just because that connection was made didn’t mean Tharp was going to do anything with it.
Selya danced more and more. At first it was first largely arms and quick footwork but it escalated to steps. If it wasn’t with the form he had when he danced for American Ballet Theatre a quarter of a century ago, it was still impressive, like watching Vladimir or Estragon do a ballet solo out of nowhere.
Ulbricht came flying back in. If he was once again the sidekick, Tharp has a lot of sympathy for the sidekick, and he got to outshine his master. Selya took off the breastplate and helmet. Pretty soon he did a double tour, which was a trick too far; theatrically, he almost collapsed.
Trenary reentered now unveiled, wearing just a pink slip. She and Selya did a double solo opposite one another. Selya’s might have been more indicative but he kept up before the men lifted Trenary away, leaving Selya to dance alone.
Ulbricht brought back Selya’s breastplate. Again, Ulbricht shone both as a dancer and a clear, comic actor, trying to keep his boss in check even as the Don nearly broke his back sitting on him.
Things worked up. After an impossibly quick change, Ulbrict reappeared with Trenary, both now in gold and black while the other dancers continued on in déshabillé around them.
The women climbed up the men and tumbled off, everyone raced in and out in the kind of frenzied activity that Tharp has set in The Golden Section or In the Upper Room, what she sees as an apotheosis. Selya slid in to close the work with a non-ending.
Tharp’s not one to have a cogent thesis, but all the clues pointed to The Ballet Master being about an aging artist surrounded by the young. One could assume Tharp saw or at least knew about Balanchine’s Don Quixote. That moment of imagining himself as Cervantes’ hero didn’t go well, either.
Tharp’s mind isn’t particularly suited to narrative work; she seems to see narrative as things that happened, without worrying about why. She’s not one for clarity or explanation. If she knows, that seems to be enough for her.
Her specialty is movement – lots of it, and there was plenty of that to enjoy in all of the works. Some of how you feel about Tharp comes down to how you feel about structure, order or disorder, symmetry and chaos. Tharp has no love for order or symmetry; in fact she has an almost compulsive need to disrupt it, which at her best produces bracing results. At her worst, it’s like a jigsaw puzzle she dumped on the table and left us to sort out.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Ocean’s Motion, Brel, The Ballet Master – Twyla Tharp Dance
The Joyce Theater, New York, NY
February 14, 2024
Cover: John Selya, Cassandra Trenary and Daniel Ulbricht in The Ballet Master. Photo © Steven Pisano.
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