by Leigh Witchel
Gibney Company, a group dedicated towards social justice as well as dance, brought two short, early Twyla Tharp works to its season at The Joyce Theater, along with two more recent commissions for a program that journeyed from concise to self-indulgent rambling.
After at least 50 years Tharp’s two works, rather than feeling revolutionary, seemed to uphold old-fashioned virtues such as artistic rigor, structure and putting the choreography first. It’s stuff you miss watching in them newfangled works the kids are making today.
The Fugue came second on the program, but from 1970, it was Tharp’s breakout work. Originally done by three women (Tharp, Rose Marie Wright and Sarah Rudner), writers have described it as a feminist statement, but later on Tharp cast it with all men, or mixed, so that was likely not central to her conception. The work, inspired by Bach, is carefully constructed, so it takes on the shading of whatever staging it gets.
This one had two men and a woman, dressed in the same quotidian, anonymous but utilitarian outfit: trousers, rolled up beige shirt, and heeled shoes.
Graham Feeny and Eleni Loving took their places on the stage and began stamping. There was no accompaniment, the noises their bodies produced were the music. Tharp’s palette had plenty of ordinary movement. Feeny beat a rhythm with his hand on his thigh; Loving took it up with her feet. Eddieomar Gonzalez-Castillo arrived and the cast danced briefly as a trio before Loving left.
The Fugue continued through permutations of people and phrases, using the same tools a musician might (counterpoint, retrograde) to build the fourteen-minute dance. A duet for Loving and Gonzalez-Castillo sped up, shimmying and rolling, then Gonzalez-Castillo leaped across the floor.
You don’t feel as if you’re seeing back to the original cast; these dancers lavished their schooling on it, which gave the piece a more chiseled look. Spinning and high jumps were as easy for them as clapping in rhythm, and the loose Tharpian movement felt quite calculated. What 50 years ago may have been shocking, or a manifesto, was a virtuoso bauble.
Gonzalez-Castillo and Loving walked to one another and almost clasped hands but instead everyone walked off, but Gonzalez-Castillo faked us out and remained. Everyone returned; they faced us and after a final slow extension they left to end The Fugue.
For all the rebellion implied in decoupling music from dance, The Fugue merely provided its own music while borrowing the composer’s tools of construction. Concentrating on composition and structure gives the work a longer shelf life, and there’s as much in the work that affirms well-made composition as rebels against it. Tharp’s been rebelling against, and becoming the establishment, ever since.
By 1974, Tharp had already done two commissions for The Joffrey Ballet the prior year. Her star was quickly rising. Bach Duet was first done by Wright and Kenneth Rinker (the group’s first male dancer) at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Bach Duet is what it says on the tin, a brief duo to a six minute excerpt from Bach’s Cantata BWV 78. At the corner, a musical quintet: organ, cello, bass and two singers, performed – the only live music in the evening. In the center, Jake Tribus and Miriam Gittens (both of whom have worked with Tharp) bounced loosely in simple white outfits: shorts and tank tops.
The duet started out with Tribus spitting on the floor and rubbing it into the Marley with his sock, a rehearsal move you’d see less in a ballet studio; we usually ran to the rosin box. Tharp’s improvisatory quality when making steps that lope and rebound made everything feel as if Tribus and Gittens made it up on the spot, but as with The Fugue, you know they didn’t.
The spitting became a motif and Tribus was really spitting and rubbing it in with his sock, which was the only shocking thing about the work now. Well, less shock and more yuck. Irreverence is a transient quality, and Tharp’s no longer a young Turk, but one of our senior choreographers. Now largely about contrast, Bach Duet acted as a brief marker of a point in Tharp’s career.
The other two works on the program were recent. Before intermission came Yue Yin’s duet, A Measurable Existence, from 2022. The setting was one it shared with many other contemporary works, a dark, smoky stage, lit from the sides and above. A man, Jesse Obremski, and a woman, Jie-hung Connie Shiau, met. Shiau alternated her part with Tribus, so the work didn’t depend on gendered relationships. It began as a double solo with a lot of floor work.
The music started to pound and crackle, and the atmosphere of uncertainty felt familiar. Obremski and Shiau gripped one another by the shoulder, pulling and tumbling without missing a beat in Rutger Zuydervelt’s rhythmic score. The music changed, as did the lighting to lurid red spots on a diagonal overhead, and we saw . . . another double solo to a fast beat.
This went on well past the point you were hankering for something else to happen. The two stopped; Shiau inspected the space, Obremski joined her to do I-touch-a-limb-and-it-lifts experimental partnering. There was almost a moment that spiraled into the Anna Sokolow Stare when Shiau came forward in the dark, then Obremski, but existential dread was mercifully avoided. Obremski backed out, Shiau headed back, and blackout.
A Measurable Existence was not a long work, but it was long-winded. If you were there for the dancing, you might not care; Obremski and Shiau were strong dancers and who phrased the piece fluidly. But still. State your business.
Compared to the final work, Remains, a premiere by Jermaine Spivey and Spenser Theberge, A Measurable Existence was concise. Spivey also composed the score for Remains, Theberge wrote the text.
The work was composed mainly of post-modern compositional games. The full company stood in a circle on a stripped stage with microphones and stands, while Obremski stammered a sentence to create a rhythm: “It could be me right on time.” Shiau did mechanical movements, grabbing Feeny. Every now and again someone said numbers, which may have been a cue. But for the last half of the piece the only number seemed to be One. Shiau braced herself between dancers and did sort-of a duet with Gittens. Tribus danced with a mike.
The work veered among scattered jewels of wit trapped in a gooey pool of preciousness. The funnier moments: A dancer asked us rhetorically, “You know what I always wanted to do?” And as a kind of answer, he left. Or in a solo for Tribus rattling into a mike lengthy variations of the phrase “always wanted to be.” “I always wanted to be like this.” He left, but came back immediately, having reconsidered. “Like this actually.”
With stricter editing, this could have all been funny. Instead, it was loose, too banal, and went on way too long, veering between parody and taking itself seriously. Gittens nattered, then bonked herself on the head with the mic. If this was trying for something both funny and upsetting, I’d recommend watching Sarah Michelson.
A free-flowing duet with more pulling and tumbling transitioned to frantic activity and rearranging of the microphones. This went on, as the music got louder and ran or slid around, entered and exited.
And it went on.
Slowly each of them joined into a unison phrase except for Gittens, who kept doing her own thing until the end. The cast fell to the floor, she kept going like a post-modern Energizer bunny.
The lights went low, the others slowly got up, met in couples and decoupled. Some walked off, but it wasn’t the end. Music started and it seemed as if the Dreaded Pas de Deux Once the Dance Should be Over was about to begin.
Nope, worse. More microphones. Folks intoning numbers as if it mattered. It didn’t before this and it didn’t here. And Gittens was still at it. Feeny came up to Madi Tanguay and held her head. We all could have used that.
Then Gittens started singing. Meanwhile, someone had rearranged the mics about ten times. And seemingly everyone got a solo. Good Gods of Choreography, send these folks an editor.
Finally, a last “one” was intoned and the curtain went down as if the piece had an ending.
The program notes stated that Remains was made from improvisation in collaboration with the dancers. It felt as if the participants were under the impression that most everything they did was interesting. It wasn’t. Please don’t ever assume you’re interesting unedited.
Going back to the program notes, Spivey and Theberge describe Remains as “requiring urgent attention and rigorous action.” That was likely true for the dancers because of the improvisation and cuing, but not for the audience. The piece was overlong and watching it, you could easily tune out for several minutes and miss nothing.
But isn’t it egotistical to think we’d be more interested in how a work makes the dancers feel over how it makes us feel?
Much of this is generational, and watching an evening like this, with works spanning the bulk of my lifetime, brings in relief how the ground slowly shifts under us. Priorities have changed, but that’s fine. It’s their turn. Still, it would be amusing revenge to be around 50 years from now to watch their dismay at how much the ground will inevitably shift under them.
Bach Duet, The Fugue, A Measurable Existence, Remains – Gibney Company
The Joyce Theater, New York, NY
May 8, 2024
Cover: Graham Feeny, Eleni Loving and Eddieomar Gonzalez-Castillo in The Fugue. Photo © Whitney Browne.
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