by Leigh Witchel
Twyla Tharp came back to City Center, bringing something old and something new. She had assembled a new group of excellent dancers doing two of her most popular dances from the eighties, “In the Upper Room” and “Nine Sinatra Songs.”
“Nine Sinatra Songs,” from 1982, took place under the biggest disco ball ever, hanging there like a glittery harvest moon. Compared to “In The Upper Room,” “Sinatra” is straightforward: a series of duets punctuated my two gliding ballroom numbers for different groups.
Even then, Tharp was looking and listening backwards. The Frank Sinatra songs from the late 50’s and 60’s she chose are his marquee numbers: the album titles, the ones everybody knew the words to. James Gilmer and Jacquelin Harris, both from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, worked with Tharp on her last City Center gig. Looking elegant in Oscar de la Renta’s formal wear, they led off with “Softly As I Leave You.” Gilmer was a crane in a tuxedo; Harris was constantly being lifted and pressed overhead, caught and spun until the final toss and embrace. As much as anything, the piquancy was seeing these two do a style that isn’t a big part of their usual repertory.
The sharp turns of directions Marzia Memoli and Richard Villaverde took made “Strangers in the Night” feel like a tango, though the steps were nothing like one. Cassandra Trenary, also a veteran of the last show, sported a mop of shaggy hair while walking on Benjamin Freemantle’s back in “One for My Baby.”
That song, from an album Sinatra did after his second marriage, to Ava Gardner, ended in divorce, was the first crack in Happily Ever After. Freemantle, without a tuxedo jacket, his bow tie untied, moved Trenary as if she were a parcel, folding her in half and pulling her through his legs. If Tharp was looking back with the music, she was right inside a trend of almost Apache “Are they in love, fighting, or both?” duets. William Forsythe’s implicitly violent “Love Songs,” made for Stuttgart Ballet in 1979, was imported to the U.S. by the Joffrey Ballet the year after “Sinatra.”
The three couples returned for the first of two group numbers to “My Way,” and the influence of Tharp’s work on ballroom dance for the 1981 film “Ragtime” was clear. Tharp had the couples exist in the same space but independently: sliding, doing aerial lifts. Like Charles Ives imitating several bands playing at once, it’s cacophonous, but it’s also as if it were the semi-final at a ballroom competition.
New couples took the stage. Daisy Jacobson and Reed Tankersley got the comic number, “Somethin’ stupid.” Tharp’s humor is of the time as well. In 1978, Gilda Radner and Steve Martin did similar happy feet while exploring the same myths of Hollywood and love in their sweetly amateur “Dancing in the Dark” duet on “Saturday Night Live.” A year after “Sinatra,” Jerome Robbins made bumping into one another a choreographic motif in “I’m Old Fashioned.
Kaitlyn Gilliland and Lloyd Knight danced “All the Way,” which became all about her long legs and endless arabesque. Stephanie Petersen, all in ruffles, got flipped up and over by Julian Mackay in “Forget Domani.”
Daniel Ulbricht and Jeanette Delgado did the last, most Apache duet, with him tossing and dragging her to “That’s Life.” Delgado shaded the role as if she were doing the third duet in Robbins’ “In the Night,” as a willing and eager participant in the drama, smiling and enjoying every moment of the combat like makeup sex.
The last lift, where she raced at him as he was putting on his tuxedo is tricky to time, and Ulbricht found a solution that cagily mixed risk and safety. He got the jacket almost fully on but left the last fumble with the sleeve to when she was racing at him.
All the couples returned for a reprise of “My Way” to a later, live recording. Sinatra recorded and sang it many times, it became his signature song, and according to his daughter Tina, he came to hate it like gum on his shoe. Tharp’s approach was less of a recapitulation or finale. More like “One for My Baby,” it had the feeling of closing time.
As she has written, this was her parent’s music, from a time when marriage was mythologized to be something you did once, for the rest of your life. “Nine Sinatra Songs” was a yellowing Kodak snapshot of mid-century heteronormativity.
Tharp made “In the Upper Room,” four years later. Like “Sinatra” it was a return after a Broadway Project, “The Catherine Wheel” in 1981, “Singin’ in the Rain” in 1985. It’s an even more complex work, not about partnering and the couple, but dance as eschatology, as if one day you woke up in heaven and everyone was moving.
The opening, a smoky landscape where the dancers emerge from darkness at the back, is both a stage and a tabernacle. Peters and Gilliland, wearing black and white striped pajamas and sneakers, began the work with fluid, long phrases, jogging and shaking. Gilliland’s leg flew up at the opening, and once the motion started, it didn’t stop.
Two women arrived, Delgado and Jada German, also with striped shirts, but bare legs and red pointe shoes. Ulbricht again partnered Delgado. Freemantle was having trouble; he had German way back off her leg on pointe.
Trenary, who had danced the work already at American Ballet Theatre, and Julian Mackay joined in. She was also on pointe, all the couples did endless promenades and partnered turns.
Tharp was going for long phrases for the women on pointe as well as for the dancers in sneakers, whom Tharp refers to as the “Stompers.” The scale and drive has the feeling of the eighties: of massive edifices built to impose. Was it construction or motion? The era was also a time of fascination with altered states, of using exertion to break through the wall and find enlightenment: an Elysium of aerobics.
Delgado is also a veteran of the ballet, having done it with Miami City Ballet. She entered flying in kicks, then went into head-rolling spins. Ulbricht tore into a virtuoso combination, incorporating the extra shaking accents Tharp was looking for.
By about ten minutes in the dancers stopped hitting positions and were throwing themselves into the movement with ecstatic energy. That’s the point, the transition away from control into momentum, letting “Upper Room” dance you. From Sufis to Shakers, exertion as a spiritual practice. This is the work where Tharp’s hive of activity choreography makes its point: chaotic frenzy revealed itself as truly more-is-more.
Norma Kamali’s costumes now added red to the black and white stripes. Ulbricht rocketed skyward in a turned-in passé; this was so clearly a breath of fresh air for him.
The men with the Stompers, Knight, Tankersley and Villaverde, were now bare chested, doing a frenzied time step, then heading into kicks, jetés and rivoltades with no let up. Trenary reentered in a short red dress; then Gilliland came out fully aerobicized in a red leotard and red ankle socks peeking out of her white sneakers. Tharp enticed her back onstage after four years off. If she wasn’t in shape after this, she never would be.
Waves of men, three by three, leapt into turns to the wordless soaring of the soprano in Philip Glass’ recorded score. The dancers start to slowly shook their heads side to side, another link to movement as meditation.
Paradise got crowded. Four women on pointe come on; Memoli’s position as the fourth pointe girl is one of Tharp’s deliberate inconsistencies like Jerome Robbins’ enigmatic “run-on principals.” Delgado, German and Trenary do the bulk of the dancing on point; Memoli started out in sneakers, only showed up occasionally and in one section where she had changed into pointe shoes, still danced with the Stompers.
Mackay danced with Trenary. They all kept going, smiling to push through it. “Upper Room” is never dull, but it seems long as hell because of what the dancers go through. Motifs recapitulate; all the dancers slowly moved their heads side to side in a kind of transport. The castle gets erected.
The dance finally came to a stop with Gilliland and Peters, who opened it, landing with one knee up and pulling into a fist that both encapsulated, punctuated and defied. They were exhausted. We were exhausted.
The greatest gift from Tharp was the casting. What a pleasure to see Delgado and Gilliland, dancers I thought I might never see onstage again, and Ulbricht, a dancer who looked as if he was cutting back at New York City Ballet. What a wonderful surprise to see Ulbricht looking a decade younger, not just with clean, clear phrasing but beautiful lines. In the program he said he was in the best dancing shape he’s ever been in. He made a strong case for that; he looked rejuvenated. Keep it up, and please keep going.
The biggest mystery of the evening was that “Upper Room” was done first. In so many ways, even in this essay, it is built to be a closer. It’s an exhausting work and a huge statement. Even logistically, it uses haze, and it takes time to clear haze from the stage. Works using it usually get placed last.
Why do it first? Tharp gave her reasons in a preview of the show but they’re less compelling than the preceding practicalities and sense of build. Unless those things look different to you. Tharp always celebrated the chaos of everything happening at once. Is it because she senses order, and even perhaps time, differently?
copyright ©2022 by Leigh Witchel
“In the Upper Room,” “Nine Sinatra Songs” – Twyla Tharp
New York City Center, New York, NY
October 20, 2022
Cover: Lloyd Knight, Reed Tankersley and Richard Villaverde in “In the Upper Room.” Photo credit © Benjamin Miller.
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