How choreography lives

Twyla Tharp's Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Ralph Lemon's Tree

by Marcia B. Siegel

Just when choreography seemed reduced to the menial task of showing off stunts, sex, and famous faces, Twyla Tharp has once again rewritten the job description. Variations on a Theme by Haydn, which was premiered last month at the Kennedy Center and in New York last week by American Ballet Theatre, is not just a good work but a grand work: expansive, inventive, and unapologetically classical.

Traditionalists have always cringed when Tharp intruded on classical territory. They've tried to dismiss her has a maverick, a parodist, a kook. Back in the days of her first all-pointe ballet, As Time Goes By for the Joffrey Ballet (1973), one of her defenders pointed out that, far from attacking classical ballet, she was trying to see how to do it another way. Since then, of course, she's made many ballets and fusion pieces as well as modern dances, but in this new work she's still experimenting with ways to think about classicism.

ABT put it on a program of stellar repertory -- Theme and Variations (Balanchine), Jardin aux Lilas (Tudor) and Other Dances (Robbins) -- and I got to see it three times. With Theme and Variations to set the tone, it seemed to be carrying Balanchine's legacy forward into the 21st century. Entirely formal, it has the speed, the amplitude, and the sense of structural momentum that you get from a Balanchine ballet. But these are expressed in contemporary terms. Tharp suggests a spectacularly technical team of workaholics whose greatest pleasure is transforming confusion into sense.

The 30 dancers are hierarchically ranked, with principals Susan Jaffe and Marcelo Gomes, Julie Kent and Angel Corella, and Paloma Herrera and Vladimir Malakhov, plus four secondary couples and a corps of eight couples. This pairing-off of the dancers is important: Tharp is creating a corps de ballet of partners without junking the ballet convention -- the twofold corps still forms a decorative and rhythmic backdrop to the principal dancers. Tharpitively, there can be two or three patterns or ideas layered in and competing for attention, but I've seldom seen a Tharp stage that's so visually consolidated.

If the Balanchine corps represented an advance because of the virtuoso work it demanded from every woman member, Tharp's innovative corps has to excel at the kinds of double work you usually see in a featured pas de deux: lifts, supported turns and poses, precision timing and coordination. Then she ups the ante by requiring two or more of these pairs to synchronize with each other. They create stunning effects as they stream across the stage, exploding in mass lifts without breaking stride, underlining the music's exclamations.

I do remember moments when the corps stood in place and framed some solo couple, but most of the time Tharp resists this kind of static picture. The corps members are almost always traveling, sometimes in counterpoint patterns that are nevertheless readable because they tend to be symmetrical. They rush in neat clusters from the sides of the stage, criss-cross in the center and spread out again, making the space shrink and expand, without ever falling into disorder.

Against and through this very active ensemble canvas, the solo couples provide contrasting movement, often leaning off center, twisting, or gesturing in stopped angles. The very eccentricity of their movements personalizes them for a moment. Their extreme lifts and tangles are immediately "learned" by the corps and engineered into the group patterns: the women snaking around the men's bodies or upended with their legs shooting into the air.

Even after three viewings, though, it's hard to single out what any of the main couples did. Some or all of the principal and secondary couples actually share the first statement of Haydn's theme, emerging one at a time as the phrase progresses and the corps flows in and out like some irregularly breathing organism. The one time you get to see something singular is when the stage clears for the variation of Kent and Corella, which is like a miniature pas de deux with intimate opening conversation, individual statements, and spinning lifts.

This, the audience and I thought, was the high point of the ballet's action curve. After that it winds down. One of the secondary couples seem to be searching for each other among three other couples, all different. She flings herself into his arms and he rushes out. The last variation begins with a stately canon, criss-crossing lifts, and a big corps build-up with cameos by all the main couples. It thins out to about three couples, then reassembles everyone into a hasty but masterful final pose.

Tharp's use of the ensemble to express musical and design ideas and to extrapolate from the more individual actions of the principals is a Balanchinean idea, but it does tend to diminish the dancers' individuality. I thought the scenic concept -- pulled-back hair on the women, identical pale-ochre-and-straw-colored costumes (by Santo Loquasto) and a flat, overall foreboding twilight (by Jennifer Tipton) -- worked against our ability to see the changes of scale from gorgeous functionality to poignant individualism.

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In New Haven, choreography was being reinvented in another way as Ralph Lemon premiered Tree, the second installment of his projected Geography trilogy. Maybe one has to talk about how dance gets created these days as much as what is created. Lemon gave up the usual channel (so did Tharp), directing and figuring out how to finance his own modern-dance company, five years ago. He made a fruitful alliance with Stan Wojowodski Jr., the director of the Yale Repertory Theatre, and has spent the last few years alternating international travel with workshopping and performing the first and now the second part of Geography there. The show will tour in the fall -- but not to Boston.

Lemon has always been an unusually thoughtful and intriguing choreographer, but his work now looks in the opposite direction from Tharp's. Questioning the Euro-American traditions in which he grew up as a dancer, he has sought out dance that originates from other roots and reasons. Tree investigates what 12 Asians, Africans, and Americans bring to a work from their different cultures, what they can share, and what new thing they can make together. The beautiful piece that results is multicultural in the best sense, and also, through its eclectic, episodic, collage form, postmodern. One of the many things I liked about it was that it doesn't try to resolve all its differences and clear up its ambiguities.

The work has many scenes that cut into each other or overlap cinematically. Each is a self-contained incident that achieves resonance against other scenes with similar themes. People try to communicate in different languages, and they succeed. They do each other's dances in their own styles. Four men drop stones on the floor, snatching their feet out from under their neighbor's falling stone. People fall off low platforms. One person rolls off a very high platform -- a harness protects him.

Asako Takami tells a story about being on a train during an earthquake in Japan. She's standing very still, except that her hands move through a continuous series of Indian mudras-dance gestures. Later, Yeko Ladzekpo-Cole tells the end of the story, with mudras. David Thomson recites a description of the effects of escalating degrees of earthquakes. While Cheng-Chieh Yu is struggling to repeat a description she gave earlier of some plant biology but may now have forgotten, the large, heavy set piece behind her starts to keel over. It stops, then looms over the stage at a perilous angle for the rest of the performance.

There are many duets. A modern-dance phrase made of big scooping spatial moves and falls and slicing arms. A classical Indian dance in Orissi style, done by Takami and Manoranjan Pradhan, with Indian drumming by Bijaya Barik. A duet for Lemon and Thomson that starts tentatively and turns into a sort of contact improvisation or a wrestling match. Later, Carlos Funn and Djédjé Djédjé Gervais have a similar encounter. While some other dance is going on, Thomson and Wen Hui conduct an ongoing silent dialogue that builds up to a love scene, then deteriorates into an argument, then a parting.

While Yu tells stories about the way to put on make-up in Chinese opera, Takami seems to be serving something on a tray to Wang Liliang. At the end of the story we see Wang has acquired a crude blackface make-up. He and Li Wen Yi, also in blackface, sing a traditional song from their native Yunnan province in China. Lemon dances something that looks like a minstrel shuffle that's gotten so exaggerated it's nearly out of control while someone sings the blues on a recording.

Takami and Wen do a very long, very slow gestural dance with a clock ticking in the background, and I appreciate it all the more when I remember the many Asian traditional dances I've seen that were cut short to accommodate the presumably impatient American audience.

In the last, touching scene, Li Wen Yi sits quietly on a bench after a stamping, swinging dance. We hear a voice singing "Good Mornin' Blues," and Li, in a high, nasal, South Asian voice, tentatively echoes each phrase.