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Mayhem — mit schlag
Twyla Tharp at Jacob’s Pillow, María Pagés at the Majestic
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Twyla Tharp’s new company has been touring the United States for the past six months, but it’s still in the shakedown phase. Not that these three women and five men aren’t terrific dancers, but they haven’t yet reached acute consensus about timing and performing attitude. They haven’t been together long enough to arrive at the mysterious fine tuning that makes you think small, sturdy, feisty people and long, taut, refined people could be members of the same tribe.

Twyla Tharp Dance, with two brand-new dancers on board, opened the summer season at Jacob’s Pillow last week with a program of old and recent work. The four pieces, seemingly very different from one another, had enough similarities to look collectively like a trend, if not a style. All the dances were contentious, even when the characters seemed to be having fun. Struggle has always been a Tharpian metaphor for sex, but the other side, sensuality, seems to have dropped out of her discourse for the moment. And all the dancing raised the temperature from hot to torrid.

The program’s combat began with Known by Heart Duet, an excerpt from an intriguing longer work that was made for American Ballet Theatre in 1998 and has since left the repertory. In context the duet deconstructed two ballet stars, Susan Jaffe and Ethan Stiefel, from frosty classical paragons to contemporary people who don’t get along but have to work together anyway. Another couple portrayed courtly, playful partners with folk-dance roots, and a pair of male comrades did a kind of marathon softshoe around the edges of the action. The ballet may have been about how classical partnerships evolve, for today and beyond. Taken by itself, the Jaffe-Stiefel duet is just a replay of the war between the sexes.

I think it must be hard for ballerinas to unbend into Tharp’s pedestrian personas — men don’t seem to have the same difficulty. In the two casts I saw at the Pillow, Lynda Sing and Emily Coates played down the comic possibilities of the role whereas Matthew Dibble and Charlie Neshyba Hodges exaggerated them.

Coates did project a woman trying to maintain her dignity while being perfectly aware the things she had to do were way beneath it. Hodges rushed around looking anxious, trying to get her attention, and that of the audience, by punching out faster, higher, and more multiplied ballet steps than seemed possible. She’d turn her back on him, or give him a dirty look. Once or twice she pushed away his attempts to help her. When it came time for her solo, she tossed off the scary, tilted pointe work, odd changes of direction, and fast detail, showing us she was capable of doing all these things without a partner. And then it was only logical that, in a little pantomime skit later on, he’d show up at the wrong time for their date and they’d miss connections.

Coates was fine as the delightful girl with three over-ardent, competing suitors in Westerly Round, but Sing played her as more naive, persuading me she was having fun with the corny premise. The dance, from 2001, seems a bit trifling for dancers sophisticated enough to get on top of Tharp’s demanding choreography. They do it as a character piece, with Hodges as the sweet boy-next-door who keeps getting shouldered aside by his bigger rivals. There are plenty of chances for virtuosic showing off as the men try to win the girl, but she keeps them all friendly by not choosing among them.

Today’s audience enjoys dances like this, with theatrical situations and comic characters. They " read. " They even feel familiar, like what you see in the movies or on TV. Tharp doesn’t bother much nowadays with the physical wit that slipped by without emphasis in so much of her earlier work. Not only did this subtle play with movement make her dances funny, it made them dense. There was so much going on, what with the dancing and the choreographic patterns and the dance humor, if you didn’t always catch everything, it was okay. You’d be helpless with indulgence and excitement.

Maybe Broadway has crept into Tharp’s concert work. She has, after all, devoted a year’s creative energy to the hit show Movin’ Out. Her company now performs with a kind of raging extroversion — okay, mugging — that she first cultivated to portray the cartoonish family in her stunning full-length work The Catherine Wheel (1981). Now the dancers act almost all the time, or overtly comment on the movement, as if the audience wouldn’t see it if they only danced it. Some of the current work does have a light story line or indications of character, but the dramatic version of The Fugue constituted a distortion, not just an interpretation.

Tharp has always had special feelings for this dance, the last and most fiendishly intellectual of her early works. She was deep into the compositional process in 1970, and she didn’t throw any bones to the audience with this super-complex set of variations performed by three dancers in canonic sequences in different time and space configurations. She probably thought of The Fugue as a teaching piece for the audiences as much as for the dancers, and in lecture demonstrations she’d take the trouble to show the themes and explain how the dancers were breaking them up, inverting them, changing the timing, the spacing, the shapes. It is one of the few dances she’s preserved in repertory, and as the rest of her choreography grew more balletic, more elaborate, The Fugue would jolt us back to the edge, force us to pay attention, with its austerity. Movement, it seemed to say, was the last, most rigorous frontier of dance theater.

The dance I saw at Jacob’s Pillow looked like something else; I decided maybe " The Fugue Recollected from a Tropical Beach, " with possible injections of fancy new choreography. The dancers (Jason McDole, Dario Vaccaro, and Whitney Simler) embellished the movement with curlicued arms and torsos, extravagant transitional movements, punchy balleticizing of the steps, and relentless mugging. They turned the piece into an almost burlesque display of one-upsmanship.

Where the original Fugue was all structure, Tharp now frequently submerges her compositional process in dazzling dancing, and in Surfer at the River Styx (2000), there’s a plot under the surface as well. Tharp has referred us to Euripides’s Bacchae as a viewing aid, but after having read the play and seen the dance a few times, I still find it confusing as a narrative, though the dancers apply melodramatic facial expressions to their fiendishly difficult dancing. A capsule Greek chorus of two men and two women frame the tall, godlike Stuart Capps and his antagonist, the frenetic Hodges or Dibble, who might represent the puritanical King Pentheus and the libertine Dionysus, or some other metaphorical idea.

What’s clear about the dance is its titanic fury — critics have called it hellish. After long preliminary danced orations, the principals battle fiercely but without physical contact, and both of them stagger out as if defeated. Then they’re all transfigured for a cathartic procession of spirits.

DOES DANCE inevitably become more flowery and dramatic as it lives from one era to the next? Flamenco Republic, the newer of the two excerpted pieces that Compañiá María Pagés presented at the Majestic Theatre last weekend (in a World Music event), started out as a more or less traditional flamenco show. Pagés did several variants of her characteristic dance, an elaboration on the serpentine arms and torsos that most people identify with flamenco. She can arrange this design concept in seemingly infinite ways, and the audience even applauded a little number where she spiraled a shawl with long fringe around her body like a matador’s cape.

Then, midway, the show turned more contemporary. The company of nine dancers, three musicians, and a female singer gathered in different groupings to make rhythm together. First, a couple sat on chairs back to back and clapped a pattern. Others arrived and joined in. Then they created a whole series of little choruses and conversations, rapping with canes on the floor, tapping folded fans against their wrists, challenging one another’s inventions, fingering castanet riffs, and of course stamping and clapping. Flamenco, like tap, gets its distinction from the individual performer’s virtuosic articulation of sounds. So the flamenco ensemble is usually locked into plain unison, but Pagés found an effective way to take it past that.

Since her success in the original incarnation of Riverdance, Pagés has adapted flamenco to the contemporary-folk fusion of rhythm dance and music that Riverdance marketed. She also made important connections to Bill Whelan, Riverdance’s presiding musical deity, and to fiddler Eileen Ivers, who emerged as a Riverdance star. Both of them contributed to the pastiche score of Pagés’s theater piece La Tirana, which was also excerpted for the Majestic performances. The idea of a painting that comes to life (in this case, Goya’s Duchess of Alba) is no novelty, but the audience loved it.

Compañía María Pagés appears this weekend, June 26 through 29, at Jacob’s Pillow; call (413) 243-0745.

Issue Date: June 27 - July 3, 2003
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