dance

Twyla Tharp celebrates new work with Cal Performances

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Two Fanfares to celebrate 50 years of dance

About her recent Preludes and Fugues, set to several of the pieces from Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, renowned choreographer Twyla Tharp says that she intended to have the piece “show the world as it ought to be.”

The quality she seems to find characteristic of Bach’s music is order and a measured and mathematical approach to sound. Which just goes to show that we humans often admire and desire traits that are other than our own.

That’s not to say Tharp is disorderly. Few trained dancers are. The discipline necessary to control the body’s many planes and movements with the precision necessary for complex choreography is staggeringly beyond most people.

Tharp, however, has long mixed, modified and mocked the rigidly defined traditions of dance, each form of which has its own training and style and its own philosophical commitments.

Tharp reorders, rather than disorders. Brings modern and classical, acrobatic and vernacular together in a kaleidoscopic mélange. It’s her thang, and nobody does it quite like she does.

This past weekend Cal Performances brought the touring Tharp and her wonderful company to Zellerbach Hall. A Bay Area premiere, Preludes and Fugues was the centerpiece of the program’s first half. It was preceded by Fanfare One, set to music by John Zorn. There is a striking similarity between the repetitions of Zorn’s composition for brass and the mathematical intricacies of Bach’s fugues.

This first half was rather like Balanchine’s neoclassical period. Even the costumes had a reserved and refined quality: the men in beige chinos and slightly blousy tops, thin gold belts circling their muscular but slim waists, the women in monochromatic short skirted ballet dresses, with piping that suggested a Grecian tunic. The pieces were pleasant but somewhat bland, saved by the dazzling vigor of the male dancers.

Fanfare One used a primarily balletic movement vocabulary – not one of Tharp’s strong suits. But Preludes and Fugues brought us slowly back to Tharp, with its insouciant steps, rocking back into the hips, one leg straight, the foot flexed. The unexpected ballroom dancing, hundreds of little jumps. All of it just a bit wry and sly. And speed speed speed: isn’t it just … preposterous? A dancer mugs at the audience.

All the pieces were company pieces, with duets the primary division, followed by trios, cascading into larger group pieces of twelve or so dancers.

The second half was more flashily Tharpian – reminiscent of Deuce Coupe and Push Comes to Shove, Yowzie, another Bay Area premiere, was the central piece. It was preceded by Fanfare Two, a shorter piece also set to a brass fanfare by Zorn. The stage was bathed in red light, the dancers transformed to black silhouettes wearing wacky hats, small black figures in front of the scrim, huge black figures enlarged by backlighting behind the scrim.

Yowzie opens with Rika Okamoto and Matthew Dibble, focusing on their story of the stoner couple not quite able to “connect” – the male distracted and adoring – of anything and anyone, apparently, the female zonked, only occasionally rising out of her careening psychedelic world. Okamoto’s deadpan was the perfect mask for her rambling attention. A series of short encounters, each with an accessible story followed. Everyone is costumed in slurries of tie-dyed motley. Yowzie is fun, dynamic, goofy, choreographically brilliant and shockingly difficult to dance.

But dance everyone did, and what dancing! As someone was heard to say in the lobby, “I could watch those dancers all day.”

Me too.

– Jaime Robles

Photo: Rika Okamoto and Matthew Dibble in Twyla Tharp’s Yowzie. Photo by Ruven Afanador.