The Transformer: Twyla Tharp Dives Into the Future
It could be the middle of the ocean on a starless night, but it's a stage. An arm reaches up, glowing like a beacon of light. It lowers — slowly, deliberately — sliding into the darkness.
A piece of movement is nothing without context. Twyla Tharp created that arm gesture nearly 40 years ago as the emphatic closing image of her celebrated 'In the Upper Room' (1986), in which two women — the 'stompers' — yank down a fist in victory. It's as much a physical movement as a celebration of making it to the top of a choreographic Mount Everest.
During a recent interview, Tharp, 83, hopped from a chair to her feet to illustrate its emphatic power. 'Where that came from is the notion of pulling down a shade,' she said. 'Blackout!'
That dance unspools to a propulsive mix of ballet, modern dance and even calisthenics to music by Philip Glass. It ends with the sense of an exhalation, a release.
But what if that final exhalation from 'In the Upper Room' turned into an inhalation? What if an ending became a beginning? 'Slacktide,' Tharp's newest dance, is also set to Glass, his 'Aguas da Amazonia,' in a new arrangement created and performed by Third Coast Percussion. It starts where 'In the Upper Room' left off.
'I take that last move and make it go incredibly slow into the future,' Tharp said. 'Into another place, and that other place is a transformation.'
The idea of transformation is a potent and poignant thread of Tharp's program at New York City Center, beginning Wednesday. The program also celebrates a milestone: her 60th anniversary as a dance artist — a diamond jubilee for one of the most important choreographers America has produced. The show pairs 'Slacktide' with the New York debut of her transcendent 'Diabelli' (1998), set to Beethoven's 'Diabelli Variations.' (Created for her Tharp! company, 'Diabelli' premiered in Italy and was performed in only three other places.)
Tharp sees connections between the two works. 'Slacktide' was choreographed when 'Diabelli' was being reconstructed, and moments of the older dance have made their way into the new. But 'Slacktide' references material that goes back farther into the past. The movement for the central female figure of 'Slacktide,' Marzia Memoli, a Martha Graham and ballet-trained dancer, has been resurrected from Tharp's archive of video improvisation sessions — stitched together and reimagined for today.
'It's the fundamental question of any artist: How do you deal with the past?' Tharp said. 'If you're going to pretend like there's not one, you're not going to be very useful to anybody. So then the question becomes, how are you going to use it? And what's relevant in it and what's interesting, and even what's beautiful in it?'
Tharp still finds a line from her 'Bix Pieces' (1972), for which she wrote the text, useful: 'Nothing new has been added, much has been forgotten, and it is all different again.'
Throughout her robust career, Tharp has transformed both modern and classical dance, making patterns more layered, more intricate — for her, geometry is content, conflict and resolution — and building a movement vocabulary that binds looseness with precision. The mix of polished structure and body intelligence that a Tharp dance demands allows dancers to be themselves inside the works.
Tharp's gift to the world is the idea of what American classical dance can be: unpretentious, technically complex, joyful and with every nerve activated. It's the way exuberance emboldens and refines classical dancing. Counterbalance is poise, and equilibrium is a meeting of heart, humor and tenacity.
'Diabelli,' a monumental dance, has everything of Tharp inside it. For roughly an hour, the dancers — playful, effusive, somber, heroic — glide among the many moods of Beethoven's variations as they somehow dissolve the delicate line between dancing and simply moving. As Tharp lifts the witty, danceable notes into the air and grounds them with kinetic weight, she shows that to dance is to be fully alive. The ebullience is part of the sophistication of 'Diabelli.'
For the 10 dancers, it's a tour de force, and for the pianist, too. (Vladimir Rumyantsev will perform live.) Following the pattern of the music, how Beethoven addresses the theme, Tharp said, she sees transformation as one variation moves and morphs into the next. 'They're like beads on a necklace,' she said. 'It's not one whole stream from beginning to end. It's 33 separate seeds.'
Tharp was originally urged to take on the Beethoven score by the pianist Alfred Brendel, whom she met while working in London. She thought it was a crazy idea, but, 'He said, 'It's so funny, you should do it,'' she said. So she did.
The dance shares something with 'an old, well-structured variety show,' Tharp said, where 'you have to constantly refer to what just happened, but it has to be different enough to jar the audience.'
'It can't be totally out of left field or people are going to feel disconnected,' she added. 'But it also has got to be different enough that you're refreshed by the next act.'
At the start, dancers cross the stage in staggered lines as they sway their arms from side to side and pause to bounce in plié. A charming lift has a woman straddled on the shoulder of a man before falling sideways like a paper doll and strapped behind him in an elegant, deadpan version of a piggyback ride. As one movement phrase morphs into the next, the dichotomy of opposing sensations is the strength of its vision: 'Diabelli' may be grand, but it grooves.
'Slacktide' has a different feel and look — while 'Diabelli' is presented in black and white, the lighting in 'Slacktide' is a shock of color. This ballet is meditative yet builds on itself as dancers swirl and glide, sometimes as if they were moving on ice.
And then there is Memoli's material, which takes the dance back to a time when Tharp was in her 50s and improvising to explore classical technique, experimenting with movement — spatially, rhythmically and sequentially. She was reinventing: stripping out preparations, pairing a loose top of the body with a classically held center, and using torque as a way to allow for more suspension.
When Memoli, who left the Graham company in 2024 to join Tharp's tour, first watched the videos, she said her first thought was, 'Wow, how can she move like this?'
Memoli and Tharp worked together to turn steps from those improvisations into phrase material. Memoli said it was — and remains — a challenge for her to move with more weight, to drop the pelvis instead of lift it. Graham is modern and grounded, but Tharp's approach is different. One day, Tharp told Memoli to feel like a sponge full of water. 'She was like, 'Feel heavy,'' Memoli said. 'When I dance Graham, I never feel heavy. Never. She worked a lot on my ankles and my feet.'
She added, 'I learned that sometimes my impulse needs to start from my imagination and not from my body.'
Instead of going for everything 100 percent, she has learned to pull her focus inward. 'Something that she always tell me is: 'Don't perform. Let the audience come to you. They will come. Trust it.''
Dreamier than 'Diabelli,' 'Slacktide' takes place in an in-between world that emphasizes fluidity. 'Slacktide,' also set to Glass, doesn't have the punch of 'In the Upper Room'; instead it embraces the idea of flow and, again, transformation. It's named after the time when the tide seems to stand still before reversing, the moment when, as Tharp said, the out becomes the in.
'You can either think absolute stasis, which is actually what it is — it's no momentum — or you can think, all movement,' Tharp said. 'You can think all possibilities are right there at that moment.'
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