Throughout her one-of-a-kind career, Twyla Tharp has never had a tough job done. She never dances around her challenges. She may be the only one she doesn’t dance to.
But in her latest project — Remount two masterpieces in New York City Center Starting Wednesday—the challenge wasn’t about creating something new. It was more subtle. It was to reconstruct a pair of dances, each with a different spirit, a different soul. “Nine Sinatra Songs” (1982)her rich excavation of Frank Sinatra’s music, is a story of relationships: love and mess, playfulness and passion.
A motion and musical thriller, In the Upper Room (1986) is held together by its impeccable structure and vibrant unison as the dancers materialize and disappear through a thick fog. . Drive at full speed until you exceed it. It’s breathtaking.
Set by Philip Glass, “In the Upper Room” is always a wrap-up, a hard-hitting finale, no questions asked. Changed my mind about “In the Upper Room”. If there’s one dance that reflects the struggles of the past few years, it’s “In the Upper Room.”
“It’s about survival,” Tharp, 81, said in a recent interview.
But what happens next? What has society been like in the last two and a half years? How could the two dances reflect the way into the future? For Tharp, it’s clear. “Sinatra is a series of relationships,” she said. “The pandemic was about extending individual survival and community survival, but it was not about relationships.”
And relationships are about intimacy. So what did Tarp do? “I started with the closer and ended with the opener,” she said.
Tarp thinks of her night as an event, not a dance concert. “But for theater, which is traditionally a presentation that reflects our culture, this is definitely an event.”
In other words, it’s not just another show. In framing this choreography, she suggests something of spiritual rejuvenation. Dance is more than just an aesthetic language, it is something that can set the mind and body right.
Over the past few months, Tharp has worked with an amazing group of dancers. Many of them are borrowed from big companies. Although the crew is diverse in age, race, and experience, the performers have one thing in common: dedication and determination. Such a collective talent has the quality of her once-in-a-lifetime, and the dancer is eager to put her life on hold to work with Tharp — not just for her dance, these are dance. Even Tharp, who doesn’t want to say too much, said, “It’s exciting to bring this kind of chemistry together on stage.”
Tharp’s cast includes the contemporary dance troupes of Alvin Ailey (James Gilmer and Jacqueline Harris) and Martha Graham (Lloyd Knight, Marzia Memory, Richard Villaverde), as well as the American Ballet Theater (Cassandra Trenary) and New York City Ballet dancers. Veterans such as Daniel Ulbricht (City Ballet) and Janet Delgado (ex-Miami City Ballet) will share the stage with freshly graduated Juilliard Jada Her German.
For the lead “stomper,” a woman who opens and closes with a triumphant fist pump, Tharp cast the heroic and generous duo of Caitlin Gilliland and Stephanie Petersen. “If you have two stompers, you can put on a show,” Tharp said. “They are right and left. They rule space. They open it and close it. So they ground everything. They are the frame.”
Peterson, who recently left the ballet theater, wanted to join immediately, even though she had moved to Australia with her husband and 21-month-old son. “Working with Twyla is that when you walk into the studio, everyone is there to dance and work and there is no outside noise,” she said. “For me, this was a really important experience. These could be my last shows in New York.”
Before earning her MBA from Yale School of Business, Gilliland, a former member of the City Ballet who had an impressive freelance career that included dancing with Tharp, hadn’t danced for several years. She felt like she had lost her body. “She was looking for some kind of spirituality or personal redemption,” she said. “She was talking to Twyla one day and she told me about her plans for this performance and immediately wanted her to ask if I wanted to dance.”
During the weeks of rehearsals, Tharp did not always have a full cast. Especially early on, she worked in a small unit. After the choreography was taught, she turned her attention to detail as more dancers became available. She seemed to take the dance apart and put it back together in order to find its essence. At one rehearsal, she talked about the “Upper Room” lift, telling dancers to approach each moment of her partner as a snowflake, rather than ending the lift with a position.
“This shouldn’t be flat,” she said. “It’s all very round. And I think the end is really important here.
Recently, because of her dancer schedule, she began running through the entire program — no stops, only short breaks between pieces — at 10:00 am profane dancer time. It’s time to take a class. Like “In the Upper Room,” it’s for the day, not when you’re going all out. Before the run started last Wednesday, Tharp announced that this would be the same as doing her third show and entering her fourth. (There are five performances total.) “This is,” she told the cast.
Along the way, the dancers were panting, sweaty and skating, but giddy and happy. “Some days they’re all there, warming up at 9am and starting the run-through at 10am,” Tharp said in a previous interview. That’s why they are here.
And each one has a story. Delgardo, who danced “In the Upper Room” with the Miami City Ballet, is playing a role she’s never played before. She’s not stomping her feet in sneakers, but she’s dancing in pointe shoes as a member of what Tharp calls “Bomb Squad.”
At first Delgado hesitated. She hadn’t worn any of her pointe shoes for the past three years. Tarp told her, “If it’s what your heart and your heart want, your body will respond.” It was a real conversation. It was powerful.”
With Sinatra in a series of duets, she dances with Ulbricht, principal of the City Ballet, in “That’s Life.” She “must be able to handle conflict in relationships,” Tharp said. “You give as good as you get. It’s mutual. She’s as strong as he is.”
Delgado performed a duet in Miami, but without Tharp’s guidance. It has now evolved and her character is given “more voices”.
The procedure remains the same, but Delgado says it feels like a whole new relationship. “It’s an approach of how I’m reacting physically,” she said. And we talked about how you can find a place where you stand in your power.
It is the same fortitude, the same strength that never escapes Tharp. During her pandemic, she didn’t quit her job, creating dances that relate to the state of the world. This time around, the dance isn’t new, but it’s saying something new.
“Everything is transitional now,” she said. “Few things can be trusted from the economy to the supply, how people work, who works where and how. The bridge between the warmer, more embracing world of , is in a way a promise. “
She knows it may not be today.”Maybe not tomorrow,” she said. “We are still at war. We still have an economy. We still have a very divided country.” but saying can Because we do it on stage.