Tharpbeats

Knowing Twyla by heart

by Marcia B. Siegel

Twyla Tharp doesn't realize that her mind is capable of processing three times more information than even the most above-average audience member. It's part of her charm that she just assumes we can keep up with her. It's part of her charm and her genius that her dances galvanize us even when we don't quite grasp the extent of her message.

Known by Heart, Tharp's new work for American Ballet Theatre, was given only four times in the company's fall season at New York City Center. (The company, regrettably Tharpless, will be in Boston this weekend for three performances at the Wang Center.) Before the first of two viewings I'd planned, I went to watch a class she was teaching at Hunter College, and by a lucky chance she was showing and analyzing a rehearsal video of the ballet, as a lesson to the students in "how to survive the critics." So I had special access to the work. But this privileged information went only so far in accounting for the impact the piece had on me.

Known by Heart is a long, diverse ballet, an apparent collage of disparate elements that get all wound together into a final, inevitable ecstasy of exhaustion and transcendence. Three duets succeed one another, to three drastically different musics. Julie Kent and Angel Corella are a playful, classical couple; Susan Jaffe and Ethan Stiefel are a competitive contemporary one; and Keith Roberts and Griff Braun look to an unremitting but amiable future. But none of these duets is fixed on stylistic purity.

The music for Kent and Corella, by Mozart and two anonymous pre-romantic composers, is like a bumptious, blaring local band holding forth in a Bavarian wine garden. The dancers toss galumphing peasant high jinks into their ballet show. For Jaffe and Stiefel the music is a bucket of clangy, rackety rhythms played on found objects -- the composer is Donald "The Junkman" Knaack. Ballet's requisite supportive partnering turns into a bopping match as the dancers reveal a mutual antipathy.

The plot thickens when Roberts and Braun arrive. Working in unison like side-by-side vaudevilleans, they encompass the stage with big circling jumps and easy, shuffling repartee. They're accompanied by Steve Reich's early, subtly mutating Six Pianos, and as they perambulate the space, the other two couples start returning from unpredictable places and vying in unexpected combinations. All six dancers start incorporating some of one another's motifs. Now they all defer modestly to their partner, they all compete and attack, they all share the limelight companionably.

At one point, as the men are weaving through a four-part canon, two new men appear. They replace the male duet, and soon two more male-female couples arrive. Wow, I thought, this is all going into retrograde, or shifting onto another plane. The 12 begin to recapitulate the ideas from the original duets, but it's all different and inventive all over again, with movement trading, counterpoint, temporarily reshuffled partnerships.

Roberts and Griff return, to initiate a long section where they do the time step while Kent and Corella, then Jaffe and Stiefel reprise some of their original material, in slow motion. Two men duel each other; two other men re-enact the funny dance skit Jaffe and Stiefel did about a date that goes wrong because of bad timing.

Twyla Tharp has always been an eclectic choreographer, but never a random one. Styles and shtick from here and there, now and long ago, overlap and complement each other in her dance. History, she seems to say, is part of what we are, and what we are is part of what we'll be when we're gone. This is the idea of Known by Heart. What keeps the ballet together is the steps, the phrases that she's made up, borrowed and found, then blended together so that they seem to have disappeared. But instead of extinction, the steps go on, transformed and renewed. The styles don't become obsolete, the dancers don't give out. Others come and replace them until they can return, re-energized, re-humanized, and re-inspired.

I think this is also the meaning of Steve Reich's minimalist music, a tactic for regeneration. Minimalism's materials are endlessly recyclable into new rhythms, new harmonic combinations. It stops when the time for the job is up, but you can take it up again for the next job. Because it doesn't reach final conclusions, it always leaves something more to be explored and disclosed.

Known by Heart ends suddenly as Roberts and Braun are charging toward the audience and their doubles are doing the time step upstage. When the curtain fell, I woke as if from a dream, clinging to those last, vanishing moments.