Things have changed. Presiding over the latest version of her 1970 extravaganza, The One Hundreds, Twyla Tharp remarked Friday night at Jacob’s Pillow, “In those days we did not smile. We did not entertain!” Behind her was a stage filled with the fit and the fragile, large, small, young, old, novices and star ballet dancers, collaborators in a Tharpian original that treated the audience to the choreographer at her brainiest and most beguiling.

In 1970, Tharp was still nobly fending off even the social rewards of success — applause, for instance. She shared the postmodernists’ crusade against the trappings of theater, and she went farther than any of them in plunking down her dance ideas plain and unvarnished — being Tharp, her ideas were always dancier and more ingenious and internally thrilling than anybody else’s. The One Hundreds seems like the simplest of ideas: there are 100 unrelated short phrases of equal duration. Two people perform them side by side at first, their challenge being to remember the sequence and keep together through peripheral vision. There’s no music, of course. Then the 100 phrases are divided up among five persons and performed simultaneously. Then a hundred persons, each having learned one phrase, enter and do them all simultaneously. A finale worthy of Charles Ives. The Fourth of July in 11 seconds.

For years Tharp used The One Hundreds as a touring piece. The afternoon of coaching sessions — company dancers are assigned to the local volunteers as teachers — and the big blast of achievement at the end were the payoff for whatever tedium might have been induced by the first 29 minutes of didacticism. About five years ago, she brought the piece back in a new, Technicolor version adapted to each performing situation. Tharp as MC gabs her way through a hoked-up history of the ’60s, showing bits of videotape, supervising various audience-favorite competitions, and eventually getting us through the original dance.

The Jacob’s Pillow version was the most relaxed I’ve ever seen; the thing had almost evaporated in the wash of conjured-up nostalgia. Keith Roberts soldiered through all the introductory variations — starting with phrases sitting in a chair as Tharp harangued the audience to learn and do them along with him. Later the other company members, including Tharp, joined him in relays, dressed in comic pseudo-hippie get-ups. Favorite teacher Chuck Davis won the prize for the Most Visible Costume, an arrangement of large flags draped over his massive frame. Most Authentic Costume was an Indian bedspread its wearer had sewn herself into, a proudly homemade creation. After their 11 seconds of fame, the hundreds got to dance several more phrases behind Tharp, to Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.”

The One Hundreds generated so much good will that no one was disappointed by the cancellation of the hour-long Hammerklavier (the Beethoven piano sonata), which probably would have taxed the audience and the dancers beyond their limits. Instead, Tharp finished off the evening with two engaging little pieces. Known by Heart Duet, originally choreographed for Susan Jaffe and Ethan Stiefel at American Ballet Theatre, compresses a typical set of Tharp dualities into 10 minutes of intense dancing in traditional pas de deux form. Ashley Tuttle and Keith Roberts are contrasting types — she’s thin and wiry, he’s solid yet malleable — and they seemed funnier than the originals, playing “seduce ’em, now bust ’em in the chops” to Donald Knaack’s junkyard gamelan music.

Westerly Round, Tharp’s newest work, starts out with the remaining four members of the company entwined in a lazy figure that might belong to a vestigial square dance. After this moment of repose, though, it revs up to Tharp’s usual mile-a-minute pace. Elizabeth Parkinson is looking for a fella among three guys (John Selya, Benjamin Bowman, and Alexander Brady) who’d prefer to stick together. Working with precision, and acting, too, they swung through chases, lifts, and virtuosic showing-off, played crack-the-whip, and returned to their grapevine patterns. Tharp has been developing choreography for partners for quite a while now, and in recent work for this company she’s often teamed two men to lift a woman. Here she’s seeing how three men can lift Parkinson.

Mark O’Connor’s music starts out with a fiddle tune and expands to full orchestra in a listenable series of postminimalistic appearances and repetitions. Both dance and music seemed like an exploded version of some Aaron Copland Americana piece — bits of hoedown and prairie wind and, in the choreography, references to Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring. The dance seemed manic and relentlessly cute to me on first viewing, but I’ll probably get over it.

Issue Date: July 5-12, 2001