NEW YORK, NY.- Throughout her unparalleled career, Twyla Tharp has never swatted away a herculean task. She never dances around a challenge. That might be the only thing she doesn’t dance around.
But for her latest project — remounting two masterworks at New York City Center starting Wednesday — the challenge wasn’t in creating something new. It was something more subtle: reframing a pair of dances, each with a different spirit, a different soul. “Nine Sinatra Songs” (1982), her lush excavation of the music of Frank Sinatra, is a tale of relationships: loving and thorny, playful and passionate.
“In the Upper Room” (1986), a thriller of movement and music, is held together by its impeccable structure and galvanizing unison as dancers materialize and disappear through a thick haze of fog. It drives full steam until it pushes past that. It’s breathtaking.
Set to Philip Glass, “In the Upper Room” has always been a closer, a finale with a bang, no questions asked. But Tharp, watching the world experience the pandemic, has changed her mind about “In the Upper Room” — not about what it represents, but where it belongs. If any dance comes close to reflecting the struggle of the past years, it’s “In the Upper Room.”
“It’s about survival,” Tharp, 81, said in a recent interview. “And for dancers, it’s a real tour de force of surviving. It takes stamina and wits, technique and determination — everything you’ve got to get through it.”
But what happens next? How are we situated as a society after the past 2 1/2 years? How can two dances reflect a way into the future? For Tharp, it’s clear. “The Sinatra is a series of relationships,” she said. “The pandemic was about individual survival and extended community survival, but not really about relationships.”
And relationships are about intimacy. So what has Tharp done? “I’ve started with the closer,” she said, “and finished with the opener.”
Tharp is thinking of her evening not as a dance concert, but as an event. “In a dance concert, you’d have ‘Nine Sinatra Songs’ and ‘In the Upper Room,’” she said. “But for theater, which is a presentation traditionally mirroring our culture, this is definitely an event.”
In other words, it's not just another show. With this choreographic framing she is proposing something of a spiritual rejuvenation: Dance as not just an aesthetic language, but one that can right minds and bodies.
For the past few months, Tharp has been working with a spectacular group of dancers, many borrowed from major companies. It’s a diverse crew in terms of age, race and experience, but what the performers have in common are devotion and determination. Such a coming together of talent has a once-in-a-lifetime quality to it, with dancers eager to put their lives on hold to work with Tharp — to perform, not just in her dances but in these dances. Even Tharp, who doesn’t want to say too much too soon, said, “It’s exciting to put this kind of chemistry together onstage.”
Tharp’s cast includes dancers from the modern companies of Alvin Ailey (James Gilmer and Jacquelin Harris) and Martha Graham (Lloyd Knight, Marzia Memoli and Richard Villaverde) as well as from American Ballet Theater (Cassandra Trenary) and New York City Ballet. Veterans like Daniel Ulbricht (City Ballet) and Jeanette Delgado (formerly of Miami City Ballet) will share the stage with Jada German, who just graduated from Juilliard.
For the lead “stompers,” the women who open and close — with a victorious fist pump — “In the Upper Room,” Tharp has cast the heroic, generous duo of Kaitlyn Gilliland and Stephanie Petersen. “If you have the two stompers, you can get the show up,” Tharp said. “They’re right and left. They control the space. They open it, they close it. So they’re grounding the whole thing. They’re the frame.”
Peterson, who recently left Ballet Theater, immediately wanted in despite having moved to Australia with her husband and 21-month-old son — she has done the Australia-New York trip six times since rehearsals began. “The thing with working with Twyla is you go into the studio and everyone is there to dance and work and there’s no outside noise,” she said. “For me, this has been a really important experience. These might be my last shows in New York.”
Gilliland — a former member of City Ballet who went on to forge an impressive freelance career, including dancing with Tharp, before getting her MBA at the Yale School of Management — hadn’t danced for several years. She was feeling disembodied. “I was looking for some kind of spirituality or personal redemption,” she said. “Twyla and I were talking one day, and she was telling me about her plans to do this performance. And I immediately knew that I wanted her to ask me if I wanted to dance.”
Over the weeks of rehearsal, Tharp did not always have a full cast; early on, especially, she worked in smaller units. After the choreography was taught, and when more dancers were available, she focused on details: It seemed like she was breaking down a dance and putting it back together in order to find its essence. In one rehearsal, she spoke about the lifts in “Upper Room,” telling the dancers not to end them in positions, but to approach each of the partnered moments as snowflakes.
“Nothing should be flat in this,” she said. “It’s all just so round. And I think ends are really important here. The ends of the lifts evaporate. Let it all sort of trail out.”
Recently, because of her dancers’ schedules, she initiated run-throughs of the entire program — with no stops and just a short break between pieces — at the ungodly dancer hour of 10 a.m. This is usually when dancers take class, the act that prepares them for the day, not when they perform a dance, full-out, like “In the Upper Room.” Before the start of a run last Wednesday, Tharp announced that this was the equivalent of doing the third show and going into the fourth. (There are five performances in total.) “This one,” she told her cast, “is going to be mind over matter.”
Halfway through, the dancers were panting and slick with sweat yet also deliriously happy. “Some days when I see them all in there, warming up at 9 in the morning to start a 10 o’clock run-through,” Tharp said in an earlier interview, “I go, ‘These guys really want to dance. That’s why they’re here.’”
And each one has a story. Delgado, who danced “In the Upper Room” with Miami City Ballet, is taking on a role she has never performed before; she is not a sneaker-clad stomper, but is dancing on pointe as a member of what Tharp calls the “bomb squad.”
At first, Delgado was hesitant. She hadn’t really worn a pointe shoe in three years. Tharp told her, “Your body will respond if it’s something that your mind wants and your heart wants,” Delgado said. “It was a conversation I needed to hear or have that I didn’t know I needed. It was powerful.”
In the Sinatra, with its series of duets, she dances with Ulbricht, a City Ballet principal, in “That’s Life,” a duet spotlighting a mature couple — a fighting couple. “You’ve got to be able to handle conflict in a relationship,” Tharp said. “You give as good as you get. It’s mutual. She’s as strong as he is.”
Delgado performed the duet in Miami, but without Tharp’s coaching; it has evolved now, she said, and her character has been given “more of a voice.”
While the steps remain the same, Delgado said it feels like a completely new relationship. “It’s more of the approach of how I physically am responding,” she said. “Instead of letting my body completely be like a rag doll, she talked about how can we find where you’re standing in your own strength, looking at him eye to eye. When I go into that split, I can pull myself up.”
It’s that same fortitude, that same strength that never seem to evade Tharp. During the pandemic, she didn’t stop working, creating dances that related to the state of the world. This time, though the dances aren’t new, they have something new to say.
“Everything is transitional right now,” she said. “There’s very little that is dependable, from the economy to supply, to how people are functioning, to who’s in what job where. And the bridge between the world that ‘In the Upper Room’ presents and getting to this other warmer, more embracing world is, in a way, a promise. This can happen.”
She knows it may not be today. And “maybe not tomorrow,” she said. “We’ve still got a war going on. We’ve still got the economy. We’ve still got a very divided country. But I’m saying it can happen, because we’re doing it onstage.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
