Tharp Moves Out from Wingside

By Martha Duffy

Her new ballets show a masterly range of choreographic skill

It may be the name Twyla--curious, fanciful, perhaps not quite grownup. Or it may be her stage image as a witchy little jazzbo with a boxer's shuffle and a baseball pitcher's kick. For nearly two decades Twyla Tharp has gone about the business of being a choreographer, methodically building a first-rate company and a large, acclaimed body of work. But her reputation, at least outside serious dance circles, has lacked weight. She handles certain material, such as social dancing, pop songs and pop-up emotions, better than anyone else, in an idiom that seems delightfully impromptu and improper. The loose-jointed, off-balance look is unmistakable, whether a gleeful Sara Rudner is jigging through Eight Jelly Rolls or a bemused Mikhail Baryshnikov is buckling under the weight of his hat in Push Comes to Shove. A lot of the action takes place right at wingside: people venture onstage and quickly think better of it, or they try two or three different entrances, or they are flung on and hurled off by their fellows.

Her vaudeville flair so far has overshadowed the dramatic skill she has shown, notably in the full-length The Catherine Wheel (1981). But from now on she ought to be recognized as a major choreographer; indeed it can already be said that this is Twyla Tharp's year. Her troupe, now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is launched on a national tour featuring three of her jazz classics (Eight Jelly Rolls, Sue's Leg, Baker's Dozen) and some provocative new pieces that break away from the American nostalgia that is her specialty. Nine Sinatra Songs is vintage Tharp, drenched in '40s sentiment but done so well, with every upbeat affirmation so radiantly realized, that no easy label will stick.

But the ballet that really rang in Tharp's big season was Bach Partita, which American Ballet Theater is performing on its current tour. Despite some radical moves, it is a classical ballet that Petipa would recognize, and as such, it completes Tharp's range as a choreographer. She has nothing more to prove; the challenges now are the ones that she, a master, gives herself.

Set to Bach's Partita No. 2 in D minor for unaccompanied violin, the piece uses a cast of 36. Cascades of energy flow from couple to couple, wit and finesse point the steps, stretchy phrasing buffets the classical meter. The work not only rewards repeated viewing, but requires it; as usual with Tharp, there are at least two things going on simultaneously, complementing or teasing each other. What can be seen right away is how well she has taken six of A.B.T's best dancers, Cynthia Gregory, Fernando Bujones, Martine van Hamel, Clark Tippet, Magali Messac and Robert La Fosse, burnished their skills and made them look fresh. This 28-minute ballet contains the role that Gregory has waited a career for, showing her matchless turns and balances and presenting her very simply as herself: a vibrant, modern virtuoso instead of the fairy-tale queen she has very nearly frozen into.

A.B.T. also has a shorter new Tharp. Sinatra Suite came about because her friend Baryshnikov "needed a ballet," and so she ran him up a little number from the same cloth she was sewing for her own company. It consists of four duets for Baryshnikov, who looks and acts oddly like Cagney, and the sultry Elaine Kudo. At the end he dances a marvelous soliloquy on spent passion to One for My Baby. Nine Sinatra Songs is a sunnier, heartier, more ample work that audiences love. It is hard to believe that Tharp was fashioning Bad Smells and Fait Accompli at around the same time. If she has sometimes been accused of courting the crowd, these two ballets are surely a corrective.

Bad Smells, an acrid bit of post-punk savagery to a deafening score by Glenn Branca, does not really work. Six dancers perform rites of snarling brutality while a seventh (Tom Rawe) records them with a video camera, with the action projected on a big screen. Bad Smells looks unintentionally like a satire on TV news, flitting among scenes of horror and tragedy, recording or ignoring at random. But even without the distracting human figure, one must decide whether to watch the screen or the stage, and either way the result is unsatisfying.

Modern brutality is also the theme of a more interesting effort, Fait Accompli, for which Tharp must share honors with Lighting Designer Jennifer Tipton. The material is not very original: another electronic score (by David Van Tieghem) hurls heavy metal at the ear; frantic squadrons of dancers pound down the floorboards; Tharp, as a lone, weary figure, moves through a series of duets with men who try to help her but cannot. The inky mood, .faltering and yearning, is what matters here, and it is achieved through Tipton's enchanted fog, a miasma that gradually shifts from a poisonous smog to a more benevolent ether in which Tharp's lost soul can at last breathe. The eerie impression of inner space comes from a novel effect: the dancers appear and disappear gradually through a wall of light in back, with most of their exits and entrances made upstage rather than from the wings.

When Tharp first comes onstage she has a little sparring match, all darts and shuffles, with Raymond Kurshals. Fait Accompli is certainly not about the woes of boxing, but physical workouts have something to do with its style, and especially with the grace and vigor of Tharp's body. At 42, she is in superb shape, performing every night without any concessions at all to age. She is in fact making a comeback after a three-year retirement. "I wanted to be stronger than I could get through ballet classes," she says. "I figured that a boxer Fizzy nostalgia is in better condition all round than anyone." She calls dancing "a luxury" now. The real business of life is choreographing, running and nurturing her company, and making deals, TV tapes and even the occasional movie.

Her troupe will tour Latin America this spring, Western Europe in the summer. Next fall will see the open-ing of Milos Forman's film Amadeus, for which she created the dances. Next year she will make a full-length work for a European company, inspired by the early ballets of Mozart's time. Before that will come a June collaboration with Jerome Robbins for New York City Ballet. All of Broadway has its eye on this matchup of two tough-minded show-biz smoothies. So far Robbins has made only one suggestion: that the drop curtain be in the form of "His" and "Hers" bath towels. The sense of loss in Tharp's Fait Accompli has in part to do with the eventual prospect of retiring, and it will not be easy.

"If I didn't believe in myself as a dancer, I wouldn't choreograph," she says. "My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer." In fact she has prepared the transition that must come when the founder of a company is no longer its performing focus.

The range of her creations is already greater than her physical presence can encompass. She speaks fondly and volubly of her parents' inspiration. Her mother, who trained to be a concert pianist, insisted on lessons in several instruments, musical theory, plus extras like baton twirling (there is a fine baton riff in The Bix Pieces). Her father owned drive-in movie theaters around Los Angeles, which provided Tharp with an open-air classroom in popular culture. But she also remembers the satisfaction of watching him building and repairing his property, "brick and mortar, step by step." That is how Twyla Tharp has constructed her career. Which brings us to her third great inspiration, George Balanchine. Unlike most people in the dance world, Tharp is no expert on his choreography, but she knew what she needed to learn from him. "He understood about music," she says. "He understood about dramatic and social dancing. And he understood everything about the erotic, bless his heart. He was a craftsman, not someone who took a 19th century artistic pose. He trained generation after generation of dancers, each a development on earlier ones, and his own work developed and diversified. He was a good businessman -- I like that -- and I loved the flair of the man." Tharp visited Balanchine when he was dying and no longer able to recognize anyone.

"But I wore my best clothes and my good perfume," she says, "because I knew he would still enjoy that." That is a tribute, with flair. No one is about to replace Balanchine or even approach his union of genius, constancy and craft. But it is good that someone is studying the map and traveling the routes and exploring the whole world of dance theater, as he did.