Cal Performances program confirms Tharp’s genius
The major problem with the program that Twyla Tharp brought to UC-Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall Friday evening, celebrating the choreographer’s 50th anniversary, is that she can exhaust you all too easily.
Once a dance starts, there are no rest periods, the invention flows non-stop; the superb 12 dancers Tharp has chosen for this 17-city tour always seem capable of dazzling you with an inflection, suggesting a hidden meaning underlying a gesture.
Rather consider them confirmations of an extraordinary talent, one that can still find riches embedded in a well-traversed path.
The Bach, for all its structure and spirituality, includes the occasional jape (like kicking a supine dancer in the ribs), while, in “Yowzie,” the eye detects evidence of a rigorous structure.
In between, Tharp explores structural issues, like the canonic trajectory of two couples who end the sequence in dramatic lifts.
[...] in spite of a few inert sections, the sheer energy carries you along.
Tharp mingles ballet and modern vocabulary as she desires it, and it is not surprising to see an excellent dancer like Matthew Dibble scrunched on the floor in one section and launching a perfect arabesque in another.
Tharp revolutionized classic American pop dances, allowing upper bodies the freedom such infectious music evokes.
The choreographer plunges her dancers into a classy vaudeville, in which they slip and side, arch their backs and hunt for mates.