Latest news with #Diabelli
New York Times
15-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Corrections: March 15, 2025
An article on Thursday about the Environmental Protection Agency reframing the purpose of the agency's mission referred imprecisely to the views of the Climate Enterprise Institute. The group believes global warming has been minimal and good for humanity and the biosphere; it does not promote 'climate denial.' An article on Monday about Israel's decision to cut off electricity to the Gaza Strip, relying on information from a source at the Israeli electric company, misstated the type of service affected by the electricity shut-off in Gaza. It was a desalination plant, not a wastewater treatment plant. A new analysis article on Thursday about shifting political winds in the Philippines misspelled the name of the city where people gathered to protest Mr. Duterte's arrest. It is Cotabato, not Cotobato. An article on Thursday about the impact that cuts to the Department of Education's research employees and outside partners will have on research and data collection misstated the amount of money that A.I.R. had in federal funding last year. It was $236 million, not $600 million. An article on Friday about a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's firing of more than 1,300 workers at the Department of Education incorrectly described Pell grants. They are not loans. A dance review on Friday about a program celebrating Twyla Tharp's 60th year of making dances misstated the name of a dance. It is 'Diabelli,' not 'Diabelli Variations.' Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.
New York Times
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: A Tharp Master Class on Themes, Variations and Allusions
In the middle of Beethoven's 'Diabelli Variations,' from 1823, the pianist's left hand starts rocking up and down the keyboard in a pattern that sounds uncannily like boogie-woogie from the 1930s and '40s. For a choreographer courageous enough to tackle that score, this is low-hanging fruit. It's easy to be witty by having the dancers jitterbug, with women tossed over the shoulders of their partners and hung upside down. Twyla Tharp does this in her 'Diabelli Variations' (1998), but the difference between Tharp and other choreographers is that by this point in her dance, the over-the-shoulder lift has already been introduced (and earned a laugh). Theme and variations is an ideal form for her brilliant mind, and her 'Diabelli' is a masterwork. What's more, with Tharp the jitterbug moves aren't just an allusion to a seemingly incongruous historical rhyme; they're an allusion to herself and her signature way of mixing American social dances into her American classicism. At New York City Center on Wednesday, Tharp's 'Diabelli Variations' had its New York debut as part of a tour celebrating her 60th year as a choreographer. That's a lot of past to draw upon. The little-seen 'Diabelli' is a treasure from the vault, but its new companion piece, 'Slacktide,' is full of fruitful recycling and repurposing, too. The challenge of the Beethoven score (excellently played at City Center by Vladimir Rumyantsev) is its one-thing-after-another quality, an hour of music divided by 33. There has to be enough repetition and backward references to hold the dance together but also enough transformation to keep it surprising and moving forward. Like a form-producing machine on overdrive — symmetry and asymmetry, duets doubled and tripled, five-part canons! — Tharp maximizes both. Beethoven took a mediocre theme by Anton Diabelli as material with which to demonstrate his own unparalleled virtuosity. Tharp takes Beethoven's virtuosity as a partner for hers, and that of her 10 terrific dancers. As she introduces her movement motifs and shows how they change in different choreographic and musical contexts, she continually marks details in the score. But unlike choreographers who follow the map of the music, Tharp creates her own. She might repeat a section exactly, or with a twist, but not because Beethoven does. Because she is Tharp, the grand design incorporates vaudeville gags. Dancers bump into each other, face-off, mock fight. One section for two men plays with the old 'I'm in front — no I'm in front' bit, which Tharp mines for its classic humor and revives with clever variation. But even these comedy bits are ultimately just movement material. When Tharp brings them back, they might be tender or pure form. Throughout, Tharp distributes little suggestions of interpersonal relationships and dramatic situations. (She can do that, too.) A few duets go further, expanding into resonant scenes. In one, a woman is searching for something or someone but it's not the man with her; he rolls on the floor, and she steps over him unaware. For Tharp aficionados, the tuxedo fronts on Geoffrey Beene's sleeveless costumes for 'Diabelli' recall Kermit Love's sleeveless, backless tuxedos for Tharp's 'Eight Jelly Rolls' (1971). In 'Slacktide,' Tharp's self-allusion is even more specific: It's the first move, isolated in light: a raised fist pulled down, which is also the final gesture from 'In the Upper Room' (1986). 'In the Upper Room' had a score by Philip Glass, and so does 'Slacktide': his 'Águas da Amazônia,' in a new arrangement played live by Third Coast Percussion. Where in 'Upper Room' the fist is yanked down, here it is lowered slowly. The dancers move in slow-motion, as if underwater. As if out of the murk, another current surfaces: a loose, limb flinging, heavily torqued wildness. Alongside this movement contrast, Tharp incorporates fragments of story. At one point, the dancers look like tourists; at another, like the guys and girls groupings in 'Grease.' It all merges into a flow that threatens to stall but doesn't. Kind of like Tharp's creativity. Programmed after 'Diabelli,' the much shorter 'Slacktide' might have looked like an afterthought. Many of Tharp's recyclings in recent pieces have seemed like worn-out chewing gum (a Tharp simile) or lazy shorthand, but this new work — set to Glass, the arch-self-plagiarizer, who took a bow on Wednesday — is fresh enough to hold its own. As the Glass score is obviously a Glass piece, 'Slacktide' is obviously a Tharp, and a good one. The measure of quality isn't whether Tharp is repeating herself but how. And it's important she doesn't allude only to herself. 'Diabelli' is chock-full of nods to predecessors. I spotted some Agnes de Mille, Alvin Ailey, Paul Taylor and, of course, George Balanchine. One of central motifs of 'Diabelli' and its final move — a fall that ends with the dancer stretched out along the floor — comes from Balanchine's 1934 'Serenade.' It's just a fall that Tharp uses like any other bit of movement material. But she knows what it means. It's a nod to the past that connects her to a pantheon. A bold move, but not an unjustified one.
New York Times
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Transformer: Twyla Tharp Dives Into the Future
It could be the middle of the ocean on a starless night, but it's a stage. An arm reaches up, glowing like a beacon of light. It lowers — slowly, deliberately — sliding into the darkness. A piece of movement is nothing without context. Twyla Tharp created that arm gesture nearly 40 years ago as the emphatic closing image of her celebrated 'In the Upper Room' (1986), in which two women — the 'stompers' — yank down a fist in victory. It's as much a physical movement as a celebration of making it to the top of a choreographic Mount Everest. During a recent interview, Tharp, 83, hopped from a chair to her feet to illustrate its emphatic power. 'Where that came from is the notion of pulling down a shade,' she said. 'Blackout!' That dance unspools to a propulsive mix of ballet, modern dance and even calisthenics to music by Philip Glass. It ends with the sense of an exhalation, a release. But what if that final exhalation from 'In the Upper Room' turned into an inhalation? What if an ending became a beginning? 'Slacktide,' Tharp's newest dance, is also set to Glass, his 'Aguas da Amazonia,' in a new arrangement created and performed by Third Coast Percussion. It starts where 'In the Upper Room' left off. 'I take that last move and make it go incredibly slow into the future,' Tharp said. 'Into another place, and that other place is a transformation.' The idea of transformation is a potent and poignant thread of Tharp's program at New York City Center, beginning Wednesday. The program also celebrates a milestone: her 60th anniversary as a dance artist — a diamond jubilee for one of the most important choreographers America has produced. The show pairs 'Slacktide' with the New York debut of her transcendent 'Diabelli' (1998), set to Beethoven's 'Diabelli Variations.' (Created for her Tharp! company, 'Diabelli' premiered in Italy and was performed in only three other places.) Tharp sees connections between the two works. 'Slacktide' was choreographed when 'Diabelli' was being reconstructed, and moments of the older dance have made their way into the new. But 'Slacktide' references material that goes back farther into the past. The movement for the central female figure of 'Slacktide,' Marzia Memoli, a Martha Graham and ballet-trained dancer, has been resurrected from Tharp's archive of video improvisation sessions — stitched together and reimagined for today. 'It's the fundamental question of any artist: How do you deal with the past?' Tharp said. 'If you're going to pretend like there's not one, you're not going to be very useful to anybody. So then the question becomes, how are you going to use it? And what's relevant in it and what's interesting, and even what's beautiful in it?' Tharp still finds a line from her 'Bix Pieces' (1972), for which she wrote the text, useful: 'Nothing new has been added, much has been forgotten, and it is all different again.' Throughout her robust career, Tharp has transformed both modern and classical dance, making patterns more layered, more intricate — for her, geometry is content, conflict and resolution — and building a movement vocabulary that binds looseness with precision. The mix of polished structure and body intelligence that a Tharp dance demands allows dancers to be themselves inside the works. Tharp's gift to the world is the idea of what American classical dance can be: unpretentious, technically complex, joyful and with every nerve activated. It's the way exuberance emboldens and refines classical dancing. Counterbalance is poise, and equilibrium is a meeting of heart, humor and tenacity. 'Diabelli,' a monumental dance, has everything of Tharp inside it. For roughly an hour, the dancers — playful, effusive, somber, heroic — glide among the many moods of Beethoven's variations as they somehow dissolve the delicate line between dancing and simply moving. As Tharp lifts the witty, danceable notes into the air and grounds them with kinetic weight, she shows that to dance is to be fully alive. The ebullience is part of the sophistication of 'Diabelli.' For the 10 dancers, it's a tour de force, and for the pianist, too. (Vladimir Rumyantsev will perform live.) Following the pattern of the music, how Beethoven addresses the theme, Tharp said, she sees transformation as one variation moves and morphs into the next. 'They're like beads on a necklace,' she said. 'It's not one whole stream from beginning to end. It's 33 separate seeds.' Tharp was originally urged to take on the Beethoven score by the pianist Alfred Brendel, whom she met while working in London. She thought it was a crazy idea, but, 'He said, 'It's so funny, you should do it,'' she said. So she did. The dance shares something with 'an old, well-structured variety show,' Tharp said, where 'you have to constantly refer to what just happened, but it has to be different enough to jar the audience.' 'It can't be totally out of left field or people are going to feel disconnected,' she added. 'But it also has got to be different enough that you're refreshed by the next act.' At the start, dancers cross the stage in staggered lines as they sway their arms from side to side and pause to bounce in plié. A charming lift has a woman straddled on the shoulder of a man before falling sideways like a paper doll and strapped behind him in an elegant, deadpan version of a piggyback ride. As one movement phrase morphs into the next, the dichotomy of opposing sensations is the strength of its vision: 'Diabelli' may be grand, but it grooves. 'Slacktide' has a different feel and look — while 'Diabelli' is presented in black and white, the lighting in 'Slacktide' is a shock of color. This ballet is meditative yet builds on itself as dancers swirl and glide, sometimes as if they were moving on ice. And then there is Memoli's material, which takes the dance back to a time when Tharp was in her 50s and improvising to explore classical technique, experimenting with movement — spatially, rhythmically and sequentially. She was reinventing: stripping out preparations, pairing a loose top of the body with a classically held center, and using torque as a way to allow for more suspension. When Memoli, who left the Graham company in 2024 to join Tharp's tour, first watched the videos, she said her first thought was, 'Wow, how can she move like this?' Memoli and Tharp worked together to turn steps from those improvisations into phrase material. Memoli said it was — and remains — a challenge for her to move with more weight, to drop the pelvis instead of lift it. Graham is modern and grounded, but Tharp's approach is different. One day, Tharp told Memoli to feel like a sponge full of water. 'She was like, 'Feel heavy,'' Memoli said. 'When I dance Graham, I never feel heavy. Never. She worked a lot on my ankles and my feet.' She added, 'I learned that sometimes my impulse needs to start from my imagination and not from my body.' Instead of going for everything 100 percent, she has learned to pull her focus inward. 'Something that she always tell me is: 'Don't perform. Let the audience come to you. They will come. Trust it.'' Dreamier than 'Diabelli,' 'Slacktide' takes place in an in-between world that emphasizes fluidity. 'Slacktide,' also set to Glass, doesn't have the punch of 'In the Upper Room'; instead it embraces the idea of flow and, again, transformation. It's named after the time when the tide seems to stand still before reversing, the moment when, as Tharp said, the out becomes the in. 'You can either think absolute stasis, which is actually what it is — it's no momentum — or you can think, all movement,' Tharp said. 'You can think all possibilities are right there at that moment.'
Los Angeles Times
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Review: Twyla Tharp at her best in ‘Aguas da Amazonia' premiere with Philip Glass score
When Martha Graham founded her company 100 years ago, she instigated a dance revolution in America. We've now had a century of modern dance, led by the likes of Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine and many others whose modernism delved into the very essence of the body's ability to express the ineffable. One of the key modernist figures formed her dance company 60 years ago as a motley troop of five women who danced spontaneously outdoors for passersby. It was, after all, the 1960s. But the diamond jubilee tour of Twyla Tharp Dance, which began a series of Southern California performances in Santa Barbara on Tuesday night, gradually evolved into one of the country's most popular companies, taking dance into a new and surprising direction. Over those six decades, Tharp had her ups and downs — the company disbanded and reformed. But neither she nor her often startling dancers (star ballerina Misty Copeland has been a longtime Tharpian) ever lost their spunk. By now, Tharp, more than anyone in the business, has done it all. But if doing it all has been Tharp's greatest contribution to modern dance, then that has meant she hasn't always been taken as seriously as other innovators. In the otherwise indispensable Library of America anthology 'Dance in America,' Tharp comes across as little more than an afterthought. Having absorbed Graham, Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Balanchine, Tharp hardly stopped there. She danced and choreographed for ballet companies as well as for modern dance companies (hers and others), for Broadway (incredibly creating the long-running collaboration with Billy Joel, 'Movin' Out'). She choreographed for and partnered with Mikhail Baryshnikov, expanding his dance horizons far beyond his classical Russian mastery. And then there was Hollywood. The astounding dances in 'Hair.' Her opera stagings in 'Amadeus.' Still, anything goes and doesn't in Tharp. Her work doesn't begin with theory or concept but with her body and her many surprising musical seductions. She first came to shocking fame by using the Beach Boys in a ballet for Robert Joffrey. But she grew up in Rialto, outside San Bernardino, with Beethoven (her mother was a pianist) and has created a number of dances to Beethoven, as she has with Brahms, Mozart, Bach, Bob Dylan and Frank Sinatra. She has a special feel for Philip Glass. Her most irresistible work and a huge hit was the 1996 'In the Upper Room,' for which Glass wrote one of his finest dance scores. A decade ago, Tharp celebrated her 50th anniversary with a relatively conventional tour program that reached the Wallis in Beverly Hills. This time, she isn't fooling around. For her diamond jubilee, the 83-year-old Tharp has remounted a major Beethoven work, 'Diabelli,' from 1998, and created a major new Glass dance, 'Slacktide,' of which UC Santa Barbara was a co-commissioner. Both scores featured live music, Russian pianist Vladimir Rumyantsev playing Beethoven's 'Diabelli' Variations offstage and Third Coast Percussion performing Glass' 'Aguas da Amazonia' in the pit. Beethoven's 33 variations on a theme by a certain businessman named Diabelli seems tailor-made for Tharp. Beethoven was one of 51 composers to whom a publisher sent a commonplace melody in hopes of a getting single variation from each for a volume that would benefit victims of war. Beethoven typically couldn't stop himself. His 55-minute set of variations, his last major work — and his largest — for solo piano is a compendium of what the composer could do and what the keyboard instrument of 1825 could do. Rather than feeling epic, it is a riot of invention, and Tharp responds in kind. Ballet loves variation, short episodes featuring one fancy bit of choreography after another. Tharp can't stop herself either. She is full of humor and whimsy, creating every imaginable kind of playful and play-acting partnering. There is little rest and lots of exhausting joy. One problem, however, was the grotesque amplification of the offstage piano, to the point where it felt like Beethoven was practically bullying the dancers. Glass' score to 'Aguas da Amazionia' (Waters of the Amazon), written for a Brazilian dance company around the same time Tharp choreographed 'Diabelli,' is peculiar but radiant. The subtitle is 'Seven or Eight Pieces for Dance.' There wound up being nine, if you wanted to do it that way. But Glass left it to ensembles to orchestrate their own versions. The first was by the lively Brazilian percussion ensemble Uakti, which uses a variety of fabulously weird instruments, Indigenous and new (a glass marimba being one). It's also been adapted, poorly, for orchestra. The Chicago-based Third Coast Percussion has found its way in, not as strangely as Uakti but beautifully. Tharp's 'In the Room' was sheer exuberance, Nearly four decades later, Tharp hardly seems to have slowed down her dance, but 'Aquas' does have a statelier sheen. The lighting illumines each river in brilliantly bright backdrop colors. The arresting dancers have not lost whimsy but are here reflective. There is nothing exactly watery in the movement or the music. Mature ritual instead replaces frolic. Dancers exude individuality and purpose. Their phrases, complex yet seemingly effortless, often direct our vision beyond their bodies to others or to the light glowing behind them, as if in reverence of the Amazonian waters and wonders, ever in need of preservation. 'Slacktide' may well be Tharp's most moving and beautiful ballet. The amplification managed to illuminate Third Coast, which was joined by flutist Constance Volk. Rivers of deep, deep bass flowed under tingling treble waves. The program reaches Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa on Saturday and Sunday, and then the McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert on Tuesday and the Soraya at Cal State Northridge the following weekend, Feb. 22-23. Rumyantsev will peform live, but 'Aguas' will be with recorded music. Tharp's diamond Jubilee tour continues on to Santa Fe, N.M., and New York, among other stops. It's supposed to reach Washington, D.C., on March 26, although the tide has turned at the Kennedy Center, another co-sponsor of 'Slacktide.' Will the show go on? Will it be enough that Tharp has made another great new American dance?
