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Chicago Tribune
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Column: Next weekend, a confluence of dance events you definitely should see
Three upcoming, monumental dance events, all with deep ties to Chicago, are on a collision course with your calendar. But it is possible to see the Joffrey Ballet, Twyla Tharp and Parsons Dance next weekend — and you should. Parsons Dance David Parsons launched his dance company in 1985. Three years later, he opened the season at Columbia College Chicago. 'For some reason, they gave us a white limousine,' Parsons said in a recent phone interview. 'I remember that gig. And I've done a lot of gigs.' Born in Rockford and raised in Kansas City, Parsons credits Chicago with putting wind in the sails of a company that went on to international acclaim. 'Chicago is a major city in the United States,' he said. 'You start getting that stuff on your resume, it's the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. You're on your way.' Since the city's early endorsement, Parsons Dance has toured 30 countries and five continents, but it has been 30 years since Parsons Dance has been back. That changes on April 12, when they perform for one night only at the Auditorium. Howell Binkley, Parsons Dance co-founder and lighting designer, is prominently featured, lighting all but two of the pieces on the program. Binkley died in 2020; among his many accolades are two Tony Awards for 'Jersey Boys' and 'Hamilton.' 'He lit every work I did,' Parsons said of Binkley, beginning with 'Caught' in 1982. 'Lighting is my muse. Light is the thing that gets me going.' Parsons was dancing with the Paul Taylor Dance Company at the time. 'Caught' uses a flashbulb effect to catch its single dancer in mid-air, and has become a signature work of the company. 'If I didn't do 'Caught,' I wouldn't be talking to you today,' he said. 'It's just one of those things.' The piece is second to last on Saturday's program, which opens and closes with ensemble works from the aughts: 'Wolfgang,' an homage to ballet set to the soundtrack from 'Amadeus,' and 'Shining Star,' set to music by Earth, Wind & Fire. A newer tour de force, 'Balance of Power' (2020), and an older one, 'Nascimento' (1990), complete the bill's repertory by Parsons, with the 2024 work 'Juke,' by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater resident choreographer Jamar Roberts, completing the program. 7:30 p.m. April 12 at the Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Ida B. Wells Drive; tickets $30-$120 at 312-341-2300 and Twyla Tharp Dance Twyla Tharp Dance hasn't been here in a while, either, not since her 2017 lecture demonstration on some of her earliest works called 'Minimalism and Me' visited the Museum of Contemporary Art. Now, Tharp brings something brand new to the Harris Theater as part of her company's 60 th anniversary season. 'Slacktide,' which premiered last year, is set to music by Philip Glass, realized and played on stage live by Third Coast Percussion and Constance Volk, all from Chicago. 'The Glass is a piece of music I've admired for a while in a different format,' Tharp said. 'When I was introduced to Third Coast and saw that they could make something old new again—that was very attractive.' It's the first time Tharp has used the composer's music since 'In the Upper Room,' which premiered in 1986 at Ravinia Festival before it had a title. Tribune critic Richard Christiansen called it a 'breathtaking, big buster of a dance.' Indeed, 'In the Upper Room' has long been considered one of Tharp's greatest dances. 'Slacktide' begins where it left off. The front half of the program is taken up by Tharp's 1998 work 'Diabelli,' set to Beethoven's theme and variations of the same name. 'Theme and variation is a natural form, in that it makes a statement and then it examines the breadth, depth and issues around the theme,' she said, 'which provides a natural dramatic unity. It's both contrast and similarity, and that's a very attractive thing.' Tharp wrote a theme 'as simple and useful' as composer Anton Diabelli wrote for Beethoven, took it apart, examined it, and put it back together every which way. Unlike Mozart's one-upping of Antonio Salieri in the film 'Amadeus' (which Tharp choreographed), Beethoven wasn't cynical in his approach, she said. 'There is a lot of humor,' she said. 'He does do parodies. But he's always respectful of the material.' She's talking about Beethoven, but the sentiment is easily extrapolated to Tharp's decades of dancemaking. 'The juxtaposition of what's old and what's new is always a pretty thorny problem,' she said. 'It becomes kind of meaningless: Old, new, used or not used, A.I., fresh, original — all things that I've always had a kind of sense of the mortality of this concept.' April 10-12 at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph St.; tickets $74-$225 at 312-334-7777 and CSO x Joffrey Ballet Lest you think that's enough dance for one weekend, don't sleep on the Joffrey Ballet's two world premieres performed alongside the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Harry Bicket. It is the third such collaboration — an unconventional challenge involving an assigned piece of music and an atypical dance space on the CSO's home turf. At first, Joffrey rehearsal director Nicolas Blanc was taken aback by his selection: Darius Milhaud's 'Le Boeuf sur le Toit' (literally translated from French to mean 'the cow on the roof'). 'Despite the fact that it's written by a French composer, I didn't know the piece,' said Blanc, a Frenchman himself. 'To be frank, when I listened to the piece, I thought, this is really fun, but I'm not sure it's corresponding to my personality. I've been more doing serious works like ' Under the Trees Voices,' more nostalgic, more lyrical. It became a lot of fun, actually, to do my research.' The result is 'Les Boeufoons' (pronounced like 'buffoons, a theatrical tribute to the piece's origin story. Milhaud intended 'Le Boeuf' to be incidental music in a Charlie Chaplin film. Chaplin didn't want it. Neither did Serge Diaghilev, the impresario overseeing the wildly popular Ballet Russes in 1920s Paris. Choreographer Jean Cocteau, who had pitched 'Le Boeuf sur le Toit,' premiered his ballet without Diaghilev's help. Blanc employs references to Cocteau, the famous Ballet Russes ballet 'Parade' and the haute couture of the era. It's fun and hedges on ridiculous, without crossing the line into farce. That is miles away from Amy Hall Garner's work 'Second Nature' with visualizes music by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, an American composer whose connection to dance is concretized in the score to Alvin Ailey's 'For Bird with Love.' For Blanc, it's been a welcome project that has pushed him outside his comfort zone — particularly with dancers he sees every day. 'I'm really excited this project is happening,' he said. 'It's not been easy to conceive. I'm hoping all my hours of research and thinking and brainstorming are fruitful for what's going to be presented to the audience. But I do think that in the particular context we live in at the moment, a lighthearted piece is very welcome.' April 10-13 at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; tickets $55-$399 at 312-294-3000 and Also of note: In her newest piece, Praize Productions artistic director Enneréssa LaNette Davis suggests a slow-down in this work-obsessed chaotic world. Called 'Complexions,' the multi-disciplinary piece features dance made by Davis, former Deeply Rooted Dance Theater co-founder Kevin Iega Jeff and two former powerhouse Chicago dancers, Dominique (Atwood) Hamilton and Monique Haley, who have found their choreographic sea legs since leaving the stage. Musicians Junius Paul and Isaiah Collier join for the multimedia performance.
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.'
