Tharp!

The University of California at Berkeley's Cal Performances opened its 1996-97 season with one of its biggest-bang dance events ever--the debut performances of Tharp!, Twyla Tharp's new thirteen-member company performing three premieres. The program showcased Tharp in a reflective and valedictory mood, with all the new dances, Sweet Fields, 66, and Heroes, bearing clear references to earlier Tharp pieces as well as her signature flair for illuminating cultural codes through dance.

This is a company of young dancers, few of whom stand out with sharp movement identities in the way Tharp dancers of the past did. The newness of the company is of course partly responsible for this difference. More profoundly, there also seems to be a shift in the relationship between the dancers and the choreographic material Tharp gives them. Instead of prodding them to match her kinetic dreams, as in the past, Tharp seems to settle much of this new choreography in the current comfort zone of the dancers. The result is a work like 66, named after the famed Route 66, in which Tharp's mental virtuosity keeps overshadowing the onstage physical virtuosity. The costumes of bell-bottoms and bandeau tops suggest that the time period of 66 is '66, as does the prickly romanticism of the central duet for the commandingly sensual Julie Stahl and a perplexed Andrew Robinson, which concisely evokes the tensions of sixties feminism.

Heroes, a joint commission by Cal Performances and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, was the most readily Tharpian work of the evening. With its Philip Glass score, inspired by a recording made in the late seventies by David Bowie and Brian Eno, and its choreographic passages which wind in and out of the jogging pulse and whirling retrograde of Tharp's signature collaboration with Glass, In the Upper Room, Heroes achieves at several points the Tharp trademark of physicalizing sound. The central image in Heroes is that of three shirtless men in tight, silver metallic pants forming a benign yet relentlessly impenetrable wall against which a slight woman repeatedly hurls herself. At another point a black man is rebuffed by a similar lineup of men as one steps forward and loudly exhales in his face. These are images that carry strong social meanings, and indeed, they are inescapable in the dance, delivered with a literalness that makes one long for the more nuanced and richly ambiguous references of the Tharp of yore, the Tharp of The Fugue and Deuce Coupe. Although there are glimmers of the relentless physicality of In the Upper Room here, it is the external logic of design rather than the internal cohesion of rhythms that finally orders Heroes.

Sweet Fields, also a Cal Performances/Kennedy Center co-commission, presented an alternative vision of community, this time the fierce celibacy of the Shakers echoed in William Billings's early American hymns. Exquisitely lit by Jennifer Tipton (as were all the evening's dances) and costumed by Norma Kamali in filmy white shirts, shorts, and tank tops, Sweet Fields is a work of serene passages, of groups coalescing into communities. The world according to Tharp! now is a gentler place than her works revealed in decades past.