Twyla Tharp in Washington.

Twyla Tharp in Washington Terrace Theater, Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C. September 13-October 2,1994 Reviewed by George Jackson 

This show-and-tell about Twyla Tharp's summer residency began with the dancers warming up onstage as the audience entered the theater. Tharp must have gone rummaging for bits of used ballet and Americana, since the first half of the program consisted of her doodlings with several secondhand images--plus commentary. Initially, the crew for this workshop consisted of unpaid Washington dancers; Kennedy Center lent the rehearsal space. Reportedly, the dancers tried hard. Even so, Tharp felt that she couldn't shape them into a team, and so invited seven others she already knew to come to D.C. It was they who got to perform with her. Their material reward was part of the gate.

Tharp's talk wasn't as interesting as the ones she gave a couple of seasons ago at New York's City Center. Then, her topic was sex--in dance and in her life--and it seemed firsthand. This time, being in the nation's capital, the choreographer felt she had to talk about being American. Except, though, for a rumor charade (O.J. Simpson running for mayor of L.A.; Clinton's presidential library being built at Graceland), she didn't get the hang of this town.

Tharp's doodlings included weight shifts, time steps, contrasting groupings, slides, leaps, and lifts. Theatrically, they were downright ordinary.

But what followed the intermission was extraordinary. Tharp turned the bargain-basement material into a brilliant ballet. To Bartok's music (from Duos for 2 Violins), the choreographer worked her movement ideas in two modes, as classical and as character dance. Stacey Caddell, in red practice clothes and toe shoes, had the ballerina role. The other women--Shawn Stevens and sleek Melinda DeChiazza--wore jazz shoes and were dressed in black like the men, Petter Jacobsson, Shawn Mahoney, David Porter, and John Selya.

Caddell's attack for the slides on pointe was heroic. She made the weight shifts urgent, accelerated the time steps, and the most awkward lift became as functional as a battle maneuver. In all this, she carried herself grandly. Much was also asked of the others, but they molded the movement to suit themselves and express their personalities--Selya seemed wryly private yet winsome, Mahoney open and unaware of his own strength, Stevens determined, DeChiazza outgoing, and Porter chummy. Jacobsson (chubbier than when he was a fine classical dancer in his native Europe) seemed the least individual. Was he the counterexample for Tharp's point about Americanness in dance? Tharp's Bartok ballet is akin to the opera Ariadne auf Naxos--a compression of noble and comic manners into one work and a fulfillment of each, yet with the distancing touch of irony.

The etudes that followed the Bartok were more formed than those of the first segment, but not full ballets. Tharp continued to talk (about her choreographic process of theme and permutations, about technical aspects such as the type of shoe determining basic positioning, and about America). Dancing, with the men as her backup, she looked slightly stooped and turned in but, on a small scale, still agile.