sarma

Oh Twyla, what have you done? Finally stunned me into wordlessness, I think. Here I sit, staring at the rows of mint-green letters on my Hermes, wondering how I can possibly hit them into sentences that will suggest the liveliness, the complexity, the marvelous ease of "Deuce Coupe".

As everyone probably knows by now, "Deuce Coupe" is the ballet that Twyla Tharp has just produced with the City Center Joffrey company. It's done to a selection of Beach Boy hits from the past 10 years. Tharp and her company, for the time being, are dancing in it, along with 14 members of the Joffrey.

Calling the ballet "Deuce Coupe" (a Beach Boy title too) was appropriate. It's a real double-doored affair in which ballet steps and steps based on social dance styles of the '60s banter gently with each other or go their separate, often simultaneous ways. This is not a simple matter of the Joffrey kids doing classical ballet while Twyla and her people frug and boogaloo. They're all in it together. I mean, suddenly you notice Beatriz Rodriguez in a clot of Tharp women -doing that silk-ribbon ripple of the spine with great finesse. Or Larry Grenier, making a brief, lazy trio with Kenneth Rinker and Nina Wiener of the Tharp company. And right near the end of everything, Tharp, alone in an upstage corner, begins the same soft, lyrical phrase with which Rebecca Wright and William Whitener open the ballet.

Erika Goodman -dressed in white, more relaxed and glamorous than I've ever seen her look- acts as a stylistic reference point. Throughout almost the entire ballet, she works her way through steps from a ballet glossary, leaping past, and into, obliviously wiggling hordes. Occasionally the force of the others' dancing seems to crumple her or knock her from the stage. She becomes a kind of testament to the dancer's discipline and endurance.

But in the end, "Deuce Coupe" doesn't contrast ballet with rockdancing; it points out their kinship. Tharp's ballet style doesn't show you a lot of poses or long, sharply drawn body lines. It makes you aware of those elastic little traveling steps -like pas de basque, glissade, coupé. The dancers look open and soft doing it -arms, head, torso free to glide and twist on top of the easily springing feet. Not that the balletic movement is all peaceful. Rebecca Wright and William Whitener execute some rapid turns -whipped by one extended leg and a contracting and expanding torso- that are terrifically exciting. Once I noticed a phrase that Glenn White was doing very beautifully, and I was wiped out by the combination of intricacy and nonchalant elegance -both in the choreography and in his dancing.

Tharp's approach to rock is like her approach to jazz. None of the dancing in "Deuce Coupe" looks anything like adapted Broadway-style stuff that often passes for up-to-the-minute pop in the ballet world (e.g., Fernand Nault's choreography for "Tommy"). Tharp shows you loose, scrambling legs, shrugging shoulders and hips, rolling heads. Sometimes the dancing is tight and fast, abrasive; sometimes it's lolling, lost in space, falling apart. Even in music as straightforward as the Beach Boys' stuff, there's a lot of ambiguity.

"Deuce Coupe" uses 14 cuts, some of them very short. There are a few repeats, and David Horowitz made variations on the finale, "Cuddle Up". Maybe the dance is too long; maybe it isn't. Maybe it's just so much richer and livelier than a lot of the dances I see that I can scarcely take it all in. The gentle, happy beginning with Wright, Whitener, and Goodman segues through a sprightly trio passage for White, Starr Danias, and Henry Berg into a long juicy canon with all the dancers strutting and shuffling and hip-shaking onto the stage one by one in a long line -looking very wise-ass pleased about it all. From then on, the stage often looks like a crowded dance floor on which people are sometimes dreamy, sometimes aggressive. The dancers dash in and out, drift past, butt their way through. Pardon me. Get outa my dreams. There's no such thing as a number bracketed in important pauses; the dancing is an unstoppable flood.

Twyla and Gary Chryst jackknife in, feet barely touching the floor. Their bodies jabber at each other in the air. Some kind of crazy happy contest. Tharp smiling on stage? In "Alley Oop" a bunch of dancers slouch about while Goodman completes the passage from Pas de cheval to Repetition. They're not doing the Monkey; this is full-size ape-dancing- pensively lewd. Small Tharp skitters through in the wake of big Rose Marie Wright ("Long Tall Texan"). Splat, Tharp's down. Wright walks over her into the wings, and Tharp follows still importuning. Five of the dancers mime musicians dragging on preperformance joints, then begin slowly jerking their way along in a clump. The gestures of their limbs speed up crazily, although they don't seem to cover ground any faster. They exit, looking as if the friction of their feet on the floor had built up enough static electricity to blow the place up. Sara Rudner's little solo is a long shudder of self-absorbed sexuality. Yet, even with the infinitesimal vibrations from her shaking hips and shoulders, the inviting opening and closing of one probing leg, she looks elegant. Just the sheer dancepower of it is tremendously moving.

Much of the dancing is witty or just happy. Some is equivocal. Once Chryst, Grenier, Rudner, and Tharp dance close together -arms bodies, hips swinging with the cozy love ballad, but their heads keep twisting so their eyes never meet. The kids in "Catch a Wave" slide exuberantly over the floor, but the girls who line up for "Don't Go Near the Water" look positively schizzy -arms swimming directionless, heads averted- and they finish by writhing and twisting as if trying to climb out of their skins.

There's canon, fugue, counterpoint, and what-not in "Deuce Coupe", but they're hard to see because of the breezy look of the dancing and some of the haphazard space patterns. Still, it seemed to me that in the long, lyrical, swirling finale, I saw little muted flashes of almost everything I'd seen before, and that felt somehow reassuring.

Everything about "Deuce Coupe" looked fine to me, except for some of the lighting. The women's orange dresses (by Scott Barrie) -each cut slightly differently from every other- move nicely and are ex-chic beachy without being gimmicky. The boys wear red trousers and tropical shirts, but not blazing ones. A group of guys from United Graffiti Artists do their impudent stuff with spray paint on a rolling white paper backdrop, and by the time the ballet is over, they've achieved something like the outside of a Seventh Avenue express train. Only more. The casting of "Deuce Coupe" is weird. I got the feeling that whoever showed up for a rehearsal was put in a section, and the injured, the too busy, the tardy ended up with less dancing. I kind of liked barely seeing some of them; I knew we were at the same party. All the dancers are fine. Some are better than others, but I'm not naming names. I don't want to exclude anybody. Boy is it nice to see people up there dancing.