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Criticism in the arts, particularly literary and dramatic criticism, has an established tradition of theories, modes and methods. Dance, however, with its problem of ephemerality, and the precarious nature of the responses and attitudes it has aroused through its history as a theatre art, has been less well served. An examination of critical dance writing reveals well defined criteria for assessing dance, various aesthetic viewpoints, predominant themes for analysis and distinct stylistic features in the writings of particularly significant critics.(1) Nevertheless, critical tradition in dance is sparse and a methodology is scarcely formulated. This is essentially a virgin area for investigation.

This paper is an exercise in dance criticism method. The approach taken here is to examine a specific critical theme, the notion of identifying characteristics in choreography through selected works of Twyla Tharp. The dances, Mud, Sue’s Leg and Push Comes to Shove are examined: firstly, through immediate, active description of the dance action; secondly, through analysis of the descriptive accounts to determine whether a rational basis for the notion of identifying characteristics can be discerned.

Twyla Tharp was selected not only because of her distinct and prolific output but because the impact she makes on me as a critical viewer is so resounding. Marcia Siegel’s own response to Tharp serves this point vividly:

All Tharp’s premieres have had the same exhilarating effect on me. For the first few minutes I’m stunned, disoriented, don’t know where to look or how to organize what I’m seeing. Gradually I get pulled into the energy of the piece — somebody starts falling over, and somebody you hadn’t been counting on whirls into place for the catch. I get excited. I’m grinning. I’m gasping. I’m looking as hard as I can. All of a sudden it’s over, and the minute I can pull myself together and think, to decide I haven’t seen what’s there at all. Then I start making plans to see the dance again. Tharp takes away your security, all the things you’ve unconsciously learned through constant reinforcement about how to look at dance.(2)

The following critical exercise is by no means a complete treatment of Tharp’s works. Little consideration is given, for example, to the value and influence of Tharp’s choreography, her essential classicism, nor the overall structure of her works. It is hoped, however, that the following critical exercise will produce a working model for the practice of dance criticism and contributed towards an understanding of Tharp’s works.

Identifying characteristics

As one becomes familiar with the works of a choreographer one begins to recognize certain consistent and distinctive characteristics. These seem to identify the works as the output of a single creative mind and they may be referred to as the identifying characteristics of the choreography. These characteristics endure from performance to performance, cast to east, and performing condition to performing condition

Identifying characteristics are the result of the choreographic manipulation of the elements of the dance medium: the moving body, space, time, and dynamics. Through this manipulation these elements are transformed so that the whole is richer and more complex than the sum of the individual parts. Identifying characteristics need not be only physical. They may be the ways in which the dancer and choreographer challenge and extend the particular constraints they are working with. For example, dancers in Tharp’s company must, in Tharp’s own words, “ease the tension in the tops of their bodies while using all the technique of their legs.”(3) This involves, as Deborah Jowitt interprets, “acquiring a strong classical technique and then learning to fling it around without ever losing control.”(4) Identifying characteristics can also be the attitudes dancers bring to their work. An attitude to dancing can have an immediate, visible outcome and it can produce an inherent look to the whole work. Deborah Jowitt describes the Tharp dancers aptly in this regard:

For all the loose-jointedness and slammed-into passages, the dancing has a kind of elegant ambiguity and restraint — the dancers don’t impose an attitude on it (the dancing). Instead, they allow what they’re doing to absorb, amuse, exasperate them.(5)

As a characteristic, attitude makes itself seen or felt in some theatrically intelligible way. Identifying characteristics, then, are combinations of the elements of the dance medium manipulated in a certain way to produce a unique but consistent impact and which define a choreographer’s works (or some significant portion of them). The task now at hand is twofold. First, what characteristics can be ascribed to Tharp’s works? Second, what description of these characteristics can convey the dominant impression of the relevant performance events? Four characteristics have been located. They are, weight-rhythm, game-playing, epitomizing solos and visual attitude. These can be described in general terms, as follows:

Weight Rhythm

Weight rhythm s the way in which Tharp manipulates weight as a continuous flow of motivations and consequences in movement. The thrust, shape and timing of movements and movement interactions are dictated by weight consideration. There is an unexpected nature of the use of weight which is manifested in several ways: in gestures, in movements phrases, and in movements of the whole body. In gestures, energy tends to dissolve into delicate detail slightly before what one anticipates to be the natural end of that gesture. The weight of a gesture transforms it from one quality to another very different quality. In movement phrases there are two occurrences of weight rhythm. First, as a transforming agent as in gesture. Weight is manipulated before the natural end of a phrase in such a way as to produce an entirely new and unexpected quality in the movement. For example, a run will often stop short and become a casual walk. Second, there is an illogical connection between the condition of weight and the execution of a physical feat. For example, without any visible preparation or momentum, dancers catapult into fast and vigorous feats; or conversely, dancers settle their weight into large stable preparations which are succeeded by minimal actions. In group interactions, dancers use a terrific force of weight to topple other, precariously placed dancers; or conversely, use an enormous anchorage of weight to receive the most gentle weightbearing of other dancers. In movements of the whole body weight rhythm can be seen as a dislocating agent. For example, a shrug of the shoulders in the midst of a pirouette will throw the force of the pirouette off info another shape; a swivel of the hips will shake out a whole tangle of movements, changing the phrasing to a different tack o letting it go dead and starting afresh. Weight often changes the duration, the tone and the impact of a movement. Weight-rhythm can be described as a kinesthetically illogical quality — a kind of flow of disruptions.

Game Playing

Choreographic game-playing exists in Tharp’s dances on three levels. First, the actual, little virtuoso games that are played and which allude to real games, such as musical chairs, pass-the-hat, and pass-and-block-the-ball. These danced games involve the same kind of intensity and goal achievement that real games do. A second choreographic sense of game-playing is a network of foreshadowing and cross-referencing to other movement events or themes within the dance. Like a choreographic cross-word puzzle, movement passages are partially revealed or, hinted at at certain points of the dance and then followed through at a later point. For example, a dancer might just miss colliding with another dancer in a lift sequence in one passage. In another passage, later in the dance, a dancer in the same circumstance of a lift will actually collide with another dancer. The foreshadowed event has taken place. In “cross-referencing” dancers might refer to each other’s movement quality and steps from earlier moments in the dance. On a final, overall level, there exists a sense of “the-game-of-it-all”. Dancers absorb themselves intensely in passages of dancing and then abruptly drop-out or drop the passage altogether. It is a kind of choreographic fickleness or quirkiness. Just when the viewer becomes thoroughly absorbed in a movement phrase, looking as hard as he can, the dancers abandon the phrase and begin something new. The new movement insists on a new kind of attention from the viewer. There is then, a sense in which both dancer and viewer are constant active. These three 1evels of game-playing are all skilfully shaped, timed and highly-crafted activities. There is a sense that the dance is playing as much a game with the dancers as it is with the viewer.

Epitomizing solos

In Tharp’s choreography, solos epitomize the movements and essence of the work as a whole. Tharp’s movement becomes more accessible in solos not only because of the concentration of focus on a single dancer but because the solos seem designed to reveal the nuts and bolts of Tharp’s movement logic. They seem to be saying, one dancer will play all the parts, go through the vocabulary and show you all the ways it is manipulated in this dance.”

Whereas solos in the works of other choreographers create new moods or act as brief tangents from group sections, Tharp’s solos seem to be highly conscious acts of revelation about the nature of her choreography. They act as microcosms of the dance. The length, volume and impact of the solos vary yet each solo clearly epitomizes the dance as a whole. Thus, the solos encompass all the other identifying characteristics and are themselves an identifying characteristics of Tharp’s choreography.

Visual Attitude

Visual attitude might simply be defined as Tharp’s attitude to dancing as manifested in her works. Tharp has asked,

Why do we have to crawl to art on our knees and put brambles in the path? It’s something you do. You eat, you sleep, you do other things, and in between you make a little art.(6)

This sense that art is not something to be overwhelmed by, but rather, something to be carried out is conveyed by a matter-of-factness in performance. The dancing in Tharp’s work is carried out with a kind of dead-pan veil. The sense of discovery in kinesthetically unlikely constructions, in executing virtuoso feats, in gesturing in the most minimal or pedestrian manner is all coloured by this “taking in stride” everything that comes to pass. This visual attitude is not only achieved through dead-pan facial and bodily expression. It is a manipulated, cultivated and inherent characteristics of the dance itself.

These comprise some of the identifying characteristics of at least a group of Tharp’s works. The problem now is to demonstrate their significance in the absence of the actual performance events. To this end, as indicated above, descriptive or narrative accounts of the three different works were written as the dances were witnessed. Following each of these accounts the way in which the appropriate identifying characteristics become evident in each work is discussed.

Mud: Critique and Discussion

Mud was premiered on May 12, 1977 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York. The cast for that performance was: Raymond Kurshals, Richard Colton, Kimmery Williams, Shelly Washington, Jennifer Way, Christine Uchida and Rose-Marie Wright. The costumes were designed by Santo Loquasto and the lighting by Jennifer Tipton.

Mud, the substance, is made mainly of earth and water. Mud, the dance, is made mainly of ballet and Tharp vernacular. The white costuming coolly contradicts the title, and sets us up for splattering slapstick. But the dance is not about slapstick or contradiction. Mud is about Tharp’s choreographic alchemy.

The dance holds itself up like a pillarless architectural feat. The tersely phrased, compactly spaced dance flows over a foundation of silence alternating with Mozart. There is no beginning, middle, end structure, nor predictable length of phrasing, nor any symmetrical spatial balance within the separate dances.

The dancing in Mud tends to cling to the wings and crosses the stage from side to side like a tennis match (another association for the white costumes?). Dancers generally exit or enter before a new dance begins. This is a good idea, because it is a short work (about 12 minutes), stuffed with layers and lacings of everything that can pass for Western theatrical dancing, from pedestrian minimalism to Bolshoi bravura. By allowing you breathing room between dances, Tharp at least gives you a head start in seeing.

The dance seems to interrupt itself before it even begins — with a silent section called Speed. Jennifer Way invades the stage like a white tornado in shorts and sneakers. She is in a fit of total, raw energy. Her spins and splats and shuffles spark, they’re so fast, but for all this, she has travelled about one foot. With a few sleek swivels of her hips she snakes her way out of a mess of movement and arranges herself in a new place. From a lax, dreamy jog, she nose dives for the floor, changes her mind with her weight and doesn’t fall flat on her face. Instead, she sprints around the stage, and Raymond Kurshals charges in pursuit, finding time for some pitter pattering around in folksy heel-toe steps. The two burst for the wings like a ten yard dash, screech to a halt a few paces short of their destination and casually saunter off. Who needs to win a ten yard dash?

Meanwhile, three Tharpian ballerinas, auctioned off from an authentic ballet blanc wait patiently in an upstage corner to begin Air dressed in whiter than white flounce and flowers and satiny pointes. As Mozart bids them, they venture out in buttery chassés framed inside the curves of port de bras.

Something is amiss. This odd assortment of nymphs perform their recital ballet steps as if to defy gravity would be an insult to that fundamental force. They stiffen for an onslaught of foot beats and then erase into a flurry of weavings, bridges, loops and daisy chains with determined intricacy and ballon. Towering Rose-Marie Wright crashes down off her pointes from an attitude turn and leads the pack in sauté en pointe. Kimmery Williams springs into a taut second position, bourrées promisingly for a moment in place, then hobbles and breaks at the knees. The three (the third being Christine Uchida) weave across the stage in a triangular support of hand holds, shifting between tight, academic-classical and ungainly flounce. Every now and then, like nervous giggles thwarting dignity, they emit clandestine little hip swivels. Their exit is a confusion of écarté, effacé indecision, with arms and bodies blinking in all angles.

The dance has changed sides and silence reigns once again. A contingent in white pads in. The dance is at midpoint, half undressed — half way through its cycle from everyday to formal wear. The women, Shelly Washington and Christine Uchida are still en pointe but wear variations of frilly pants and gymsuits. Richard Colton and Raymond Kurshals are more concealed in long white sweat pants and billowy shirts. Pippin kick lines, inverted Petrouchka poses, teases at florid pas de deux, near collisions and acrobatic sparks are jumbled up with just the right ratio of time and space so that the senses are not clogged. The dancers either take easy ways out of the most complicated tangles or make a lot of work for themselves when the solutions are simple. At one point, Colton braces himself in a gargantuan second position, only to receive the most delicate weight bearing from Washington as she pretends to dive into him. Then, when he seems to least expect it, she climbs over his shoulder and falls into the arms of Kurshals, who just happens to be walking by. He tosses her into the wings like a frisbee. She is out of the game. Uchida, abandoned, bourrées backwards toward the wings, tragically arching her torso back and floating her arms up slowly like a Wili.  Kurshals circles around, catches the hollow of her arch over his shoulder and escorts her out.

Strains of Mozart filter in while Richard Colton begins a solo, Water. This solo is like the connective tissue of the dance, sustaining it with references to what has lived before and creative fluid for what follows. Colton turns slowly around on one foot, tucking the other foot neatly behind his ankle. He springs to an arabesque, then starts “trying himself out for size,” tossing his weight from one pliéd leg to the other. He runs around himself making curly swivels with his hips. A surprising image is imprinted when he snatches himself up into a ball on the floor, flails his legs wildly beneath him, squelches the movement abruptly and shields his face with his arms. It is an image that sticks. Set up by its fussy, leggy preamble, the moment when he covers his face with his arms seems so personal and isolated — like a player stepping out of character for a moment.

This image alludes to dramatic modern dance and reminds me that this is something Tharp never seems to do. Perhaps this is why it is so striking. As well, so many movements in Tharp’a dances refer back to themselves or each other that one appreciates this moment in a special way because it is never repeated or alluded to. From nowhere, Colton finds enough energy to send his body orbiting in chaînés turns. He pops a pause in attitude, catches a knee that starts to sag, and with an “abracadabra” gesture of his hand finds his way into something new. He mimes a walk, covering miles in place. Switch: classical attitude turns and fourths. Switch: unidentified flying twitches. Switch: a formula of footsteps that he grasps intuitively. He walks off, then stops to “hold that pose” (you’re lookin’ good, baby) and meets up with Shelly Washington at the wings for a casually romantic rendezvous. He promenades her around en pointe, leaning on her more than supporting her and the two stroll off intimately with heads leaning together and hands clasped. Washington’s flouncy camisole dress swishes in the silence.

It is this silence that begins the next section, Earth. The dance stays on the right as a quartet marches in in shorts and sneakers. It is a Dance Olympics of breathtaking speed, manipulations, timing and invention. Raymond Kurshals flings Jennifer Way out of line, an arm’s length past himself like a yoyo trick. Their fingers just catch as they lean away, caught in the peak of jitterbug momentum. As they spring down through their knees and rebound up for a repeat to the other side, the other couple slowly sinks down through their knees, accentuating the downbeat of the event. Kurshals and Rawe start playing skin-the-cat with Way while Wright abandons them with a simple walk away. The group reconvenes in a huddle and jostles and rumbles in excess confusion. At one point Kurshals spin lifts Way around like a bar bell, whamming Rawe in the stomach (earlier, in Fire, this same manoeuver just missed making the connection). Wright gets her licks in later when she rushes at Rawe and Kurshals, who are barricading their arms in a hand hold, and pushes a fouetté off them, smashing their hands apart. The game is fast and the competition is fierce. Kurshals cannot hold his own. He softly “dies” into the floor, ca an appealing look for help at the others as he sinks. Eventually he gets picked up for a “shuffle off to Buffalo”.

At the end of the dance, al the dancers try to hold their own weight as they link arms and anchor into the floor on balancing, pliéd legs. They timber over into a still heap. Structural fatigue.

Let us now consider the four characteristics introduced earlier. First, weight rhythm, which is strikingly evident.

In Way’s opening solo in the segment Speed, she “changes her mind with her weight.” This impression bas been remarked upon by Deborah Jowitt who comments that the dancers in Tharp’s works seem:

Almost constantly on the move — sometimes they arrest the momentum of a gesture so dangerously that you’re sure they’re going to fall and then guide it in some unforseen direction.(7)

As discussed above, in weight-rhythm, a kinesthetic pattern is set up, in part, by such a change and unexpectedness in the use of weight. Way comes out of a lax, non-preparatory state and surprises us with a complete change of weight and momentum by “nose-diving” towards the floor. She also covers a stretch of space that bears little relation to the effort she apparently exerted — another dynamically illogical result initiated by a particular use of weight. Again, in Speed, Way and Kurshals illustrate another component of weight-rhythm when they “burst for the wings like a ten-yard dash,” but, then, stop suddenly and casually walk-off. At a later point Colton braces himself “in a gargantuan second position, only to receive the most delicate weight bearing from Washington as she pretends to dive into him.”

The most dramatic example of weight-rhythm in Mud is the moment described in the account as “structural fatigue.” The dancers build-up to this moment from a clump of stretched fourth positions. They ease out of the clump through slow attitude turns. It is like watching a potter’s wheel slowly revolve, building op clay walls as it goes around. The dancers interlace as they scoop around accumulating solidarity and height as elbows link, bodies lean, push and pull. Way anchors a plié into the floor and tries to stabilize herself with an arm vaguely reaching out — but she falls forward. Rawe holds on in an attitude using a thrown-back head for leverage but his forward pitch is too great to hold him back, Wright does not seen to even bother trying. She clomps right through the line and falls over. Kurshals perches securely in arabesque on relevé and when everyone has almost hit the floor, he throws himself in with the lot. Weight rhythm is a visual and felt characteristic that is essential to the experience of both viewing and performing Tharp’s works.

In Tharp’s dances our senses are teased by the game-playing. References to other moments in Mud are played out like skits, sometimes inverted, sometimes hinted at, sometimes altered slightly, but always recognizable. When Kurshals, in Earth spins Way around “like a barbell whamming Rawe in the gut” it is the result of a foreshadowing in Fire where Kurshals spins a stiffened Uchida around and just misses a fatal connection with Colton. At another point in Fire, Washington dives an arabesque penchée into Colton, and Uchida grabs the opportunity for a little dear space and hurls herself under the bridge of Washington’s leg. Later, in Earth, as Way rides up to the peak of her skin-the-cat, Wright, similarly, walks through the clean path beneath her. This is a crossword puzzle of meanings and moments. Mazo refers to this cross referencing when he says that

dancers on different parts of the stage do different things at the same time or the same things at different times.(8)

The “garbling-up” of all these things creates an intense collage and the dancers carry it off like a game. A kind of “game cleverness” is a characteristic projected in Tharp’s dances. Like a decoy, the games tend to distract the viewer from yet other discoveries.

The fact that Mud and so many other of Tharp’s dances are initiated by solos (Cacklin Hen, Eight Jelly Rolls, Simon Medley, As Time Goes By are some others), suggests that they are important in a particular way. The term “connective tissue” suggests that Colton’s solo Water appearing in the middle of Mud is a visually large and strategic dance. As Tobi Tobias says, “it is a long line of physical narrative that you want never to stop.”(9) The solo has hundreds of darting little changes in focus. Colton moves with a fluid “getting nowhere fast” quality. His body seems to be in a continuous state of implosion. A terrific energy propels his body, but only within the space he already employs (this same “non-use” of space occurs in Way’s opening solo where she manages to “travel about one foot”).

Such clarity in line and timing in this solo makes one believe that one can predict the next break at the kness (a small, jolting collapse which rebounds almost instantly), the next shift in direction, the next twitch or dislocation of a hip or limb or the next wide settling fourth position. This one, self-absorbed, moving body, produces a linear density that has the profundity of an entire orchestra. Colton varies the movement qualities that have been rendered throughout the dance; having to be ready to change direction suddenly, holding a sustained pose and them quickly shifting weight off-center and back again, allowing the body to take an unexpected shape.(1) He also extends the reference of movement itself: to mime, to classical ballet and to free expression. His solo dissects the whole network of references-to-other-moments, illogic, extremes, simplicity and confusion, but it never dissolves the mystery by doing so. It intensifies it because it is so rich, precise, and calculated.

This whole past and future of Mud gets strung along in Colton’s solo. When the other dancers merge into this passage, something else takes over. The simultaneous idiosyncrasies of all those unexpected shapes and shifts and dislocations “thicken the plot.” Weight merges with weight; timings interact creating new rich events.

Visual attitude in Mud can be most clearly recognized in the moment at the beginning of Colton’s solo in Water. Up to the point of this solo the critique has described an immense amount of complicated, fast moving activity that Colton is both surrounded by and participates in. The calmness and composure of Colton’s face, body and energy in his solo is in sharp contrast to all that has preceded it so that he exudes a matter-of-factness, an elegant ambiguity and restraint that Jowitt has alluded to. This matter-of-factness derives from the carefully crafted quietness of the emergence of his solo.

Thus we have seen how the four characteristics can be located and comprehended within Mud.

Sue’ s Leg: Critique and Discussion

Sue’s Leg was premiered on February 21, 1975 at the Civic Auditorium, St. Paul’s Minnesota. The cast for that performance was Twyla Tharp, Tom Rawe, Kenneth Rinker and Rose-Marie Wright. Lighting was designed by Jennifer Tipton and costumes were designed by Santo Loquasto. The music in Sue’s Leg is a series of Fats Waller melodies. The dance is a tribute to Suzanne Weil and her contribution to the arts. The context of “leg” here is as a section of a journey.

Sue’s Leg provides a very’ close look at Tharp at her most overtly eclectic. It is difficult to talk about the dance without anthologizing the movements into a dance history of the American twenties and thirties, covering the Charleston to the Rockettes, with Berkeley extravaganzas, Harvest Moon Balls, and Harlem Jitterbugging in between. Even though Tharp draws her steps from the rich resources of American dance heritage, the impact of the work is in the new dance rhythms it creates in the mixing, producing a look unmistakably Tharp and unmistakably contemporary.

The dancers bask in shimmery warm tones of burnt sienna and copper in a timeless array of cuffed, satin trousers, warmers over shoes (looking like spats), rolled shirt sleeves and sweaters knotted around waists. To a series of Fats Waller scores, the company shakes the dust off the scrapbook of American dance heritage and nonchalantly slides its own picture in beside the rest.

Rose-Marie Wright glides in on bent knees and roller skating feet. She spikes a stop and piqué turns like a champion, raising her arms up winningly as in “Amateur Hour” song and dance finales. She balances dubiously for a moment, then swoops down into a gangly crouch. One of her legs trombone-slides in and out to the side. She comes up sizzling.

Rinker, Rawe and Tharp clog up an entrance, bumping and pushing each other out of the way for the spotlight. They hitch together to boost Rinker up in a log roll. He lands on his feet and partners Wright in a vacant, ambiguous social dance. They converse in snatches of swivel and wag that the band drowns out. Tharp attaches herself to Rawe like a leech. Their weight yields into each other and then to the floor. In the next moment, everyone huddles closely together and balances on one foot. Arms suspend overhead, wrists flail and flop. Like sleepy marathon dancers they sag all over one another in an “all for one and one for all” support. At one point Rinker oozes down into a split. Couples link up and dance around in starched, slow glides to mood piano trills. It is obsolete. With a swizzle and slog they are in a new place and time, shuffling in a line, or drunkenly swimming into each other, or whittling some introspective foot work.

Tharp performs a solo to “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love.” She saps a postage stamp of space for all the movement she can get, then takes off in frisky, miniature chasseés. Standing perfectly still, she works herself subtly into a little Dixie Dunbar shimmy. She stops again to pose on bent leg and dislocated butt, and rolls her head back in an agony/ecstasy look. Slowly, she starts to turn around and escalates to a full out spin as Fats Waller moans, “take me to heaven.” She folds into the floor like a coltish Rockette and the others hurdle in picking up her final bow like a kick ball. Their world is a balletic playground of follow-the-leader through entrechats. side skips, chaînés and swivels. “Tea For Two” tinkles out of the piano and the men run a ring around Wright, flashing feats of one-up-manship. They play musical chairs with weights and leans and falls.

Tharp’s second solo, to “Ain’t Misbehavin” has a self-absorbed, tight abandon similar to her first one. There’s a virtuoso split jump, a few thrusty Rhumba steps and a whirl of jetés en tournant as Waller pleads “Come out of that you rascal.”

Rawe solos a silent, soft shoe foot sync to a recorded virtuoso tap number. At the end of the dance, the group forms a network of clasped hands and cooperative body supports. Like a rope ladder gnarling, tipping, spreading, lumping, and stretching under the passings of unequal loads, they hang on to each other, even nearing a low craw on the floor. Eventually they pop up to a travelling shufle step in unison, and end with low bows to the floor. Somehow, in their crazy mix-and-match way, they have made you feel sentimental about the family tree of American hoofing.

The task at hand is now to examine the dance Sue’s Leg through the above account for evidence of the four identifying characteristics which have been proposed.

Weight-rhythm is strongly evident in Sue’s Leg in the sense of gesture described earlier. Much of the dancing alludes to American black dancing and it is in a discussion of such dancing that Edwin Denby describes a quality which bas been here termed weight-rhythm:

I’d notice how the Negroes in the 30’s, when the jitterbugging started — the wonderful dancers at the Savoy — how they would give a gesture full force to start with and then they would diminish it — diminish the force at the end and make it very elegant. The same way the foot would go out with the knee very forcefully, but the last bit of stretch would be like a développé, would be very light. They did this from instinct and also from a peculiar sense of having lots of strength in the middle, and not, except very rarely, forcing a gesture out to its complete length.(11)

Marcia Siegel, when she describes Colton’s solo in Mud makes a similar observation when she says “he starts a gesture a little punchily but lets his aggressiveness drain away into swift, curly detail.”(12)

About the Linday, a black dance that is alluded to in Sues Leg, Denby discusses the particular way in which black dancers phrased their movements:

the thrust is hard and quick, seems even retarded — in musical terms there is a rubato within the phrase corresponding to the way the balance of the body is first strained, then restored.(13)

The particular sense of gesture and phrasing described in the above passage directly corresponds to a pattern of weight-rhythm in Sue’s Leg, where black theatrical and vernacular dance forms are used extensively.

In the moment toward the end of the dance (referred to in the account as “a rope ladder of hand holds and supports, probing the bounds of weight and time”) the company works its way into a dramatic instance of weight-rhythm. Another instance of weight-rhythm in the dance is when Tharp, Rinker and Rawe “clog up an entrance, bumping and pushing into each other.” The energy of all these bodies, physically sifted together, straining at cross purposes creates a taut stretch of dance time and releases into an unforeseen event.

There is an inherent look or “visual attitude” in Sue’s Leg which sometimes risks being overdone, At times the dancers anticipate Tharp’s choreographic logic and their own interactions, giving the choreography a trite and monotonous look. Imperfection gets shrugged off as easily as perfection, and the ungainly, loafy, lumbering aspects of some of these stylistic combinations gradually translate into a determined gracelessness. Moments in the “one for all and all for one” drunken marathon support, and the earlier vacant partnering of Wright and Rawe are moments such as these. The solos Tharp dances in Sue’s Leg seem more like expressions of the mood of the dance  - that is they “epitomize” the whole dance. She links split jumps, chaînés and rhumbas with the same comfort that the whole dance projects throughout its collage of dance phenomena. The solos that Tharp dances not only refer to each other but they also echo the movement qualities of the other dancers in other movements. It is the strength of Tharp’s own performing and the fact that she never anticipates herself — that she quietly surprises herself and the audience over and over again in her discovery of how it all works.

Game playing pervades Sue’s Leg in both steps and attitudes. At one point in the dance couples line up and dance around in “starched, slow slides to mood piano trills.” One senses a chuckle at dancing itself. The dancers abruptly end this game and immerse themselves in new passages of movement — new moods. Later, Rawe performs a soft-shoe solo in silent foot sync to a recorded virtuoso tap number.” Continuously, then, there is a sense of play.”

This examination of Sue’s Leg has shown how all four of the proposed identifying characteristics are exhibited in this dance.

Push Comes to Shove: Critique and Discussion

The following critique and discussion is based upon solo and trio excerpts from the ballet Push Comes to Shove was premiered on January 9, 1976 at the Uris Theater in New York City for the American Ballet Theatre. The cast for the premiere in the excerpts discussed was Mikhail Baryshnikov, Martine van Hamel and Marianna Tcherkassky. The lighting was designed by Jennifer Tipton and ostumes by Santo Loquasto. The music for the prologue is Joseph Lamb’s 1919 Bohemia Rag with Haydn’s 82 Symphony for the body of the ballet.

Watching Mikhail Baryshnikov dance Push Comes to Shove is as gratifying as watching a favourite film again and again, Every part is “the good part” and every move the super-hero makes transfixes one in adoring breathlessness.

Baryshnikov in Push Comes to Shove is quite simply the sexiest performer in generations of theatre. He is also exceedingly witty, spontaneous and an almost impossibly brilliant technician. But Push Comes to Shove is not Baryshnikov’s dance alone. The energy and ingeniousness of the dance is delegated to, most notably, Martine van Hamel and Marianna Tcherkassky, who project the dance through their own highly defined and remarkable traits as they interact with Baryshnikov.

Push Comes to Shove mixes Joseph Lamb’s 1919 Bohemia Rag with Haydn’s 82nd Symphony and an array of vaudevillian and classical movement behaviour. The rules of these conventions are relaxed and Tharp comes up with aces. Push Comes to Shove epitomizes the success of the Tharp aesthetic on today’s ballet body. Baryshnikov shrugs off the perfection of dazzling technical feats with a dead-pan exuberance. Martine van Hamel and Marianna Tcherkassky resolve their strivings for pure line into Tharp’s broken and slurred ones. Throughout, they perform with the titillating feel of discovering something forbidden and delicious.

Baryshnikov saunters on the stage inflated with the cool of Lamb’s Bohemia Rag. He glistens deliciously in a liquidy black velvet costume that conjures up the image of a vaudevillian cossack. He “cases” the space. As Tharp says, “dance is like a bank robbery, it takes split second timing.” With cocksure exactitude, he arranges a black derby on his head. His hand freezes near the brim, framing him for an invisible avalanche of adoring camera clickers. His knees shudder. He whacks a hip out. Something at the tips of his fingers fascinates him momentarily and he swirls off in a narcissistic haze of encircling arms.

A pointe shoe peeps out from behind the wings in a quiet ambush and tests the floor with ginger strokes. Marianna Tcherkassky walks out with a classical pedestrian flare and teases around the space near Baryshnikov. He is skeptical. She cracks a leg up like the smack of a glove and spins past. Another shoe pokes out of the wings and Martine van Hamel glides in. The women work their way over to Baryshnikov, exchanging soft body jokes, moving in kinesthetically illogical ways with great subtlety.

Tcherkassky and Baryshnikov start a tango while van Hamel “Ballerinas” around, obliviously. She shrugs through a pirouette, wiggles right out of a pas de bourrée and abandons a chassé altogether. Baryshnikov tosses his hat to her like a consolation prize, setting off a metamorphosis. She spins the hat expertly on her finger and soon her movements crackle with the dry-ice sass of its owner. She dons the hat elegantly, drives a leg up and passes in a feline arch. The three link up and migrate across the stage. The hat slyly passes hands, dawn the line to Baryshnikov, who possessively locks it upon his head. Sacrilegiously, van Hamel knacks it off and tosses it to her cohort. Baryshnikov looks at her with an expression of patient boredom, then leans back and pumps a stop sign at her. But the games have begun. The hat antics (and they go on and on) live on timing. Without it, the movements would be theatrically unintelligible slapstick. With it, they are thrilling moments in a ballet. Van Hamel steals the derby a last time and sprays Baryshnikov with hip wiggles. What needs water or pies in the face? The mechanics of this wit are in the movements.

When Baryshnikov begins his solo to Haydn’s B2nd .Symphony, he prepares, hair first, raking his fingers delicately through. He is better if his hair looks good. When he is ready, he musters a sturdy preparation in fourth position to accomplish an insignificant movement, then whips his body into a thrilling, off centered attitude turn hanging on to the floor with just a tip of a foot. His head lops over in the force and he unspins, sputtering to a halt. From a loaded stillness he leaps. While “most dancers leap for the sake of the bound upward only,”(14) Baryshnikov leaps for the entire trajectory. He descends onto a runway of lightning quick steps, darts and shifts. He stops to flash an ‘okay” sign. He propels one arm around like the wind up for the big pitch, but his body fractures under the momentum. The taut, ready line of his pose shatters like breaking glass, sprinkling the space with beginnings, middles and ends of shapes. The bits get whisked up into an invincible whirlwind of pirouettes, entrechats and jetés. With microwave metabolism, Baryshnikov rests only long enough for his hair to settle on his head, then he refuels for a strenuous ballet class. He batters the floor with brushes while clinging his arms diligently in fifth overhead. Suddenly, the logic of the exercises escapes him and he jumbles, inverts and burlesques through the rest. He crooks a thumb begging a ride out of the dance. He rolls back his hair with an expert hand and then spits his whole body forward to end the phrase. From punk to prince, he reveres the Haydn with jetés, emboîtés and gallant arabesques, then makes a running broadjump for the wings.

Van Hamel has cooled down from the fever of the hat and has gone icily classical. Baryshnikov comes back for a ringside seat, resting his elbows on caved in, pliéd legs, and leers at her. Tcherkassky enters and the three work on isolated adagios, replete with “kinesthetic paradoxes.”(15) Tcherkassky steals towards the wings leaving a gorgeous last impression with SwanLake arms in an arabesque penchée. It crumbles all over the wings. Van Hamel has vanished and Baryshnikov, the tenacious survivor has the place to himself again. His hand cannot resist finding its way to his hair. His body takes off in swaggers, pivots and bravura. Gestures get more and more idiosyncratic and soon look like appendages or afterthoughts to the movement ideas. The preparation put-ons throughout this ballet have kept us fooled and his final, very promising one, is no different. This time he prepares with a grande pirouette and lands frankly in fourth position. He starts to walk toward the wings. It is hard to believe that he will exit so simply after such a show of potential. But his solo dies hard after all. With a last tour de force, he wrenches out a cake walk that drags him out in style.

We now investigate whether the four characteristics are evident in a dance choreographed by Tharp expressly for a ballet company.

Weight Rhythm is exhibited in Push Comes to Shove in a variety of ways. In his solo, Baryshnikov musters a sturdy preparation in fourth position only to accomplish an insignificant untaxing movement. From that minimal, lax state he then whips his body into a “thrilling off-centered turn.” These are kinesthetically incompatible combinations of states of body weight. In another instance he winds-up his arm to gather momentum and hurt himself into a challenging movement. Suddenly this momentum and thrust collapses and his movements splinters off into different shapes, possessing a different kind of energy. Movement in this instance does not follow through to its logical conclusion. In one of the trio sections, van Hamel “wiggles out of a pas de bourrée and abandons a chassée altogether.” Here, in the dislocation of joints, through transfers of weight, the original shape of the movements change and trail off into other shapes.

Game-playing is also evident in Push Comes to Shove. In one trio section van Hamel and Tcherkassky tease and taunt Baryshnikov by stealing his hat. Eventually, the three perform a little soft-shoe, all the while passing the hat from hand-to- hand in a free-style game of “keep-away.” At another point Baryshnikov tosses his hat to van Hamel as a “consolation prize” while he dances with Tscherkassky. Van Hamel proceeds to dance with the hat and inherits the movements and qualities of Baryshnikov’s dancing in an earlier movement. She ‘refers” to Baryshnikov while dancing opposite him and a type of cross-referencing is evident.

A major portion of Push Comes to Shove is a solo performed by Baryshnikov. It epitomizes the essence of the dance as a whole — replete with weight rhythm, game-playing and visual attitude,

Throughout the whole work, the dancers, especially Baryshnikov, shrug off the perfection of dazzling technical feats, with a dead-pan exuberance. This is the strongest sense of visual attitude in Push Comes to Shove. Yet there is another aspect of visual attitude evident in this ballet. A ballet dancer’s entire training and application is largely in the aim for line. To watch a ballet dancer discover the continuous stream of broken line in Tharp’s movement, produces a marvellous “going-against-the-stream” quality. In Push Comes to Shove the awkward takes on a beauty and logic and all this must be discovered and mastered with this deadpan exuberance: the tossing-off of a mind-boggling movement equation with a minute shrug, the frenetic fury of movement ending with the cold, “stop-on-a-dime’ quality. This going-against-the-stream quality and the combinations of movement, rhythm sense and energy which are unfamiliar to the idiom of classical ballet are made to look comfortable. Croce comments on this notion when she says that:

at times she (Tharp) seems to be on the verge of creating a new style, a new humanity for classical ballet dancers.(16)

Concluding remarks

The notion of identifying characteristics has been rationalized in terms of four distinct characteristics which may be said to endure from dance to dance and performance to performance. Tharp’s choreography seems to be spontaneous and yet is meticulously crafted. The Zen expression “tenacity of discipline with a view to pristine spontaneity” epitomizes the choreography of Twyla Tharp. Her dances, appearing off-handed and casual, are founded on a strong, carefully developed structure and her dancers move en a foundation of rigourous technique.

In his book, Must We Mean What We Say?, Stanley Cavell points out that “philosophers will often say that sound is the medium of music, paint of painting, wood and stone of sculpture, words of literature.” His response to this traditional notion is that “the idea of a medium is not simply that of a physical material, but of a material-in-certain-characteristic-applications and that the medium is to be discovered or invented out of itself.”(17) In Tharp’s case, it is proposed that her medium is defined and identified by her characteristic application of weight, play, solos and attitude to dance.

We must now explore the explicit meaning of the term identifying characteristics. Are these characteristics inherent qualities belonging to the choreography as well as distinguishing external traits? Do these characteristics associate themselves inseparably with Tharp’s work and therefore persistently shape one’s experience of her works, and are therefore enduring? It is suggested that these identifying characteristics are, in fact, something essential and intrinsic to Tharp’s choreography and seem to be responsible for the experience one has of Tharp’s dances. The more they are recognized by the viewer the fuller the experience of the dance he is likely to have.

The validity of the notion of identifying characteristics depends upon being able to locate these characteristics in at least much of Tharp choreography. It is outside the scope of this essay to explore this point in detail. However, my viewing of a large range of dances by Tharp leads me to suggest that this indeed is the case. An important example is the television production by Tharp, Making Television Dance.(18) This was a very special and wide-ranging choreographic exercise: it was not only presented on a different medium but as a different medium. By allowing the eye of the camera to act interpretively the dances for this production were captured in a radically different way. Yet the identifying characteristics discussed here emerged fully in this production.

Another issue remains concerning the suggestions made here. Is it possible to locate identifying characteristics in the works of other choreographers? It seems likely that choreographers who develop a signature quality (one might here mention Balanchine, Cunningham and Ashton) produce characteristics which have the power to shape one’s experience of what dance is. The definitions of dance expand accordingly.

Notes

1 Diana Theodores Taplin, “On Critics and Criticism of Dance” in: New Directions in Dance. (Toronto: Pergarrion Press, 1979). pp. 77-96.

2 Marcia Siegel, Watching the Dance Go By (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977). Pp. 132-133.

3 Jospeh Mazo, Prime Movers (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1977), p.286.

4 Mazo, p. 286.

5 Deborah Jowitt, Dancebeat. (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1977). p. 159. Parentheses are mine.

6 Mazo, p. 296.

7 Deborah Jowitt, ‘Twyla Tharp”, in The New York Times Magazine. (January, 1976). p. 12.

8 Mazo, p. 286.

9 Tobi Tobias, Dance Magazine. (September, 1977). p. 49.

10 Mazo, p. 286.

11 Arlene Croce and Don McDonagh, “A Conversation with Edwin Denby”, in Ballett Review (2, No. 5, 1969). p. 4.

12 Marcia Siegel, Soho Weekly News, 4, No. 35 (1977), p. 38.

13 John Townsend Barrett, “The Analysis and Significance of Three American Critics of the Ballet”, an MA. Thesis, ColumbiaUniversity, 1964, p. 24.

14 Brett, p. 23.

15 Mazo, p. 287.

16 Arlene Croce, After-Images. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978).

17 Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). p. 221.

18 Diana Theodores Taplin and Gary Dault, “Making Television Dance by Twyla Tharp” an Interview en TV Ontario - Omnibus Series.December 12, 1978.

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