Word: tharp
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Maybe that's what touches off Tharp's style--the way we stare not seeing, taking in all with equal unconcern, entangled in minute tasks, frantic that there seems nothing more. Like Tharp's dance, high-speed fumbling...
...Tharp never seems to complete a movement. She cuts short most gestures, pushes one into the next, gives her dancers only fragments. Her company responds with an attitude of posed nonchalance, letting phrases slip by, shaking them off with a shrug...
...Fugue" (1970), the earliest piece on the Loeb's program, illustrates clearly how Tharp structures a dance--choreographing phrases which three male dancers reverse, speed up, slow down and cut apart. Clapping and stomping, the three men create a complex rhythm, a beat which pounds through silences. Tharp once said, "the stronger the structure, the looser the movement that can hang from...
Taking off from tunes by Jelly Roll Morton, "Eight Jelly Rolls" (1971) buries its structure and, true to Tharp's dictum, unearths random scatter. Six female dancers tease the music's rhythm, gliding over and diving under the beat, tearing through its even sounding. At first lost in inward spirals of movement, the six cohere as a group, parody a nightclub act and, later, back Tharp's solo disheveling. Shivers running down their spines, the dancers seem to shed a second skin, as if leaving shreds of themselves behind...
...rags and Mozart's twelve variations on "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" in "The Rags Suite" (1972). Able to tie knots around the music's rhythm, the two are unable to embrace, botching several attempts, although at the end they do waltz (out of kilter) in their elegant white dress. Tharp connects each dancer's deep-down motor to his outside being, transforming the motor's violent churnings into zips of energy across the body--an odd metaphor for inside jitters...