ABT 85 - Twyla Tharp's Bach Partita
- Lauryn Johnson
- Oct 15
- 3 min read
"Twyla Tharp's Bach Partita is a pure-dance, plotless work. Focused on formal concerns that deal with structure in music and dance, it also explores a host of movement possibilities. [...] This is the conceptual Tharp at her most sophisticated and at her most elegant. Those who climbed aboard the Tharp bandwagon when she went into an overtly pop phase in the beginning of the 1970's had less use for her earlier, cerebral and more ascetic formal experiments. Bach Partita returns to that genre here with a difference.
"The difference lies in her use of ballet's academic idiom. This is Miss Tharp's first 'straight' ballet, devoid of the signature movements she uses in her modern-dance pieces or even in works where she has mixed ballet steps along with her own idiosyncratic vocabulary.
"In Bach Partita Miss Tharp does what she does best — which is to put movement together without any special message. Granted she is still a tourist in the land of classical ballet. Her attitude toward choreography is that of a modern-dance choreographer, for that is what she is. This outlook is repeatedly characterized in an insistence on discovering new movement and impressing it upon the eye as such, rather than sublimating into an overall continuum of movement familiar to all as classical ballet's idiom. [...]
"[...]Bach Partita is dazzling in its intensity and density. Conceptually, there is a correspondence between the music — Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor for unaccompanied violin - and the choreography, the complex structures of which parallel the music's developing polyphony. Bach has been hailed for making one instrument sound like many here. No choreographer could make one dancer look like 16, but Miss Tharp offers the visual equivalent of the aural illusion by bringing in a 16-member female corps for the concluding Chaconne. Bach Partita has a distinctive look. Its shapes are as sleek as that of a smooth projectile. There is a bold clarity to every leg bent upward, even against the densest of ensemble work.
"The dancers themselves are not hierarchically introduced. One set of principals, Martine van Hamel and Clark Tippet enters after the curtain rises on two pairs of demi-soloists, Susan Jaffe with Victor Barbee, Nancy Raffa with Craig Wright. They are joined by other supporting couples — Elaine Kudo and Raymond Perrin, Deirdre Carberry and Gil Boggs. Their movement is in stops and starts rather than an even flow.
Cynthia Gregory and Fernando Bujones, who prove to be the number one couple, now appear. She flexes her feet during the partnering, and the recurring motif of a woman held back at a tilt -- with a bent leg in front -- is now more frequent. Miss Tharp likes swift turns, the use of a thrust pelvis, changes in direction, the elimination of transitional steps. A slight shift of weight repeatedly alters the centered classical silhouette. The point is to change a standard shape, not to retain it.
"Cynthia Harvey and Robert La Fosse, as the last of the three main couples, enter in the third section. Miss van Hamel and Mr. Tippet return to dance in canon with this new pair before all three pairs dance simultaneously but differently. Miss Harvey does a somersault in the air while held by her partner. The fourth section introduces a new sextet: Cheryl Yeager and Peter Fonseca leading Lisa Lockwood, Johan Renvall, Christine Spizzo and John Gardner.
"The Chaconne at the close of the Partita brings back the dancers in courtly guise but retaining their thematic signatures. The three ballerinas perform some difficult unpartnered toe work. Suddenly, the 16-member female corps bursts in, scatters and then groups into a diagonal mass.
"The men get their chance in a section with brief variations. A processional for seven couples recalls the origin of the chaconne origin as a court dance. The corps divides into four units and leaves. The three ballerinas strike their tilted, leg-up-in-front pose. Finally, only Mr. Bujones and Miss Gregory remain onstage. She plunges across his body in a deep arabesque. In the end, there is a perfect meeting ground here between dancers stretched beyond their usual habits and a choreographer able to use their brilliant technique and flexibility."
--Anna Kisselgoff, New York Times, 1984
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