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Captivating: American Dance Festival showcases Taylor, Tharp
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Published: July 5, 2008
Updated: 07/05/2008 12:05 am
The long Independence Day weekend has finally arrived, beckoning us to spend it with family and friends. The usual diversions may be on hold.
For fans of area dance performances, however, this is peak season, thanks to the American Dance Festival, which is running through July 19 at Duke University in Durham. If you have no commitments tonight, get to Page Auditorium for a program of works by two of this country's more senior virtuoso choreographers, Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp.
The show is more than a little memorable. It captures a good bit of dance history, and it typifies the festival's efforts to celebrate its 75th-anniversary season through "SPLIT SCENES," in which performances feature two or more leading companies.
In this case, the ensembles are the Paul Taylor Dance Company and Aspen Santa Fe Ballet. They make you feel as if you're experiencing two shows for the price of one.
The Paul Taylor Dance Company has become one of the principal vehicles for showcasing Taylor's many influential works (he has created 125) and for creating the impression, as program notes say, that "for legions it is impossible to hear certain orchestral works and popular songs and not think of his dances."
Aspen Santa Fe Ballet was founded in Aspen in 1996 but, since 2000, has also found a second home in Santa Fe. The company aims to acquire repertoire or invite top choreographers to create works for its dancers.
At the American Dance Festival, Aspen Santa Fe is championing work by Tharp, whose versatile talents have resulted in pieces for both Twyla Tharp Dance and for a slew of ballet companies, Broadway shows and Hollywood films. The company is doing two pieces: Sweet Fields (1996), an ultimately humorous response to an otherwise fervent take on Shaker hymns, and Sinatra Suite (1984), in which Katie Dehler and Seth DelGrasso dance in and out of love to popular tunes sung by the late Frank Sinatra.
I liked Sinatra Suite the best, marveling at the range of possibilities Tharp unearthed within a ballroom context. We felt everything from the sexual tension one associates with tango to the on-again, off-again qualities of a relationship swept up in love's vicissitudes. DelGrasso breaks away from the duets to show us how a virtuoso dancer might move when he's had one too many drinks in the early hours.
Taylor, whom Time magazine once called "the reigning master of modern dance," is now 76 and still turning out excellent work. The current program at the American Dance Festival shows his remarkable range. It includes Changes (2008), an often-charming remembrance of the 1960s as "defined by the demand for radical change," and 3 Epitaphs (1956), in which dancers put on costumes that make them look like bears and, moving to early New Orleans jazz, tickle the collective funny bone in cunning fashion.
But these pieces are upstaged by Promethean Fire (2002), danced to orchestral versions of Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D minor and two preludes. Here, lines of dancers move with alacrity in every possible direction, creating such an intricate maze of movements that any misstep would almost certainly spell disaster. And there's something about the dancers' zebra-like costumes, all with orange stripes against solid black, which create a blur that's so disarming you swear you're looking not at a live performance but a doctored film of one.
Does all this complement or enhance the complexity of the music's counterpoint? You bet. And when the dancers stop scurrying about, their bodies create large, multilevel structures whose majesty is equaled only by that of the music.
I walked away astonished and moved, knowing I'd never hear this magnificent music in quite the same way again.
■ The American Dance Festival will continue through July 19 at Duke University in Durham. The Taylor-Tharp program will be presented tonight at 8 in Page Auditorium, with a children's matinee at 1 p.m. For tickets, see www.tickets.duke.edu or call 919-684-4444.
■ Ken Keuffel can be reached at 727-7337 or at kkeuffel@wsjournalcom.
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