The Twyla Zone

A New York season for Tharp's revamped company

DANCE

I seems that at least once during every Twyla Tharp season some member of the audience is moved to leap up and exclaim a personal message, as if the dancing had licensed him to respond. This month, New Yorkers can tap into Tharp's power once again when her reconstituted company makes its longawaited appearance at BAM.

An articulate choreographer

whose twenty-year career has been dominated by a concern for classic objectivity and musical nuance—from Haydn to Talking Heads—Tharp still draws a firm line between the life of a dance and what can be remarked about it: dances for her begin where words fail. Yet she speaks readily about the how of dance-making. "Sometimes I'll set out consciously to do more or less literal stories," she explains, "but I have another sense of narrative. If a man enters the stage from an upstage-right diagonal, you're telling a totally different story than if a woman comes in down left. There is a psychology in just form." Important to Tharp's narrative, also, is her gift for sizing

up cultural periods and making them new. Take "My Way," one of the dances in her suite Nine Sinatra Songs (her signature work, which will be performed at BAM along with two local premieres—Ballare, set to Mozart, and In the Upper Room, to a Philip Glass score). She notes that she'd always assumed the lyrics meant "My way is our way," rather than "I'm in this alone." Eventually, Tharp asked Sinatra, "and he agreed. It was about a community." A community cracking up, that is. The ideals the suite so defiantly tenders are seen through the lens of a harder, lonelier time; the final effect is bleak, but chiseled. To suggest so much, entirely through dancing, is artistry. When Tharp's work is fully realized, its messages may not always please, but theirs is an expressionism that lasts. Brooklyn Academy of Music. (2/3-3/1)

MINDY ALOFF