Review: Twyla Tharp at her best in ‘Aguas da Amazonia’ premiere with Philip Glass score

When Martha Graham founded her company 100 years ago, she instigated a dance revolution in America. We’ve now had a century of modern dance, led by the likes of Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine and many others whose modernism delved into the very essence of the body’s ability to express the ineffable.

One of the key modernist figures formed her dance company 60 years ago as a motley troop of five women who danced spontaneously outdoors for passersby. It was, after all, the 1960s. But the diamond jubilee tour of Twyla Tharp Dance, which began a series of Southern California performances in Santa Barbara on Tuesday night, gradually evolved into one of the country’s most popular companies, taking dance into a new and surprising direction.

Over those six decades, Tharp had her ups and downs — the company disbanded and reformed. But neither she nor her often startling dancers (star ballerina Misty Copeland has been a longtime Tharpian) ever lost their spunk. By now, Tharp, more than anyone in the business, has done it all.

But if doing it all has been Tharp’s greatest contribution to modern dance, then that has meant she hasn’t always been taken as seriously as other innovators. In the otherwise indispensable Library of America anthology “Dance in America,” Tharp comes across as little more than an afterthought.

Having absorbed Graham, Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Balanchine, Tharp hardly stopped there. She danced and choreographed for ballet companies as well as for modern dance companies (hers and others), for Broadway (incredibly creating the long-running collaboration with Billy Joel, “Movin’ Out”). She choreographed for and partnered with Mikhail Baryshnikov, expanding his dance horizons far beyond his classical Russian mastery. And then there was Hollywood. The astounding dances in “Hair.” Her opera stagings in “Amadeus.”

Still, anything goes and doesn’t in Tharp. Her work doesn’t begin with theory or concept but with her body and her many surprising musical seductions. She first came to shocking fame by using the Beach Boys in a ballet for Robert Joffrey. But she grew up in Rialto, outside San Bernardino, with Beethoven (her mother was a pianist) and has created a number of dances to Beethoven, as she has with Brahms, Mozart, Bach, Bob Dylan and Frank Sinatra. She has a special feel for Philip Glass. Her most irresistible work and a huge hit was the 1996 “In the Upper Room,” for which Glass wrote one of his finest dance scores.

A decade ago, Tharp celebrated her 50th anniversary with a relatively conventional tour program that reached the Wallis in Beverly Hills. This time, she isn’t fooling around. For her diamond jubilee, the 83-year-old Tharp has remounted a major Beethoven work, “Diabelli,” from 1998, and created a major new Glass dance, “Slacktide,” of which UC Santa Barbara was a co-commissioner. Both scores featured live music, Russian pianist Vladimir Rumyantsev playing Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations offstage and Third Coast Percussion performing Glass’ “Aguas da Amazonia” in the pit.

Twyla Tharp Dance performs “Diabelli” at the Granada Theatre in Santa Barbara on Tuesday.

(David Bazemore / UC Santa Barbara Arts & Lectures)

Beethoven’s 33 variations on a theme by a certain businessman named Diabelli seems tailor-made for Tharp. Beethoven was one of 51 composers to whom a publisher sent a commonplace melody in hopes of a getting single variation from each for a volume that would benefit victims of war. Beethoven typically couldn’t stop himself. His 55-minute set of variations, his last major work — and his largest — for solo piano is a compendium of what the composer could do and what the keyboard instrument of 1825 could do. Rather than feeling epic, it is a riot of invention, and Tharp responds in kind.

Ballet loves variation, short episodes featuring one fancy bit of choreography after another. Tharp can’t stop herself either. She is full of humor and whimsy, creating every imaginable kind of playful and play-acting partnering. There is little rest and lots of exhausting joy. One problem, however, was the grotesque amplification of the offstage piano, to the point where it felt like Beethoven was practically bullying the dancers.

Glass’ score to “Aguas da Amazionia” (Waters of the Amazon), written for a Brazilian dance company around the same time Tharp choreographed “Diabelli,” is peculiar but radiant. The subtitle is “Seven or Eight Pieces for Dance.” There wound up being nine, if you wanted to do it that way. But Glass left it to ensembles to orchestrate their own versions. The first was by the lively Brazilian percussion ensemble Uakti, which uses a variety of fabulously weird instruments, Indigenous and new (a glass marimba being one). It’s also been adapted, poorly, for orchestra.

The Chicago-based Third Coast Percussion has found its way in, not as strangely as Uakti but beautifully. Tharp’s “In the Room” was sheer exuberance, Nearly four decades later, Tharp hardly seems to have slowed down her dance, but ”Aquas” does have a statelier sheen. The lighting illumines each river in brilliantly bright backdrop colors.

The arresting dancers have not lost whimsy but are here reflective. There is nothing exactly watery in the movement or the music. Mature ritual instead replaces frolic. Dancers exude individuality and purpose. Their phrases, complex yet seemingly effortless, often direct our vision beyond their bodies to others or to the light glowing behind them, as if in reverence of the Amazonian waters and wonders, ever in need of preservation.

“Slacktide” may well be Tharp’s most moving and beautiful ballet. The amplification managed to illuminate Third Coast, which was joined by flutist Constance Volk. Rivers of deep, deep bass flowed under tingling treble waves.

The program reaches Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa on Saturday and Sunday, and then the McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert on Tuesday and the Soraya at Cal State Northridge the following weekend, Feb. 22-23. Rumyantsev will peform live, but “Aguas” will be with recorded music. Tharp’s diamond Jubilee tour continues on to Santa Fe, N.M., and New York, among other stops. It’s supposed to reach Washington, D.C., on March 26, although the tide has turned at the Kennedy Center, another co-sponsor of “Slacktide.” Will the show go on? Will it be enough that Tharp has made another great new American dance?