Twyla Sparkles, Boston Ballet Fizzles

CHOREOGRAPHER Twyla Tharp is New York's new superstar. The Loeb caught her February 5-7 at the tail end of a series of Tharp profiles in The New York Times Magazine and The Village Voice. As a result, Tharp's style is now publicly well-defined: snatches of pop dance and everyday gesture emerging from tightly-paced choreography; cool, aloof dancers tossing off precise wiggles, shimmies and shrugs. It adds up to a complex choreographic vision.

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.

"The 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 it."

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.

TOM RAWE AND Jennifer Way duet to two Joplin 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.

"The Bach Duet" (1974) pairs white-bikinied Rose Marie Wright and Kenneth Rinker. Halfway through JSB's cantata 78, Rinker spits, then, repeating a gesture used earlier as a joke on soft-shoe, grinds that spot on the floor with his toe. That shocked a friend--such an act treated as if just one more jitter/jiggle/jolt.

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.

*****

The Boston Ballet's "Choreographers' Series" (National Theatre, January 29-February 8) premiered eleven works by eight choreographers, none of them very well-known, or very good. Some prove themselves good craftsmen while a few choose subject matter unusual for ballet and dabble with modern dance technique (a holdover from last year's series titled "Experiment in Dance"). With one exception, none achieve much beyond half-baked ideas or artificial cliches.

The company's resident choreographer Lorenzo Monreal is the exception, carrying off what choreographers Charles Neal, Saeko Ichinohe and Ze'eva Cohen attempt but fail. Monreal creates a highly-charged atmosphere in "Piosenki" which underlies his expressive end, unlike the other three who substitute the ambience of drama for its substance in "Yin and Yang," "Chidori" and "Goat Dance." Danced to throaty cabaret songs composed by Zygmunta Koniecznego, Monreal's duet has less specific associations than the other drama and succeeds in its allusiveness. Laura Young and Woytek Louski sweep through a succession of breath-arresting lifts, revealing the tenderness and trust implicit in "duet."

In contrast, Monreal's second contribution, "Classical Symphony" to Prokofiev, shows off the company's technical powers and little besides. Ron Cunningham's "Holberg Suite," Frank Ohman's "Serenata," and Helen Heineman's "Sinfonia" do the same. Traditionally choreographed in alternating sections for soloists and the corps de ballet, the works don't give themselves the chance to develop a broader vision.