Enter the Dancers, Rippling Fastidiously
Over at the Anta Theatre, Twyla Tharp's "The Raggedy Dances" deliberately, delicately probes into pop styles and the decadence behind the figure of the public entertainer. Joel Sachs plays seven Scott Joplin piano rags, also one by Bill Bolcom called "Graceful Ghost" (1970), also Mozart's variations on "Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman." There is indeed a graceful ghost in the pit; the playing is quiet, limpid -an echo of something that was louder and merrier in New Orleans, a premonition of the Mozartian elegance that ends the work.
The dancers in sleek, chic individual outfits by Kermit Love slide kinkily in and out of the music, in and out of our sight. They surprise us by becoming suddenly forceful, jab their weight at the floor. They twist and shudder lightly as if something were crawling on their spines. Sara Rudner and Rose Marie Wright make many spattering crosses- wrangling amicably for a slice of moving territory. There are a lot of false entrances, near-collisions. "If it's in my way, I'll dance with it."
Many of the sections are duets or double duets. Two figures subtly slipping in and out of phase with each other. One of these duets (for Tharp and Nina Wiener) is very distant, both in space and in texture. Each woman dances as if she were absorbed in a private tune she was humming. You notice, barely, that each possesses a part of the other's dance and shows it to you in her own way. Another duet, for Rose Marie Wright and Kenneth Rinker, is a tangle of coincidental ballroom clutches. Just when you tire of the jaggedness, everyone struts out some unison.
Tharp, in a purple bikini, solos as a stripper. All her gestures are small, self-absorbed. She does a creditable belly dance; leans her head back to brush her shoulders with short, bristly hair; wiggles her spine. She dances for a long time, looking with every passing minute smaller, lonelier, tireder. A stripper seen through the wrong end of a telescope, more concerned with scratching some sly private itch than with ingratiating herself with an audience.
Rudner and Wright wrap up "The Raggedy Dances" with a beautiful display of dancing. Everything they do with the Mozart looks and sounds immensely clever. You can almost imagine the music skidding over the floor like a flock of beautiful birds that they, grinning and concentrating fiercely, must step in and out of without damaging a single feather.
Tharp, in an interview, mentioned that her solo in "Raggedy Dances", called "The Entertainer", had a lot to do with the performer's dilemma. Many of the most gifted dancers seem to have a reticence about "performing"; perhaps they're afraid of cheapening the movement by over-emphasis or obscuring it by imposing the flash of their personalities on it.