DANCE REVIEW : Twyla Tharp’s ‘Upper Room’ at Royce Hall

When you’re starving, who needs haute cuisine?

Until Thursday, the Twyla Tharp dance company hadn’t graced a Southern California stage in four years and the audience in Royce Hall, UCLA, was in no mood to be finicky.

The works on view were distinctly second-rate, but no matter. A sense of euphoric rediscovery greeted nearly every Tharpism all evening long.

The liquid, playful torso accents and sudden, off-kilter hesitations; the meticulous subdivisions of time and compulsive conquests of space--these facets of her style inspired delight, astonishment and the kind of ovations that presidential candidates would die for.

Tharp herself isn’t dancing this season and her 17-member company now mixes at least two different breeds of virtuosi: veterans of Tharp’s former modern dance companies and classically oriented newcomers, some of whom danced her choreography for the first time in American Ballet Theatre or the Joffrey Ballet.

In this corner, Shelley Washington and Tom Rawe; in that corner, Elaine Kudo and Gil Boggs. What company ever had as wide a reach?

Indeed, Tharp’s “In the Upper Room” (1986) represents an attempt at assimilating the “modern” and “classical” Tharps--an attempt heroic in scale but ultimately unsuccessful. It is staged with the same apocalyptic smoke and lighting effects as Tharp’s “Fait Accompli,” the same phalanxes of dancers surging out of darkness toward the front of the stage, the same use of dancer stamina to intimidate.

Just as that 1983 work can be seen as a statement about Tharp’s career as a dancer, this newer one seems to comment on her choreographic influences.

It’s a schematic sneakers-versus-pointe shoes extravaganza, like the Balanchine “Romeo and Juliet” sequence in “The Goldwyn Follies” that juxtaposed tap and ballet specialists, or the black-dance/ballet rivalry in Louis Johnson’s “Forces of Rhythm” for Dance Theatre of Harlem.

The big difference is that here the production values and weighty Philip Glass score psych us up for something more momentous than a indecisive technique playoff.

Tharp’s dancers initially appear in loose, striped pajamas (referees? prisoners?) and soon divide into teams. Some of the jogging, shadowboxing Postmoderns partially strip down but they keep their stripes. Most of the taut, turned out Classicals end up in red leotards--though the costume metamorphosis here is never as complete (or as thrilling) as the one crowning Tharp’s “Deuce Coupe.”

In the big group sequences there’s often the dazzling impression (as in “Bach Partita”) of Tharp simultaneously presenting several different works set to the same music--a refusal to limit her options.

In the final sequence, there’s a moment when the brilliant sorties and excursions of the competing teams generate astonishing heat and momentum. Tharp is pushing furiously against her limits and you almost expect that at any instant the dancers are going to liquefy and fuse like the circle of tigers in the children’s “Sambo” story. Synthesis feels not only possible but imminent.

But the moment passes, the breakthrough into a new mode of dancing never occurs and the piece retreats to safe, predictable formality.

Predictable, too, is “Baker’s Dozen” (1979), definitely on the downslide of the pop and jazz suites that broke Tharp out of the avant-garde and into celebrity. The jokes aren’t very integral to the dancing, the social attitudes depicted (and currently overplayed) seem awfully obvious, even the dexterity of the partnering often appears an arbitrary imposition on the music.

Maybe it’s just that Willie (The Lion) Smith can’t offer Tharp as much as did Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Bix Beiderbecke or Chuck Berry.

In any case, the dancing is spectacularly accomplished, from Kudo’s cool, daring “Upper Room” toe-slides to Rawe’s antic, endearing “Baker’s” minisolo--everything sharp and loose, exact and eccentric about Tharpdancing combined, and thrown away, all at once. She’s been away far too long. . . .