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Dance Review : ABT Dazzles Audience in Tharp’s ‘Upper Room’

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Oh, Joy. American Ballet Theatre has Twyla Tharp back. Or a piece of her. Or rather, one of her works. Break open the champagne. Send up the balloons.

Performed for the first time since it was reacquired last month by artistic director Kevin McKenzie, Tharp’s “In the Upper Room” closed the repertory program offered Wednesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. A rapturous audience only reluctantly let the final curtain come down, sending wave after wave of applause toward the dancers.

The audience was exactly right.

How different from the perfunctory acknowledgments at the end of the Shade Scene from “La Bayadere,” which opened the program.

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Yet there was even other good news: the West Coast premiere of James Kudelka’s engrossing if problematic “Cruel World.”

To be honest, the current ABT cast could not efface memories of the halcyon 1988 performances of “Upper Room” at the Center in which Tharp veterans Jamie Bishton, Kevin O’Day and Daniel Sanchez led the modern contingent.

Yet such ABT paragons as Kathleen Moore and Gil Boggs continued to exemplify the necessary crisp style, and the rest of the cast danced with invigorating commitment. Above all: The dancers simply looked natural and at home in this work, staged by the memorable Tharpian Shelley Washington.

Remaining intact with all its cumulative power, “Upper Room,” to music by Philip Glass, unfolded dazzlingly from rigorous geometric symmetries and crystalline patterns to exhilarating images of seemingly free-form motion and stage-devouring dynamism. No, it may not finally fuse ballet and modern dance, as everyone hopes for. But no one else has squared that particular circle either.

Set to a string orchestra version of Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir de Florence,” Kudelka’s “Cruel World” uses duets and ensembles to explore both formal dance issues and human relationships. It was danced with powerful authority by the 18 company members.

The work opens with the stage full of couples, who impelled by raging inner drives engage, disengage, march and stalk the floor, form into phalanxes of the opposite sexes and return to couplings. A series of individual pas de deux occurs. These dances are turbulent, varied, conflicted.

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Kudelka distorts the formal vocabulary with off-center balances and skewered limbs, creating vivid images that transmute formal considerations of shared weight into psychological categories which almost instantly dissolve back into technical dance problems. The speed and power of these shifts are arresting, disturbing.

Except for an occasionally slowed-down gesture or swoop of an arm, it is mainly when physically apart that the couples exhibit any calm or lyricism, and such moments are short-lived. The couples simply have to re-form, whatever the cost.

In the second movement, Marianna Tcherkassky finds herself imprisoned, passed around, exulted by six men who create weird picket-fence images by bending down, touching the floor with one arm and thrusting the other into the air.

With the third movement, intended to mirror (invert?) the second, something goes wrong.

It may be partly a formal problem in that the situation of one free-ranging man (Guillaume Graffin) in opposition to six rather indifferent women is not fraught with an equal kind of weight or threat as would be one woman faced with six manipulative men. It may also be a failure of choreographic imagination. Graffin’s folk-derived steps and the musing poses of the women appear lightweight and less motivated by the music. The section also is too prolonged to sustain interest, even when Cynthia Harvey finally detaches herself from the group to dance with him.

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Unfortunately, the ballet doesn’t recapture its initial energy, although the couples recapitulate the anguished, formal, intricate pairings of the opening.

Carmen Alie designed the ominously muted, evocative middle-European costumes. Scott Zielinski provided the sensitive lighting, sometimes brightening the proceedings as if to suggest momentary opportunities of less troubled relationship or time.

Typically, Kudelka’s choreography did not always bear out this sometime optimism.

Charles Barker led a vitalized Pacific Symphony in a brilliant performance of Tchaikovsky’s music, mirroring exactly the drama and power and spectral eeriness that Kudelka (but few others) has heard in the score.

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In comparison to both works, the Shade Scene from “La Bayadere,” as staged by Natalia Makarova, looked like a quaint period piece to which few of the dancers related. Happily, Susan Jaffe offered a striking performance of Nikiya, creating the illusion of uncanny inner stillness and the dissipation of material weight. Dancing Solor for the first time, Parrish Maynard encountered some major problems, including almost dropping Jaffe in a lift. Jack Everly conducted.

* American Ballet Theatre will dance Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” today through Sunday at 8 p.m. and on Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets, $18 to $55, through Ticketmaster, (714) 740-2000 or (213) 480-3232, or at the Center, (714) 556-2787.

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