Madcap Spirits, Somewhat Forced
Tharpian slouch and swank sidled onto the City Center stage Tuesday night when American Ballet Theatre presented its premiere of Twyla Tharp's 1979 "Baker's Dozen." It's a bagatelle, over before you know it, danced by, yes, a dozen bright young ABT dancers. "Baker's Dozen" unfolds like charades played at a house party.
The music is by Willie "the Lion" Smith, who lived from 1897 until 1973. Before the curtain rises we hear Smith's syncopated stride piano music played by pianist Barbara Bilach like the overture to a Broadway show. When the curtain is up and the dancers start sashaying on and off in couples, we might imagine that we will see musical comedy of the Jazz Age, white flannels and ukuleles. But soon we're into territory that could only be Ms. Tharp's. Women are lifted upside down, their feet are flexed. The phrases are packed with steps, and punctuated with sharp retards and scatting stutters. Popular dance from the Ragtime era to the days of Swing flits through the crowded phrases. Closed holds spill open into glides and twirls. Dancers make pantomimic quotations from stylized nuzzling courtesy of the Turkey Trot or the Jitterbug. Ballet is very much present, but Ms. Tharp was able in "Baker's Dozen" to integrate ballet vocabulary with a light touch that would come harder to her during the following decade; at the time of "Baker's Dozen," ballet hadn't yet become a toxin in Ms. Tharp's creative system. Here, ballet spills into the mix unobtrusively, Ms. Tharp turning ballet to her own uses without exploiting the vocabulary.
In "Baker's Dozen," Ms. Tharp assigns her dancers the professional high spirits of movie extras, in the manner of a silent flick such as "Our Dancing Daughters." The dancers are the cool kids, but there's also some adolescent uncertainty to all the bravado and role-playing and antics. The self-consciousness is underscored when the cast lines up to pose for an imaginary photographer. The spirit of one-upmanship is never dormant, the dancers eagerly stomping on each other's cues.
Sleight of hand is also an ongoing subject in "Baker's Dozen," as dancers pop out from the wings and retreat again instantly. They saunter out with exaggerated casualness worn on their sleeves, then turn athletic, traversing the stage in baseball slides, the women in supported handstands.
Ms. Tharp's compartmentalization of space divides the stage into planes and corridors that overlap like color transparencies. The dancers spill across the stage like figures in a frieze. Relationships are transient: Partners are quickly exchanged, one woman is thrown from one man to another. The women are vamps, tomboys, and Kewpie dolls. The men willingly play the fool for the women.
As "Baker's Dozen" proceeds on its merry way, it gets more anarchic. Everyone starts dancing more and more to his or her own drummer. And yet the piece stays unpredictable until the very end: Suddenly the full cast blows back together, slinking onstage en masse, or breaking out into the Charleston.
On Tuesday night, the American Ballet Theatre's dancers were trying to sell "Baker's Dozen," and as a result it wasn't looking as cool as it could. The performance was staged by Elaine Kudo, who danced both for ABT and in Tharp's own company. But the theater's first performance was less successful than American Repertory Ballet's production, also staged by Ms. Kudo, which ARB brought to New York last year. ARB's performance had a genuine freshness and charm that is as yet missing from ABT's more strenuously madcap rendition. ABT's performance needs to be a little less hard-boiled and more intimate, so that the charades and the screwball escapades onstage seem like pranks staged as much for the dancers' own amusement as for our benefit. Somehow in ARB's production, the bluffs, feints, and byplay were all tied back into the adolescent quest for identity that is the subtext of "Baker's Dozen" as well as so many other Tharp works. The dancers were less encased in professional defenses. There's a smart-alecky edge to "Baker's Dozen" that can turn metallic when it's sold too hard.
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