Keersmaeker's Bach, Tharp's Brel and Balanchine
A New York dance diary, Part IV

Concurrently with the New York City Ballet season, Anne Teresa, Baroness De Keersmaeker, gave the North American premiere of her two-hour Goldberg Variations under the aegis of Dance Reflections, presented by Van Cleef & Arpels. The work premiered in the summer of 2020, as the pandemic raged. A London premiere followed in 2022. According to the reviewer for the New York Times who attended the Manhattan premiere, at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, there's video out there, dating to shortly after Keersmaeker completed the work. In that video, it seems, Keersmaeker has this to say: "I really love to dance. It's really not a joke. It's not vanity. It's really my way of relating to the world."

Noted. Really noted. It's not a joke. But who's laughing? Check out this three-out-of-five-stars review from The Guardian, filed at the time of the London premiere. "By the time the theme returns [at the end of the show], we have been on a journey of riches and strangeness, indulgence, frustration and beautiful music. There's something incredible about witnessing De Keersmaeker's steadfast commitment to her craft, her mining of musical form (and her undimmed abilities) but there's not much in the way of connection or joy." For the record, the lady is now 63 years old.

Plum tuckered out. Dancing for two solid (solid?) hours is no joke when you're 63. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker clings to the Steinway as if to a broken mast at sea. At the keyboard, Pavel Kolesnikov soldiers on. Photo by Anne Van Aerschot.

I can't agree with the revelations of the journey, and personally, I wouldn't be so quick to discount the vanity factor. An uncut performance of the music at tempi that are not insane runs about an hour and a quarter. On February 23, what with a late start, dead air once the diva arrived, and no intermission, she condemned her viewers to their seats for a solid two and a half hours. Many skulked out, not always discreetly.

We who hung around saw much swinging of unbent limbs and endless chains of turns. We also saw Keersmaeker change from a dark dress into a cream cat suit and finally into a sheer red top over silver-sequined hot pants that took on a life of their own, like a bouncing disco ball. She tied her sneakers in full view of the audience. Her game Russian-born pianist Pavel Kolesnikov went along with her agenda, likewise changing clothes, participating in bits of stage business etc. As for his playing, I found it alternately wooden and mannered, lacking in long-range vision, devoid of flow.

Bravi, tutti! Twyla Tharp Dance, February 2024, from left: Jake Tribus, John Selya, Daisy Jacobson, Twyla Tharp, Reed Tankersley, and Kaitlyn Gilliland. Photo by Mark Seliger.

On to the Joyce Theater, where Twyla Tharp Dance was selling out a triple bill consisting of one revival and two premieres. Ocean's Motion (1975) looked like a Jerome Robbins Dance At The Gym in overdrive, powered by a Chuck Berry soundtrack. The new Brel, as in Jacques, found Herman Cornejo alternating with the moonlighting Daniel Ulbricht in a riveting solo set to five of the existentialist Belgian troubadour's best-known hits. The Dance Master, finally, paid rambunctious tribute to Balanchine. The recorded soundtrack mashed up the Dutch minimalist Simeon ten Holt's punishing vocal quartet BI BA BO and Antonio Vivaldi's Per la Solennità di San Lorenzo.

Here, friends, was dancing, rich in kinetic invention, sculptural sophistication, and fluent musicality, transitioning seamlessly between loose, groovy moves and moves that were taut, clean, and explosive. The Ocean's Motion five—two guys plus three women—dressed ragtag, and that was fine. In Brel, Cornejo wore put-together Left Bank black, the perfect look for dancing that allowed no daylight between the casual and the extreme virtuosity, capturing the moody introspection of Brel's poetry without buying into his gritty heart-on-sleeve delivery. A stupendous performance.

Tharp's Ballet Master Trinity, counterclockwise from the top: John Selya, Don Quixote; Daniel Ulbricht, Sancho Panza; Cassandra Trenary, Suzanne Farrell/Dulcinea. Photo by Steven Pisano.

Ten Holt's soundscape notwithstanding, The Ballet Master was hugely watchable from the get-go, with that Tharp elder statesman John Selya as Don Quixote attended by Daniel Ulbricht as Sancho Panza. As the piece gets going, two male dancers—the hefty Reed Tankersley and the trim, lean, and loose Jake Tribus—were being put through tricky paces, out of sync, with many repeats. For added panache, they took their air turns (and floor turns, too) in opposite directions. They danced with linked arms (think Cortège Hongrois), then stood side by side, taking turns caving at the knee and falling backward, like extras in Alice In Wonderland.

Then Cassandra Trenary materialized as Don Quixote's Vogue-ready prima ballerina assoluta—think Dulcinea, think Suzanne Farrell, think Suzanne Farrell as Dulcinea. Viewers whose memories go back far enough needed no prompts. How much younger dance fans could glean is an open question; I'm guessing the wow factor of it all kept sweeping them along.

Like Keersmaeker, Tharp's company changed costumes and footwear midstream, but the carnival never stopped. I think I caught references to Serenade and even Apollo whizzing by, and who knows what I missed. Throughout, the moods ebbed and flowed in kinetics now springy, now cool and limber. There were no dead spots, no filler. Always, there was lots to look at and delight in as the moments fly by.