steve sucato  |  March 08, 2025

‘Diamond Jubilee’ Tour is Legendary Choreographer Twyla Tharp at her Tharpiest [REVIEW]

Twyla Tharp Dance – Diamond Jubilee Tour
KeyBank State Theatre at Playhouse Square
Cleveland, OH
March 8, 2025
By Steve Sucato

The 21st performance of Twyla Tharp Dance’s coast-to-coast Diamond Jubilee Tour, Saturday night’s performance at Playhouse Square’s KeyBank State Theatre, was the first by the eponymous company in Cleveland in 23 years and one to cherish as it quite possibly could be its last.

One of our greatest living choreographers, Ms. Tharp, now 83, has created over 160 dance works since 1965, including a dozen television specials, six movies, and four Broadway shows. She is the recipient of a Tony Award, two Emmy Awards, a 2004 National Medal of the Arts, and a 2008 Kennedy Center Honor.

To perform the work of such an accomplished, it was fitting that the 12-member troupe Tharp assembled for this tour was a collection of exemplary dancers, several on sabbatical from, or formerly from, some of the dance world’s top companies, including Miami City Ballet, English National Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company, and Ballet de Lorraine.

Saturday’s program, presented by DANCECleveland and Playhouse Square, featured two career-spanning, Tharp-choreographed works, beginning with a reconstruction of 1998’s “Diabelli­.” Danced to Ludwig van Beethoven’s “33 variations on a waltz by Anton Diabelli, Op. 120,” also known as the “Diabelli Variations.” The score is regarded as one of the finest and most challenging piano works ever written. It was performed live and brilliantly by the tour’s pianist, Vladimir Rumyantsev.

Twyla Tharp Dance in “Diabelli.” Photo by David Bazemore Photo.

Costumed in tuxedo-inspired sleeveless black body suits, ten dancers (five men and five women) began the work by entering from the front wings and crossing the stage in horizontal lines, swooshing and swaying their arms back and forth in unison. The scene conjured images of a royal wait staff in a stylized dinner service march.

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The work appeared to encapsulate elements from some of Tharp’s past works such as “Baker’s Dozen” (1979), “Waterbaby Bagatelles” (1994), and the “Deuce Coup” works. The choreography was playful yet sophisticated and included ballet, modern dance, and pedestrian movement blended with skill and ingenuity.

Each of the score’s 34 sections was met with new dancer formations and groupings. Some had the dancers waltzing about the stage. Others had them sprinting across to an opposite stage wing or jogging in circular patterns.

Tharp’s choreography felt symbiotic with Beethoven’s music in tempo, mood, and punctuated notes. It was as if Tharp instructed the dancers to go onto the stage and play, but to do so using every bit of their technical prowess as elite dancers.

(l-r) Twyla Tharp Dance’s Alexander Peters, Nicole Morris, Miriam Gittens, and Renan Cerdeiro in “Diabelli.” Photo by David Bazemore Photo.

As the work progressed, periodic sharp hand claps delivered by the dancers reverberated throughout the theater, and the conversation they were having with the music took shape in brief vignettes of dancers pushing and shoving one another or competing to be the front person in a 2-person line while other sequences were of partnered lifts and dancers leap-frogging over one another.

While “Diabelli” was performed magnificently by the entire cast, several performers stood out, including dancer Miriam Gittens, who wowed the audience in a dizzying chaines turns sequence with the speed and power of a mini-tornado; dancer Alexander Peters who was delightful in partnered duets with Gittens, and petite marvel Nicole Morris dancing with Renan Cerdeiro.

With the goods for consideration as one of Tharp’s masterworks, why, until this tour, was this Olivier Award-nominated piece only performed once in the Untied States? The likely answer is its near one-hour length hampered the ability to program it, especially as part of a mixed repertory production. That alone could have kept other dance companies from performing it. A pity, as “Diabelli” is a substantive work worth being regularly reprised.

If “Diabelli” represented Tharp’s version of formal classicism, her latest work, 2025’s “Slacktide,” was its opposite.

Twyla Tharp Dance in “Slacktide.” Photo by StudioAura.Twyla Tharp Dance in “Slacktide.” Photo by StudioAura.

Named after a term meaning a short period in a body of tidal water when the water is completely unstressed, “Slacktide” was, says Tharp, choreographed “as a comment on ‘Diabelli’” and referenced many of its dance steps and movement phrases. The work’s loosey-goosey approach to delivering those steps and phrases was reminiscent of Tharp’s 1975 piece, “Sue’s Leg,” where the dancing felt improvised on the spot and had the look of not being performed full-out.

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The 36-minute “Slacktide” was set to Philip Glass’s “Aguas da Amazonia,” a piece originally composed for Brazilian dance troupe Grupo Corpo’s Seven or Eight Pieces for a Ballet. Grammy Award-winning Third Coast Percussion flawlessly performed live their mesmerizing arrangement of the music that included the use of a collection of custom-designed instruments.

“Slacktide,” interestingly, began with the last image seen in one of Tharp’s most popular dance pieces, 1986’s “In the Upper Room.” An image of what Tharp refers to as “a shade being pulled down ‘fud-dup,’” it was recreated here in slow motion on a darkened stage hazed over by stage fog. The reference was the first of several nods to Tharp’s catalog of past works used in “Slacktide.”

An entire company piece, its dozen dancers were dressed in studio/streetwear-inspired costumes from designer Victoria Bek. And unlike “Diabelli’s” monochromatic lighting, Justin Townsend’s lighting design for the piece had prominent changes in colors affecting moods in the work.

Again, the dancers performed skillfully in Tharp’s choreography, with dancer Marzia Memoli emerging as a clear standout. All in all, the Diamond Jubilee program was Tharp at her Tharpiest. Both works together delivered a cross-section of 60 years’ worth of her genius. That, coupled with the excellent performances by the tour’s dancers and musicians, garnered an enthusiastic standing ovation from the KeyBank State Theatre audience at its end.