Twyla Tharp Dance, 60th Anniversary Diamond Jubilee

Twyla Tharp celebrates the monumental 60th anniversary of her love affair with choreography in Diamond Jubilee, a concert pairing of dense ensemble pieces currently touring the US. After a weekend-long run in Chicago, Madison, Wisconsin's Overture Hall received the lite version last night. Nearly two hours of non-stop dance was all there in the choreographic offerings, a look back re-staging of her Diabelli (1998), and the unveiling of newly-minted Slacktide (2025), but the latter lacked the live music that Chicago audiences enjoyed days ago.

For ten dancers and a pianist, Diabelli tackles Beethoven's 33 Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli, Op. 120 in a 60-minute-long party of wit, elegance and frivolity. An accumulation of movement styles, Tharp pokes at formality by shifting from ballroom waltz to jitterbug to Laurel and Hardy-like slapstick, including almost everything but the kitchen sink. The exquisite dancers shuffle, leap, and try to outrun each other. Clad in uniform Geoffrey Beene faux black tuxes, legs swirl in a canon of fan kicks and slide into the splits, rolling with the virtuosic piano score—played live with dextrous clarity by Vladimir Rumyanstev.  Beene's costumes highlight bare arms, but flat lighting by Justin Townsend sometimes makes it difficult to appreciate the detail of legwork.

Diabelli stands as a music visualization with Tharp often aiming to articulate every single note of the score. Dancers come and go on piggy back, skip, swirl in a ballroom grip, or are carried off with flexed feet like Charlie Chaplin. For all of the busy-ness, Tharp finds plenty of humor, particularly with a duet section in which two dancers jockey for position. Here, technical dance is removed almost entirely, and the two simply walk around, each wanting to upstage the other. It's necessary calm in the otherwise somewhat stormy hour.

Despite apparent tour fatigue setting in via a few tired lifts and sloppy curtain-jostling exits and entrances, Slacktide (2025) is a tour de force for the dozen dancers. Wearing black again, this time Victoria Bek's costume design gives each an individual cut and filigree, and Townsend's lighting finds more color, texture and dimension. Tharp hints at narrative as one featured soloist moves frenetically throughout, pushing against the group dynamic. The corps bends and shifts in the shadows like supple trees in a breeze while he darts, flailing and cutting a line through the organic shaped bodies.

Pushing and shoving and excluding the soloist from a group circle, the company transcends. In full-body dance mode one second and as entirely unwavering statues the next, they suddenly hold the unwanted figure over their heads in a sustained freeze frame. Here Tharp gives us an image in which to deepen and question. Who is this outcast? Why does he try to join the group? What happens to him next? Maybe Tharp doesn't care. As the dance pedals on and the isolated figure fades, she seems to say, "Don't take it too seriously." Slacktide is a dance. One that reads then as a vehicle to highlight the impossibilities and possibilities of the moving body, and here are a group of dancers that rise to the challenge.