London audiences may be longing to see Twyla Tharp's new Broadway musical, but her talent flourishes best when it doesn't play straight to the crowd. In her current touring programme, it is the works dominated by Tharp's private demons and formal obsessions that are stamped most emphatically with her peculiar genius.
Surfer at the River Styx has a spare narrative (loosely inspired by Euripides's The Bacchae) that places two men in confrontation with the forces of their own destruction. A chorus of black-costumed dancers move in formations of ritual aggression, their steps grotesquely inflected by images of mythological menace: hands like harpies' claws, faces bright with the drunken malevolence of satyrs, arms rippling darkly like the Styx itself.
Matthew Hart breaches this demonic chorus with a whirl of classical pirouettes and leaps, and as his opponents bay for his spirit, his dancing is whipped to near-intolerable speeds. Charlie Neshyba-Hodges, a plump, smooth-skinned virtuoso, is born aloft on his own hubris - until his miraculously fluent dance riffs are dented and crumpled, and he seems to propel himself into chaos.
Donald Knaack's percussive score, with its mix of kabuki and African rhythms, drives the dancers almost as hard as Tharp's ferociously imagined choreography. The final musical coda, in which David Kahne's limpid sounds transport the dancers into a state of luminous calm, comes, shockingly, out of nowhere. It is not only the phenomenal performers who earn this moment of release, but also the rest of us, who have sat on the edge of our seats throughout this extraordinary work.
What gives Tharp's choreography its emotional force is its structural brilliance, and the revival of her minimalist classic, Fugue, reminds us how early she established her formal authority. Out of the embellishments and variations of a single phrase, Tharp mapped out an entire dance universe. Yet while the other two works in her current programme clearly issue from the same extraordinary mind, both suffer from a determination to flag up every choreographic nuance.
Known by Heart Duet is a witty duel of egos in which Matthew Dibble and Lynda Sing flip teasingly from classical austerity to louche suggestion. Their combat is so eloquently argued that we don't need pouts and shrugs to tell us what the steps already show.
Likewise in Westerly Round, where Emily Coates toys with the hearts of three cowboys: Tharp's tender fusion of saddle-sore folksiness and lanky virtuosity is only diluted by the addition of cute gestures and obvious jokes. These works contain some of the finest choreography she has made. Only the most dogged dance-phobe would fail to get their point.
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