ABSTRACT
When choreographers take real life as their subject, they usually take it in the abstract. Literal intentions are almost always suicidal; even when they succeed they generally don't succeed at a high level, and the choreographer is accused of trying to think, as if cogitation and choreography were mutually antagonistic. Twyla Tharp's newest work, The Catherine Wheel, which she is showing at the Winter Garden, manages to be literal and abstract at the same time, so that the turn of a thought and its realization in dance are more often than not presented together. But they are also presented in separate systems that are elaborately cross-referenced. Tharp's use of semi-abstract mime and semi-literal dance is one such system. She also uses the straight varieties of dance and mime, an array of props and costumes, a sophisticated and highly theatrical rock score by David Byrne, and the ingenious stage technology of Jennifer Tipton and Santo Loquasto. The Catherine Wheel is schematically overloaded, but then Tharp tends to be excessive. She's like a juggler piling Pelion on Ossa on Mount Saint Helens on the tip of her nose. When the elements are harmoniously integrated, as in Deuce Coupe and Push Comes to Shove, we get magic. When the overload collapses, as it did in last year's When We Were Very Young, we get cacophony. The Catherine Wheei holds together. Unlike When We Were Very Young, which was a playlet with dances, it is a multilevel poetic fantasy that discharges its deepest meanings through music and dance. On one level, it is a reworking of When We Were Very Young: some of the characters from that piece are back doing some of the same things; Tharp seems determined to reduce the American nuclear family to a pile of smoked turkeys. This time, though, she zips through her catalogue of abuse, adds a twist of scalawag comedy and a suite of social dances through the ages, and gets on with the main objective of the show, which is to enlarge the turkey story to the dimensions of a fable. It's a little like interleaving the National Enquirer with The Qolden Bough, but Tharp does it, and brings it off as an uncluttered, intensively lyrical experience. And keeps it going for eighty minutes without interruption.
