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DAY IN THE LIFE OF DANCE: Twyla Tharp's 1998 Epic "Diabelli" Finally Premieres in NYC After 27 Years
By Susan Reiter
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Published on March 12, 2025
Portrait by Greg Gorman | Group photo by Mark Seliger
New York City Center Celebrates 60 Years of Twyla Tharp's Choreography, A Diamond Anniversary
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During the summer of 1998, Twyla Tharp was intensely at work in a City Center studio creating a piece of epic ambition and proportion — a 55-minute dance to the complete "Diabelli Variations," one of Beethoven’s most monumental piano scores. It has taken 27 years, but Diabelli is finally reaching the City Center stage this week (March 12-16, 2025) for its New York premiere. The expansive, multi-faceted work for 10 dancers constitutes the first half of the Twyla Tharp Dance program celebrating her 60th anniversary as a choreographer.
The other work is SLACKTIDE, Tharp’s newest dance, set to "Aguas da Amazonia" by Philip Glass, arranged and performed live by Third Coast Percussion.
The 12-member ensemble arrives in new York after touring the program around the country since January 26; additional touring engagements are scheduled well into April.
Originally co-commissioned by The Cité de la Musique (Paris). The Barbican Center (London) and Hancher Auditorium (University of Iowa), Diabelli had an unusual and frustratingly limited performance history for such a major work — created during one of Tharp’’s most fertile and prolific periods. After a week of October 1998 performances at Teatro Biondo in Palermo, Italy, it was not seen again until June 1999, when a re-configured Tharp ensemble performed it at the three commissioning venues. And that was that — until now.
Tharp choreographed Diabelli for an ensemble called Tharp! that had been working with her since 1996. She created four previous works for the group, which toured extensively and also appeared at City Center in September 1997. After Tharp had disbanded her full-time company in 1988, the 1990s saw a succession of primarily pick-up ensembles.
Tharp’s website divides her choreographic archive into five-year segments, and it’s quite remarkable to take in how much she created between 1995 and 2000. In addition to making a total of six works for Tharp!, she had a fertile period with American Ballet Theatre. The company presented an all-Tharp program of three premieres at the Met in 1995, and the following year she choreographed The Elements (a terrific work that I keep hoping with be revived somewhere). She was quite busy outside New York too, creating works for the Royal Ballet, Australian Ballet, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and Le Ballet de Grand There de Genève.
Midway through the Tharp! ensemble’s duration, some injuries required the addition of new dancers. That was when Jessica Lang, a young Julliard senior, found herself auditioning for the choreographer and Shelley Washington, Tharp's longtime dancer and assistant. Soon, Lang became part of the 1997-98 Tharp! Tour, one of five Juilliard graduates in that troupe. Today’s Tharp company includes four dancers from Juilliard.
Now a busy, widely-known choreographer, Lang was “in the room where it happened” while Diabelli took shape. “It was epic. I was nervous. It felt really interesting and unique – and human,” Lang recalls. “She really encouraged us to get the score and understand it. The music made a huge impression on me at the time. For the previous touring we didn’t have live music, so all of a sudden the presence of a pianist was really great. I recall it being a highlight for the whole company. I felt it gave us identity and individuality and humanity. It was intense; she was demanding and interesting. She was equitable: everyone has their moment. We all had solos and moments. I remember the complexity of some partnering.”
Reed Tanksersley, a current member of Twyla Tharp Dance (also a Juilliard alum), started working with Tharp soon after he graduated in 2014, after performing in her Baker’s Dozen as a student. He discussed the process of bringing Diabelli back to life: “Gabrielle Malone and Andrew Robinson from the original cast came in and worked with us for the early portion of the process. We had a workshop period to get it going last August. I didn’t know anything about Diabelli before we started this process. As we started getting into it, it’s so rich. It’s a tour de force, for sure. It feels very Tharp — there’s her humor, there’s her quirky movement, there’s classical partnering — and a basic walking march theme step — all very Tharp things. The initial theme starts with a heel-toe, arms swing (relatable movement for the audience) and then builds upon itself."
Jamie Bishton, who joined Tharp’s company in 1986 (he was in the original cast of In the Upper Room), was Tharp’s rehearsal director when she choreographed Diabelli, and was the company manager for its tour. He then danced in it for its 1999 performances, when the ensemble’s roster had changed.
“[Diabelli] was originally created on a young group of dancers whose only connection to Twyla was all the new work that she choreographed on them,” Bishton says. “At the time, they hadn’t performed any of the older works. They moved exceptionally fast, and they had this common language. Everything they performed was new — an ownership that only comes when work is created on you.”
The 1999 tour of Diabelli holds particular significance for Bishton: “Twyla convinced me to perform in it as well. It would turn out to be my last performances with her. In re-staging the work and setting it on a mostly new group of dancers, we could see and feel the incredible musicality that Twyla had built into the piece. It is a marathon, not unlike other works. And like other Tharp works, all the individual parts make a whole. It was a joy to dance and to set and to watch onstage. I’m so happy that it has been re-mounted and is touring.”
