Gia Kourlas

In Ntozake Shange’s celebrated feminist choreopoem, through Dec. 8 at the Public, seven women of color, named after and dressed in different hues of the rainbow, explore trauma and resilience through movement and text. Wailes’ performance is captivating for the ease in which she weaves Camille A. Brown’s choreography with American Sign Language.

“That was a challenge,” Wailes said through an interpreter in an interview. “I didn’t want it to become too movement-based so that the language started to get lost.”

Dance runs deep in her body. Wailes, who became deaf after contracting meningitis just after her first birthday, has danced nearly all of her life. When she was around 3, a doctor suggested that she try a class. It was a way, she said, “to help me heal and deal with the world.”

Even outside of the studio, dance has served her well. “Dancing has always been a way of communicating with people who didn’t understand me,” she said. “It was a way of breaking down barriers between languages.”

“For Colored Girls” features a series of monologues. In the Lady in Purple’s, Wailes narrates the story of a mixed-race dancer who performs the role of an Egyptian goddess of love. The production’s director, Leah C. Gardiner, was impressed with Wailes’ elegant weaving of two visual languages, dance and ASL.

“I could request something,” Gardiner said, and “she would ask me questions and then take that information and put that into her body and translate that into ASL in relationship to the text.”

Wailes worked with Onudeah Nicolarakis, who is credited as the production’s director of ASL, to focus on making sign and spoken language work together, as well as imbuing the choreography with expressiveness and nuance.

“She didn’t just translate the words, she translated the experience and emotion,” Gardiner said. “One of my favorite moments in the show is when Alexandria turns upstage and is talking about how her hoop skirt falls. She gestures at her bottom and pulling the skirt down, but she does it kind of looking back. It’s cheeky and expressive.”

The role was not originally for a deaf actress, but in casting, Gardiner — with Shange’s approval — wanted to broaden the idea of what an African American woman could be. She also had another ambition in this production: To illuminate the idea of colorism, in which skin tone — whether lighter or darker — can lead to favoritism and discrimination within an ethnic group.

Wailes, who is half black, has a lighter complexion than the others onstage. “When Alexandria came in and auditioned there was, for me, the excitement of, Wow, maybe my dream of exploring colorism can come true,” Gardiner said. “And, oh my gosh, she’s also deaf? This is insane.”

“For Colored Girls” had its premiere at the Public in 1976, the year after Wailes was born. And that connection is meaningful to her. “As a deaf woman of color who grew up dancing,” she said she could see herself in the role. As she put it, “I felt like I needed to be doing this show at this time.”

Recently Wailes spoke about bringing ASL and movement together, listening with her body and the freedom that dancing gives her. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Q: How does dance break down barriers between languages?

A: It is in the body when you learn to listen. And you learn to listen differently as a dancer. Being deaf, we always use our eyes; it’s so critical for us to survive and to take in the world. So to bring in dancing is just an automatic extension of my way of life as a deaf person.

I was very lucky because in the last two years of high school, I transferred to the Model Secondary School for the Deaf. It was during the 1990s and they had a strong performing-arts program. I started to meet other deaf dancers.

Q: What did that give you?

More motivation and incentive to stay true to my path as an artist considering I never had anyone to look up to. I had no role model. A deaf woman of color? Dancing? (Laughs) I had to go, OK, if that’s not out there, I want to create it.

Q: How do you bring yourself to the character?

A: This is me in my true element as an actor as a dancer. I have seven siblings. We’re all girls. There are seven women in the show, and I’m the only deaf person in the cast and in my family.

Q: Are you generally very expressive when you sign?

A: Yes. I can turn it down and be less expressive. I’ve worked with (contemporary choreographer) Heidi Latsky for a few years. She had a piece, “Somewhere,” inspired by different renditions of “Over the Rainbow.” I told her that I wanted to challenge the notion of signing, which often tends to look so very beautiful and pastoral and emotive and expressive. I wanted to see signing used in an urban manner. I wanted it to feel gritty, edgy and just bigger — more like an attack in a positive way, like in your face.

Q: How did she work with you?

A: She worked with me on my expression. She said: “Don’t put it in your face. It’s not about putting on a show.” I understood, but it was a challenge because face is my voice. My expressions are my voice. But over time, it was freeing, because I was focusing on bringing American Sign Language and movement together.

Q: How do you find rhythm without hearing the words?

A: Signing naturally has a lot of musicality within it. The challenge is determining which signs best honor the length of the text, because in Ntozake’s text you often see the slashes or you see space or an ampersand.

How do I embody this physical language on top of a dancing language on top of trusting and working with the other actors who are speaking the lines that Ntozake wrote? Because a big difference between speaking and signing is I can keep signing, but you need to take a breath, right? There is a difference in the way that breath is used in both languages.

Q: This production explores the notion of colorism. How has skin tone affected you in your life?

A: I didn’t ask to look like this, do you know what I mean? (Laughs) So I was really grateful for Leah. She just got me. She understood the inherent challenges that I deal with in life because I’m always passing. I’m not going to deny that that privilege is there.

But I’ve had to suppress who I am — because the idea of who I am doesn’t match who I am inside. It’s an interesting tension, and it’s a constant dynamic that I’m negotiating all the time.

Q: Do you know why you took to dance as a deaf person?

A: Because it’s another language. I learned sign language and dance around the same time. Dance is a physical vocabulary and a way of communicating. Sometimes it relies on sound — but not always.

This article originally appeared in

NEW YORK — Alexandria Wailes has had a cathartic, enlightening autumn. As the Lady in Purple in “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” she finally has a part that reflects her just the way she is: deaf, mixed race and a dancer.

Two Visual Languages Propel a Dream Role

The postmodern choreographer Yvonne Rainer is finding that out as she reconstructs, in collaboration with Emily Coates, “Parts of Some Sextets,” which she created in 1965 for 10 performers and 12 mattresses. A complex braiding of movement, text and, yes, mattresses, it builds an invigorating labyrinth of choreographic activity. Rainer now refers to it as “the mattress monster.”

It’s also a rarity: Presented Friday to Sunday at the Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center, the work has been performed only a few times before, and in 1965 — at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut and Judson Dance Theater.

The idea for the reconstruction, a Performa 19 biennial commission, came from Coates, who is in the cast, as well as the director of dance studies and associate professor in theater studies at Yale University. “I recently heard a young artist succinctly describe the 1960s dance aesthetics as ‘They cracked an egg on their head and called it dance,’” Coates said. That “moment of horror,” as she put it, gave her the incentive to stage the revival.

“Some Sextets,” she said, could “be a way to challenge and complicate the more reductive interpretations” of Rainer’s legacy.

It’s an important work for that reason and more. Rainer, a member of the groundbreaking 1960s collective Judson Dance Theater, helped to usher in a new way of thinking and approaching dance. While everyday or pedestrian movement was deemed a valuable and worthy tool by its practitioners, choreographers of that period also featured untrained performers in their works; “Some Sextets” included the visual artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Morris. Their dances were full of craft and finely articulated movement. They studied ballet and the Merce Cunningham technique. And their choices of what to put onstage weren’t random.

And that included mattresses. Rainer said that reviving “Some Sextets,” with its “stack of mattresses that had disappeared I don’t know where,” had never occurred to her. “It was a big enterprise. It seemed over.”

One problem in reviving the dance was that few have actually seen it, a category in which Rainer includes herself. Because she was in it, she never had a clear sense of what it looked like. “I wanted it to have a very strict structure,” she said. “I left it to the mechanics of the strategy that I had laid out and to hell with aesthetics and choice.”

Coates, who met Rainer while dancing with White Oak Dance Project, convinced her that the process of reconstructing “Some Sextets” wouldn’t take long. (It didn’t.) And she had another motive, related to that remark about the egg on the head: To show that Rainer’s innovative approach was “an epic site of experimentation with choreographic organization.”

Its movement score features 31 possibilities of activity, which are performed in 30-second increments; they include standing, running, interacting with the mattresses and a rope, as well as executing unison dance phrases. One is called “Swedish werewolf (always offstage)” in which, “people go out of sight behind the pile and they do what they think is Swedish werewolf,” Rainer said. “They howl. For 30 seconds. I don’t know where I got that.”

The performers’ actions change according to cues taken from phrases from “The Diary of William Bentley, D.D.,” which Rainer reads excerpts from in a voice-over. An Episcopal minister living in Salem, Massachusetts, Bentley wrote meticulously about his community in the late 18th and early 19th century; Rainer learned of the diary from a review in The New York Times.

“I wasn’t about to buy it,” she said, but it was in the library, “so I just spent time perusing it.”

That took five weeks. “I had gotten the idea about the mattresses around the same time, and I wasn’t even that aware that there would be a congruence of the voice-over and the actions,” Rainer said. “But looking at it from the outside, you hear about this daily life — illness, fishing, sea monsters and an elephant came to town. It’s all kinds of details and you see this constant parallel movement in the space. I think they meld.”

As the movement and words layer upon one another in a continually shifting landscape — it’s sad and funny, refined and a little dangerous as the dancers leap onto mattresses and one another — it’s impossible for viewers to follow both the entire time. “But overall I feel there are two parallel lives — one in a village, the other in this space,” Rainer said. “There are even some exact parallels.”

During the reconstruction process, the original sound recording was found at the Rauschenberg Foundation. In the present version of the dance, it is used along with a new recording of Bentley’s diary entries.

When Coates and Rainer heard the original recording, it solved a mystery: One written cue had referred to a musical interlude. Rainer didn’t remember what she had done but on the recording she could be heard bursting into song. Now the voice-over includes that — and something else that Rainer came up with: She added, Coates said, “a series of expletives.”

These discoveries were happy surprises for the collaborators; originally, Rainer said she had doubted there was enough information to bring back “Some Sextets” at all. Coates traveled to the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and spent several days immersed in Rainer’s archives there.

She found the receipt for the mattresses ($140 for all 12). She also discovered a letter from Rainer to the editor of Tulane Drama Review, which published her essay about creating the work. Coates said: “She told him basically like: ‘Lay off editing my writing. Don’t change my language. If you want to publish artists, you have to let artists sound like artists in their own words.’”

Coates, who performs Lucinda Childs’ part in “Some Sextets” — Shayla-Vie Jenkins takes Rainer’s role — unearthed much of the necessary core materials for the reconstruction though she could only track down a little more than half of the original score.

Rainer remade the rest of the dance, aided, in part, by images from the Peter Moore Photography Archive. The ending — with one tweak to accommodate today’s bulkier mattresses — is the same. “They slowly all group themselves on two piles of mattresses,” Rainer said of what was originally one tall stack. “These mattresses are much thicker, and they wouldn’t been able to jump on top.”

As that final, poignant tableau attests, “Some Sextets” is driven by structure, but it’s not dry. It’s full of vitality, and for Rainer, the experience of remounting it has been both intense and gratifying; she loves working with Coates. “I’ve watched her develop from this innocent,” Rainer said. “She didn’t quite know what she was about and now she has a child, a family and is doing her own work.”

Lately, Rainer, who is presenting the United States premiere of “Again? What now?” (2108) for a concert of Barnard/Columbia Dances next week at New York Live Arts, has been working nonstop. She will publish a piece of writing soon, too; in it, Apollo, the sun god, is appalled by what’s happening on earth. (It’s political.)

“It was a way of screaming,” she said.

There is a reference to it in the voice-over of “Some Sextets.” Rainer, who turns 85 later this month, still has things to say, but she has no plans, at present, to choreograph a new dance.

“I don’t want to audition new people and I’ve run out of ideas, frankly,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Go volunteer in a soup kitchen. I’m serious.”

NEW YORK — It could be a dream or a nightmare. You’re 84. What would it be like to have an artistic conversation with your 30-year-old self?

Beware the 'Mattress Monster,' My Child

Taylor, who died a little over a year ago, formed his company in 1954 and is regarded as one of the most important choreographers in modern dance. Novak, a dancer in his company, was something of a surprise pick, but Taylor was confident in his choice.

Now Novak, 37, is presiding over his first season of Paul Taylor American Modern Dance at Lincoln Center. That means he has a hand in deciding not just the repertory but also the casting, the gala menu, the tablescapes and the posters hanging outside the David H. Koch Theater, where the company is in residence.

But Novak doesn’t just consider the details, small and large. “The big thing in my brain right now is how do you balance heritage and new?” Novak said. “Ready-to-wear and couture?”

The season features new and recent works by contemporary choreographers Kyle Abraham, Margie Gillis and Pam Tanowitz, along with Taylor classics, including an evening of collaborations between him and visual artist Alex Katz — Novak’s idea. As an artistic director eager to pull in new audiences, Novak is thinking about the dances, of course but also about creating an experience around them.

“It’s what comes before and what comes after,” he said. “It’s how you package the evening for someone. There can be parties, backstage tours, meet and greets with the dancers — things that make it a real experience. Not that seeing a show isn’t a real experience, but I think people are looking for that next thing.”

Wouldn’t Taylor hate that kind of approach? Novak laughed. “I don’t know,” he said. “Paul was a renegade. He was always trying to push boundaries and push people a little bit so I think he would respect it like” — he imitated his mentor’s shrug — “see if it works.”

And in the end, their goal is the same: “It’s all about the art form,” Novak said. “And letting people connect with the power of dance, and letting it change and inspire and challenge them.”

To prepare for this season and the future, Novak has spent a good deal of time in the organization’s archives. One of his aims is to bring back Taylor’s early works. “There is a side of Paul that is radical and modern — he was pushing boundaries,” Novak said. “I don’t want people to forget that side of his artistry.”

The Lincoln Center season, which runs through Nov. 17, includes some older gems like “Scudorama” (1963), “Private Domain” (1969) and a revival of “Post Meridian” (1965) — it hasn’t been seen since 1989 and features costumes by Katz. The season will also see the final performances of company stalwarts Michelle Fleet, Parisa Khobdeh and Jamie Rae Walker. (Robert Kleinendorst and Sean Mahoney will step down later this year.)

And there are other changes in store: In June, the company will present the inaugural program of the TaylorNEXT series, showcasing a selection of Taylor’s early experimental works at the more intimate Joyce Theater. By then, a new generation of dancers will be in place: Novak has hired seven since he took over, two men as recently as last month.

In a recent interview Novak spoke about his plans for the season and beyond, as well as his final conversations with Taylor. His lasting (and last) advice? Keep them laughing.

Q: Why are you so interested in Paul’s early works?

A: I feel like Paul was really exploring his choreographic style. You see echoes of Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. I was really interested in works that you saw that maturation happening. That inspired me to bring back “Post Meridian.” [Former Taylor dancer] Carolyn Adams called it moving cubism. It’s this really spare use of movement and sound and pattern.

Q: Was there anything that Paul wanted revived?

A: “Brief Encounters” — that was actually a request. I gave him a list of ideas and asked: “Can we bring this back? What do you think of this?” He definitely wanted “Diggity” to come back.

Q: For that one, Katz created free-standing cutouts of dogs. Why did he ask for it?

A: Paul was very big on having diverse moods throughout an evening. My initial proposal didn’t have enough fun in it. [Laughs] Paul wanted funny. He was really big on the importance of humor.

Q: He didn’t want that to disappear?

A: No. And it’s valuable for the artists — to do pieces that make you laugh and have fun is good for morale. And he did not want the same composer on every night. Design he wasn’t as specific about.

There’s going to be a Donald McKayle night, and I had brought the idea to him to do a tribute, because I loved “Rainbow ’Round My Shoulder,” and I was like, “We have to do more, we’re in a position to do more. Could we turn that into an evening?” Paul said, “Give it a try. See what you can do.” [Laughs]

Q: What else did you talk about?

A: He wanted me to be onstage and he wanted me to be in the house watching as much as I could.

Q: But can you keep up dancing?

A: I can’t, I can’t. My last performance is on Nov. 5. I’m dancing “Beloved Renegade.”

Q: Why did he want you to keep performing?

A: I’d like to think he liked my dancing, but he knew the weight of responsibility that comes with an artistic directorship. I think he wanted to make sure that the transition was a transition and that I didn’t give up my performing career when I was not ready to actually say goodbye to it. I’m guessing. I never really brought it up again because I didn’t think he was going to pass away as fast as he did. And then he passed away and I ended taking six months off [performing] because there was so much to manage with everything.

Q: Who are you trying to reach as an artistic director?

A: I’m trying to reach younger audiences and the larger dance community in the sense of — Paul was a renegade, he was a rebel. There was this side of him that was unique and special that doesn’t get as much attention as I would like. I also want to expand our audience’s palate for Paul.

Q: What are some older dances you’ll show at the Joyce?

A: “Fibers,” which we reconstructed in 2014. Some excerpts from “Images and Reflections.” It hasn’t been seen since 1961. “Events 2,” which is part of “Seven New Dances” and hasn’t been seen since 1958. “Tracer,” which Taylor 2 reconstructed in 2016 but was last performed by the Paul Taylor company in 1963. And there’s a piece called “Duet” — also known as “Hayden Duet” or “Duet from Lento” — and that was last performed in 1992.

These early works are going to be a lens through which we view world premieres by Peter Chu and Michelle Manzanales. It’s this idea of how does the past inform how we view the present?

Q: And the idea is to explore that in a different setting than Lincoln Center?

A: Yes. I want the stage to amplify the power of the work. You’re getting a different side of Taylor. I’m finding, at least with the master classes we’ve been doing around the country, that when the dancers are teaching the more kind of rebellious work from the ’60s, students are responding to it.

Because it feels more relevant?

I don’t know what the parallel is, but you have this really visceral, kinetic, technical, emotionally intense way of moving, and students are latching onto it. A lot of the early work has that. “Scud” is almost like a precursor to Gaga [the movement form created by Ohad Naharin]. It’s also a way to get students to recognize there’s more to Taylor.

Is this starting to feel like your company?

Yeah. [Smiles] I think I’m learning what matters to me as a viewer of the work, and I think the dancers are starting to understand that when I say something, it’s always coming from a place of wanting them to look their best. I’m also very transparent. If I’ve given a note that in the studio was very important and we get onstage and it’s the wrong note, I’ll say, “Don’t do that, you were right.” It makes people feel empowered to take risks onstage so there’s some play in it. You can’t take risks and be afraid of making mistakes. It’s in the doing.

Paul didn’t tell his dancers much about his works. Is this related?

He liked watching the dancer figure it out. He liked giving you a challenge or an obstacle or a directive and then sitting back and seeing what you would do with it.

He was also famous for giving you two notes that contradicted each other. Like “I want you to crawl slower but get off faster.” For him, there was something in the spirit of the try, the spirit of the effort. I intend on keeping that.

Advice for Running the Paul Taylor Company? 'Keep Them Laughing'

NEW YORK — When Paul Taylor asked Michael Novak to take over his organization after he buzzed off — that was the way Taylor put it — both knew what a challenge the job would be.

“God gives you one gift: You get to be born,” choreographer Twyla Tharp said. “Thereafter, you’ve got to take care of it yourself.”

Her new book, “Keep It Moving: Lessons for the Rest of Your Life,” doesn’t have anything to do with chasing youth. No, no, no — to Tharp, 78, that is a losing proposition. But it’s not over until it’s over. “The figures are still shocking in terms of people who don’t exercise or who are not aware of the reality that diet is actually extremely important,” she said. “If you want to have a future, you’ve got to provide for that now.”

And Tharp, a dance pioneer and Tony-Award-winning choreographer, is ready to assist. She has already written two books about how to better yourself using the tools of an artist: “The Creative Habit” (2003), a bestseller, and “The Collaborative Habit” (2009). “Keep It Moving,” a follow-up, applies those tools to finding purpose and growth as you age, no matter what age you are.

Tharp, armed with a no-nonsense approach to life, is fine with the phrase “self-help.” “What’s the matter with helping yourself?” she said. “I don’t have any problem with that category.”

Not that “Keep It Moving,” to be published by Simon &amp; Schuster on Tuesday, is a self-help book exactly, though it’s full of bits of wisdom: “After we terrorize ourselves with self-doubt, our only relief is to get moving again.” And there is practical advice, too. Never, for instance, fight a fall.

Above all, Tharp is a motivator. The text is illustrated not with pictures, but with descriptions of simple exercises: Each chapter features one, ranging from “Squirm,” a wriggling sequence of motions that she recommends trying out in bed, to “Take Up Space,” which is both a physical and mental act. Here, she connects the reader to a dancer’s intuitive way of moving bigger, with amplitude. “You can think the same way in your everyday movements,” she writes. “When you walk, think of yourself striding, not just taking mingy steps.”

The brain is one thing; the body is quicker. “We all think the mind is smarter, and excuse me!” she said in her galvanizing way. The body’s reflexes, she continued, are “much faster than the brain can process and come up with a concept.”

“That’s all I’m saying here,” she explained. “Everybody get connected to your body.”

“Would you care to walk with me for a moment?” she asked. I would. “Good girl,” she replied.

During our promenade around her studio — a pristine, wide-open space in the center of her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — she focused on the task at hand, all the while making odd, little animallike noises.

She instructed herself in real time: “Walk straight ahead. It really has to be down the middle of the metatarsal so the whole leg is rotated in. The back has to be really strong. Sternum up. You do this for quite a long time depending on how bad the feet are.” (Hers are bad.)

She moved onto a mat and quickly zipped through her routine, some of it on a large exercise ball, which she loves, “especially first thing in the morning, if you’re not feeling so very up to it,” she said, “because you can’t help but bounce, and bouncing is good for the knees and the thighs.”

Her workout, or, as she put it “the whole mishegoss,” involves isometric exercises, crunches (300) and obliques (100 each side), as well as at least 20 minutes on a stationary bike. With the comic timing of a vaudeville performer — Tharp, deep down, is something of a clown — she flipped her body to arch over the ball and stretched out her back. “You have to take your temperature at every part of your body,” she continued. “And you see how much space it takes: not much.” All that’s required, she added, is “a space patch and no fancy clothes.”

In other words, you can do it at home. In your own way, at your own level: Start with 30 crunches. In the book, her philosophy is guided by the body’s need and ability — in small or large ways — to move.

She should know. Not only has she danced much of her life, but she is also committed to her own movement practice, which begins with walking and lasts from 45 to 90 minutes a day, depending on her schedule. For the past few weeks, it was closer to 45; she had a heavy rehearsal load while making her latest work, an otherworldly beauty for American Ballet Theater called “A Gathering of Ghosts,” which was unveiled during the company’s fall season.

She taught the dancers all of the material. (How many 78-year-old women can demonstrate steps?) “I’m certainly not promoting myself as the ultimate exemplar of this movement,” she said. “But I do still have right and left, and I prefer in rehearsals to stay on my feet.”

Those feet are why she sticks to a 1,200-calorie-a-day diet. “It’s a little crazy,” she said. “But it helps me keep myself on the bone, which is important, because the less weight I put onto feet, the better off we are.”

Tharp has worked hard over the years to maintain her health and physical well-being. But her body has taken some knocks. Still, until she was 65, she said, she could do almost anything. Then, physically, everything began to decline.

“I got nothing for free anymore,” she said. “I had to work hard for every little thing, and that could be discouraging, to say the least. So how to maximize that? How do we learn from some of these newer moves that the body comes up with just to survive?”

And how does Tharp learn from her own injuries? Recently, she underwent hip surgery; she was determined to come back better than before — and with a goal: to improve her balance, which, she said, “has always sucked.”

Just before our walk, she kneaded the top of a well-worn foot to break up its calcium deposits. All of her metatarsals have been broken, she said, at one point or another. “I am working now to open the feet,” she said.

The self-massage and walking regimen have done wonders for both her balance and her feet. But things happen. A few weeks ago, she thought she had broken her left foot during a rehearsal at Ballet Theater. (Mercifully, it wasn’t a break, but it hurt.) “I was showing everybody how to do relevé,” she said, the ballet term for rising on the toes. “I was exhausted and I also had on a pair of jazz shoes, which are much lighter than sneakers.”

Even Tharp can make mistakes. “You have to prepare for everything, and I hadn’t prepared for the jazz shoes,” she said. “I just put them on. I haven’t used them for five years! Hello? Right.”

Clearly, Tharp puts in the time to improve herself. But why would a world-class choreographer want to pass on her knowledge to the general population?

When she first began creating dances in 1965, she said, she was curious about how movement fit inside of the avant-garde dance world. “Now,” she added, “I’m curious about how movement sets in every single human being who walks.”

Tharp has always thought of what she does as partly scientific: What is the body capable of? And she has been fortunate, she said, with her own instructors, including boxing trainer Teddy Atlas. “If you understand something you believe in, you have an obligation to share it,” she said. “Why hoard it?”

It took her about three years — or maybe four — to reconcile herself to writing a book about being older. In the dance world, age is not freely acknowledged; Martha Graham lied about hers for years. “You don’t do this,” she said of her decision to go for it in her book. “Some people are going to laugh. OK. That’s their prerogative.”

And with “Keep It Moving,” Tharp has a clear mission. “I really tried to write it for the person who is completely not familiar with their body,” she said, “and I tried very hard to open up the community of dance, which can seem to the public as elitist — it actually is not.”

As time passes, Tharp works to stay open-minded and to challenge herself, too. For her, the book and “A Gathering of Ghosts” are related. In the dance, created as a showpiece for Herman Cornejo, a principal celebrating his 20th anniversary with Ballet Theater, Tharp is looking at her own career and the ghosts in it, or the larger-than-life choreographers who came before her. She knew them all: Graham, George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham.

In “Gathering,” the ghosts start in front of Cornejo; by the fourth and final movement, he has moved in front of them. You can always, Tharp seems to be saying, push beyond yourself in big and small ways.

“We all have our ghosts,” she said. “You can either leave them out in front or say: ‘Thank you very much — I’m stepping forward. I’m representing.’ You don’t disappear.”

NEW YORK — Take up space. Stretch. Move your body.

Twyla Tharp Wants You to Move

At American Ballet Theater, Melanie Hamrick seemed to be on the path to becoming a leading ballerina. A gracious, willowy dancer, Hamrick’s combination of line, warmth and a rare kind of transcendent beauty — it always reminded me of Julie Kent, a former Ballet Theater star — made her the kind of dancer you’d want to see as Juliet, say, or Giselle.

Early on, Hamrick, who started studying ballet as a child in Williamsburg, Virginia, danced prominent roles in “Apollo” and “Les Sylphides,” but gradually her debuts started to peter out. Hamrick said that Victor Barbee, the company’s former associate artistic director, used to tell her, “‘You’re just the best corps dancer we’ve ever had.’

“I was like, is that a good thing or a bad thing?” she continued. “Is that holding me back?”

Now after 15 years as a member of the corps de ballet, Hamrick has decided this fall season will be her final one with Ballet Theater. Her final performances — in “Apollo” last Sunday afternoon and as a demi-soloist in “Theme and Variations” on Tuesday and Saturday — are in ballets by George Balanchine. It’s fitting: As a dancer, she is sleek, musical and in possession of a great jump. “I love the feeling of ‘Apollo,’ ” she said. “It feels like coming home. It feels natural.”

One afternoon, before Ballet Theater’s fall season at Lincoln Center, Hamrick showed how true that was as she prepared in the studio for Calliope, a role she has danced before in “Apollo.”

Two other dancers learning the part were following along. As the steps came back to Hamrick, 33, she used her elegant limbs extravagantly to cover space. “It’s so musical,” she said, rosy-cheeked and panting.

“I feel if she wasn’t there,” said soloist Cassandra Trenary pointing to Hamrick, “I wouldn’t have a clue.”

During a break in between rehearsals at a cafe near the company’s Lower Broadway studios, she recalled her first performance of “Theme” — specifically, the moment right before the show when she discovered that her dressing-room spot had been decorated with gifts and notes that said things like, “You can do it!”

She had only been in the company for a couple of months. “I thought everyone hated me,” she said. “To see my spot decorated and so much love — just from the beginning, it was really special. That is hard to leave.”

But Hamrick’s life has changed. She has a son, Devereaux, 2, with her partner, Mick Jagger. She also wants to pursue choreography, which she explored earlier this year when she and Joanna DeFelice, her friend and creative partner, produced “Porte Rouge,” set to music by the Rolling Stones. That experience, she said, allowed her to shed some of her fears.

“I got all this confidence that I wish I had had during my years at ABT,” Hamrick said. “I had a really great season last spring: I felt like this is who I am as a dancer. This is my style. Before, I felt like I was always just trying to make everyone happy.”

She also wants to keep dancing — but in a more contemporary vein.

In a recent interview, Hamrick discussed the ups and downs of her career, the importance of the corps de ballet and a spectacular spill she took — with young Dev — at a Rolling Stones show. Here are edited excerpts.

Q: Why did you decide to stop now?

A: It feels time to close this chapter and open the next. The schedule of ABT is great, but it’s hard when you have a child and the life I have now. I feel like superwoman some days, and other days I feel like I’m head above water just phoning in being a dancer — coming to rehearsal and not being my best. That’s not fair. I love it. But sometimes my head is not there. And I’ve done enough “Swan Lakes.” It’s OK.

Q: When you were starting out in ABT, you had real promise, but you didn’t rise beyond the corps de ballet. What happened?

A: I don’t think I realized what I had to offer. I was constantly, When am I going to mess up? Everyone was saying, “She’s a ballerina, she’s so amazing” and praising me, and I didn’t understand why or what I had done.

I was so hard on myself. I was nervous all the time. I was so nervous to walk into the studio even. I still enjoyed all the shows, because when you get onstage it’s great, but I didn’t feel comfortable in my skin. My father got ill. It was awful.

Q: Did you get to spend time with him?

A: I was going home every other weekend to see him and sleeping in the hospital and coming back here and trying to work. I was tired and sad and not dancing well. After that, my mind switched. I was like, I want my family first, and I’ve kept that.

Q: Did you talk to the artistic staff about your place in the company?

A: Yeah, we had chats, and it’s always positive. And I’m inconsistent. If I have a rough day, a tiring day outside, it’s hard for me not to bring it to the studio and then my work isn’t very good. People have been promoted and it’s politics. I’m not so good with that. I just say what I think. So I feel it’s all of those combinations.

Q: Does your son dance?

A: He dances a ton. I don’t have him in classes yet. He plays the ukulele and he makes up songs. He’s got the gene. Definitely. I really want him to take tap. For a little boy to make some noise with his feet? He loves music classes. I’m a little bit like [whispers], “Did you see that? He’s picking up the guitar.” (Laughs)

He loves going onstage. I brought him onstage for one of Mick’s concerts before they opened the door. They had a few people in. I was like: “Let’s go down the ramp — no one’s here. Let’s run!” And the two of us were running down the ramp and he tripped and I tripped and we both face planted and rolled over, and there were more people there than I thought.

Q: Did people film it?

A: They did, but no one posted it. I’m supposed to be a professional dancer and I’m out there rolling with my son. I was like, this is going to be a horr-ible video. I was cringing. I grabbed Dev and we ran off the stage. I warned Mick, though. I was like, “This is what happened. I’m so sorry, there’s a video.”

Q: Are you developing “Porte Rouge”?

A: I’m creating a new show that’s going to be a rock-dance festival. I want people to get excited about coming to the theater. I want you to feel that feeling when you leave a concert. Mick inspired me. After his concert, you’re awake for hours wanting to dance.

Q: What are your weeks like?

A: This weekend, I went to London. I came back last night and then I got up and brought Dev to school this morning and then I’m here at work. Why don’t I just calm down? Kevin McKenzie (Ballet Theater’s artistic director) and I have always had a great working relationship. I’m like, “I’m sorry — I’ve taken three long weekends in a row.”

Q: What does he say?

A: He’s like: “I understand, but — try not to. Be at work.” He understands that I struggle with the pull. He let me finish with “Apollo.” Sometimes in the corps, you’ve spent all of these years dancing, but you don’t get a very nice goodbye. I feel he’s really giving me one.

Retiring From Ballet Theater, a Dancer Gets What She Needs

Why do some dancers rise in a ballet company while others become stuck?

NEW YORK — Houston Ballet, in town for its 50th anniversary, lured me in with the promise of a real dance: That’s what Mark Morris makes. “The Letter V,” which he choreographed for the company in 2015, is better than that. It’s gorgeous.

Morris has a way, all too singular, of placing classical ballet in a setting of understated elegance. His steps are so clean that to watch anything afterward can feel like taking a bath in used water. By the end of Thursday night’s program at City Center, I realized that the only thing I want to watch after a ballet by Morris was another ballet by Morris.

Set to Haydn’s Symphony No. 88, the four-movement “Letter V,” a New York premiere, leads the program, which also includes works by Aszure Barton and Justin Peck. This pastoral delight is a braiding of choreography, music, lighting and costume, as well as another crucial element: the right dancers for the job. It’s not fashionable to move with beautifully rounded arms — lightly and smoothly — yet the Houston dancers did so with indelible loveliness and intention.

There’s much to take in here, yet the ballet doesn’t get cluttered. While certain actions repeat, they never become routine, as when a woman, holding a man’s hand, leans out and swings her body, landing on the floor as gently as a fresh, billowing sheet.

Morris, who comes from the modern dance world, knows a thing or two about getting dancers on and off the floor, a skill that doesn’t always translate to ballet choreographers, though they keep trying. Evidence of that came later in Peck’s “Reflections.” He loves it when dancers lie on their backs with, say, a leg stretched straight in the air; getting them to stand up again is when the situation gets awkward. (It’s like watching a ballerina run.)

But for Morris, the floor is the same as the air, and he uses both to luminous effect. In the poignant second movement, the dancers perform a plié in second position — a basic ballet position in which the knees bend outwardly — as their palms face forward. With a surgeon’s precision, they jump and land exactly as they started. How could something so simple be so ravishing?

“The Letter V” takes a livelier tone in the third movement, which draws on Morris’ background in folk dance; the men and the women move in separate circles, one placed within the other, and change places throughout. Occasionally they pause to look at one another, tilt their faces and raise their hands as if to say: “What? What’s wrong with beauty?”

Actually, I have no idea what it means; it’s just unexpected and fresh — like everything in this ballet, not least of which are Maile Okamura’s spectacular costumes. In a palette of greens and blues, stripes and gingham are overlaid with sheer fabric; the glow of Nicole Pearce’s warm lighting also helps to create the sense that the dancers are flitting around, not on a stage, but in a garden, enchanted by their own merriment.

In the joyful fourth movement, they zoom on and off the stage, gathering in formations that have them vigorously swinging a leg forward and back as their arms slice in the opposite direction. With the Haydn, it’s a wild pairing of high and low — like caviar and Coke — but it fits.

The remainder of the program was tougher to get through, especially Barton’s “Come In,” a work created in 2006 for Mikhail Baryshnikov and an ensemble of men from Hell’s Kitchen Dance. Set to music by Vladimir Martynov, this exploration of stillness, in which tension is used in gestural, largely unison choreography, was as overlong and sophomoric as ever. The evening’s final piece also had an air of the familiar, the New York premiere of Peck’s “Reflections,” created earlier this year for the company.

Pianists Katherine Burkwall-Ciscon and Yi-Chiu Rachel Chao performed Sufjan Stevens’ score opposite each other at the back of the stage. The pianos made for a dramatic sight, but they also seemed to cramp the stage, pushing the bustling, full-bodied dancing into the foreground.

Coming after “The Letter V,” Peck’s port de bras, or the carriage of the arms, seemed brittle, just as the constant swirl of motion — a continual hiccup of jumps and turns — felt frantic and at the service of rigid architecture.

But this homage to classical technique relaxed somewhat as it went along. Eventually, dancers began to stand out, namely the lyrical Karina González, who performed a duet with Charles-Louis Yoshiyama; she doesn’t strike a position as much as linger in shapes, in time with the music.

The ballet seemed like the usual from Peck: energizing and athletic, with increasingly recognizable components. Using dancers like a set, he created sculptures with their bodies, both in the opening pose in which they clustered closely, cascading like a waterfall, and at the end, when they stood frozen in different positions while soloists performed — and could be seen clearly — in the front.

Peck’s dance worlds are usually logical ones, and that’s fine. They have their place. But Morris’ “The Letter V,” showing the dancers at their best, made a case — and space — for real grandeur. That’s dance poetry. It felt new.

Review: Mark Morris Fits Houston Ballet to a 'V'

(Critic's Pick)

Forsythe has created a setting — not completely silent, but nice and hushed — that encourages listening with both the ears and the eyes. The last thing you would want to hear under such conditions? A beep, buzz or, God forbid, the marimba ringtone. Putting our cellphones in airplane mode was the easy part; more difficult was grasping the poetry of this two-act program. And that wasn’t because of the sound or lack of it.

Actually, it isn’t completely quiet. The second half features a lively dance set to to Jean-Philippe Rameau, and in the first half, there are bird sounds and a spare composition by Morton Feldman. For the most part, though, it’s up to the dancers to create the score with their steps and breathing, and for the audience to absorb it.

Certainly, there are moments to admire and respect. “A Quiet Evening” has the rigor that Forsythe always brings to the stage; there’s just not enough transcendence. In part, that could have been because of an injury to a leading dancer, Christopher Roman. (Four others were brought on to fill in; during the curtain call, Forsythe said that they had learned their parts in three days.) But there is also a sameness to the material, and that makes the less experienced dancers stand out in an unfortunate way among the Forsythe veterans.

“A Quiet Evening,” with new and reworked choreography by Forsythe, pays homage to ballet’s European roots while attempting to bring it into the present. Forsythe is more than qualified for such a choreographic endeavor. An American based for many years in Germany, where he directed Frankfurt Ballet, he did much to guide ballet into a new era with his extreme take on classicism, paired with stark lighting and, frequently, the bold synthesized sounds of the composer Thom Willems.

The next phase of Forsythe’s career landed him in a more experimental world of theater and dance; but recently, he’s fallen back in love with ballet. While the Shed program affords the pleasure of becoming lost in his swirling, finely executed steps — how did that hip end up there? — taken as a whole, it starts to feel arid. And at times, the attempt to look at the future of ballet seems more contrived than organic, like the appearances of the street dancer Rauf Yasit. Also known as RubberLegz, he demonstrated the elasticity of his limbs with floor work that knotted him up like a pretzel, but as the night wore on, it seemed like we were seeing the same sequences on repeat.

Chirping birds introduce Act 1, which begins with “Prologue.” Parvaneh Scharafali and Ander Zabala, wearing evening gloves and sneakers covered with socks, perform a crisp, stately duet — it’s a labyrinth of limbs — with joints as loose as soft spaghetti. (The socks over the sneakers remind me of the way figure skaters pull their tights over their boots — not my favorite look.)

More intriguing is “Catalogue,” featuring the velvety dancing of Jill Johnson — formerly a principal dancer with Ballet Frankfurt, she is still astonishing — alongside newcomer Brit Rodemund. Here, it’s as if they are illustrating the development of ballet starting with simple shapes, some awkward, others pedestrian. This dance is in silence, which begins the moment they each extend an arm and touch palms.

At the start, they draw invisible lines along the perimeter of their torsos with their hands. As they increase their force and expand spatially, the dancers’ elbows and shoulders tell a tale of Forsythe’s intense study of épaulement, or the carriage of the arms. Eventually their isolated movements morph into ballet steps and shapes. When their palms touch in the center once again, and the music — Feldman’s “Nature Pieces From Piano No. 1” — starts, so does “Epilogue,” in which the cast of seven continues the story of some of Forsythe’s most recognizable contributions to dance: his use of torque, speed, articulation and counterpoint.

It’s handsome in parts and confounding in others: Why include even a second of the ever-popular floss dance? Is it meant to be playful? It feels like a throwaway.

“Dialogue (DUO2015),” the final piece in Act 1, pairs Brigel Gjoka and Riley Watts — an extraordinary dancer with silky athleticism — in a frisky duet of physical reverberations. This and “Catalogue” reveal much about Forsythe’s lineage and achievements — both spoke of scale and intimacy — but as informative as the first half of “A Quiet Evening” is, it’s also rambling. Steel yourself.

If Act 1 is about revealing the raw ingredients that make up Forsythe’s classicism, Act 2 is the meal in the form of a stand-alone dance: “Seventeen/Twenty One,” to Rameau’s “Hippolyte et Aricie: Ritournelle” from “Une Symphonie Imaginaire.” It explores ballet’s evolution from the 17th century to the 21st, flooding the previously quiet space with full-bodied dancing and baroque music.

This is a dance, charming in moments, that is hungry for movement. By the end, it creates a sweet and simple sense of community — a group of people just dancing together — that comes to a joyful close as they suddenly clasp hands and run to the front of the stage for a bow. But the most consistent pleasure is from one dancer: Johnson brings an unassuming clarity and articulation to Forsythe’s movement that feels like it comes from the deepest of places. All night long, her quiet radiance was the loudest thing in the room.

—

NEW YORK — One of the pleasures of a life filled with dance is the way, at the end of the day, a performance can force the mind to change course, to quiet down. William Forsythe’s program at the Shed, “A Quiet Evening of Dance,” which opened Friday, takes that to another level.

Gia Kourlas

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