The legacy of Twyla Tharp

Now, the 84-year-old is celebrating 60 years as a dance-maker with a double bill revealing her mastery of form and content that receives its only European performance in Venice. Diabelli, a work from 1998, is performed to Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations (played live, beautifully, by the pianist Vladimir Rumyantsev) and inspired by the richness of the composer’s imagination as he creates 33 variations on a theme. Tharp matches him blow for blow with her dozen dancers streaming on to the stage like piano notes, tumbling over each other, their movements at once relaxed and precise.

Elaborate speedy jumps mix with arms that punch and pulse. Repeated movements reveal the symmetry within the music: a woman is propelled horizontally like a pencil, dancers leapfrog over one another or are carried, piggyback-style. Tharp responds to Beethoven’s falling and rising scales; feet flex and legs kick to suggest a ripple of notes; tiny inflections and shoulder wriggles shape the space around the rigorous movement, letting it breathe.

An exceptional cast powers through 85 minutes of invention and skill, barely pausing as they make delicate patterns that change constantly: upright to jazzy, formal to naturalistic, melancholy to witty. It’s exceptional, joyful.

Slacktide, performed to Philip Glass’s Aguas da Amazonia, also played live by the exceptional Third Coast Percussion, is the perfect complement. In his post-show interview with Tharp, Wayne McGregor, artistic director of the Venice Dance Biennale, suggested it felt like letting her dancers take off a corset, and that’s exactly right.

Created in 2025, the piece has an expansiveness in its movement, a gentle thoughtfulness in mood. Virtuosic leaps, runs on the spot and fiercely spun turns punctuate frozen poses and slowly unfolding arabesques. Both works contain multiple references to works from the past, which feels appropriate: Tharp, a true pioneer, belongs in that historic pantheon.

Since 2008, Tao Ye of Tao Dance Theater (founded with Duan Ni and Wang Hao) has been pursuing his own particular style, based on the principle of the “circular movement system” that seeks to create constant flow. The results have won Tao a worldwide following on YouTube and TikTok, commissions from top fashion houses and fans willing to travel the world to see his work.

His Numerical Series takes one idea per piece and explores it in choreography of minimalistic, repetitive precision. In 16, that idea is a 360-degree movement of the head performed by 16 dancers, all in black, in a long, snaking line. They move in unison, differentiated only subtly by hairstyles and details on their clothes. Their perpetual progression in curves and squares, never breaking, never stopping, is transfixing. The movement is subtle, arising from the neck and shoulders, arms hanging loosely, steps varying in size and intensity but always locked in pattern. The dancers seem serene, enclosed in their own meditative world.

17 is more troubling. Sound cues – screams, shouts – trigger a group of 17, first seen lying flat on the floor, to fling their bodies across the ground in crashing, interlocking shapes so they look like rocks, or beached sea creatures. Their flips and jumps are controlled but off-putting. An exercise in repetition and connection starts to feel like one of abnegation.

Photographs by Andrea Avezzù