School of American Ballet 2013 Winter Ball

There was plenty of eye candy at the School of American Ballet’s annual Winter Ball, held last week in the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. Jaw-dropping dames lounged beside palm trees, plucking instruments’ strings. Models posed for the shutterbugs, blinged out in Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry. But the Transom had eyes for only one man this evening: Latvian native and ballet superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Word around the room was that the man known as “Misha” had yet to arrive, and so we sulked our way through a few cocktails before running into actress Kelly Rutherford, the oft-remarrying mom on Gossip Girl. Ms. Rutherford told us about her favorite ballet, The Nutcracker.

“I like the little mice,” she said. “I go to The Nutcracker every year.”

After a little more investigation, we discovered that the last Nutcracker she attended was actually by the American Ballet Theater, not City Ballet (with which SAB is affiliated)—but excellent technique is excellent technique, and we couldn’t fault her for the blip.

As if on cue, we then spotted New York City Ballet principal dancer Ashley Bouder, who was with her husband, former Royal Ballet dancer Matthew Dibble, and who told us she had declined someone’s offer to dress her for the evening.

“I was like, I’ll just wear my Nicole [Miller],” said Ms. Bouder, who was wearing a classic black-and-white print dress. “Nicole gave me the dress for a different party. It was Japanese-themed.”

The theme for this evening was Le Bal Oriental. There were exotic flowers, gold thread-embroidered tablecloths and parasols suspended from the ceiling, and we had nearly lost ourselves in the magic of it all when morning TV reporter Tom Murro tipped off the Transom that “Mikhail is here.”

He added, “Go tackle him.”

Tackle Mr. Baryshnikov? We think not. But we did tap the legendary dancer delicately on the shoulder when we had finally tracked him down. And then we lost our nerve. This was, after all, the Baryshnikov. Mumbling more than we should admit, we proceeded to ask him a few questions about ballet as a medium of communication for our darkest emotions—or something like that.

“There’s nothing to say yet, the party hasn’t started,” Mr. Baryshnikov scolded us. “We’re raising money for the ballet.” Regaining our composure, we then spoke to Mr. Baryshnikov in his native tongue, finally impressing the legend enough to earn a handshake and a pat on the back.

Just then, the dinner bell rang, and we all tucked into a splendid meal of Peking duck spring rolls and chicken curry over rice. The most anticipated portion of the evening, however, was a piece danced by the School of American Ballet’s advanced students and choreographed by NYCB’s newest apprentice, Silas Farley. Still only 18, Mr. Farley carried himself with the air of a seasoned veteran as he thanked his dancers after their flawless performance.

On our way out of the Koch Theater, we noticed Mr. Baryshnikov strolling outside, although we were too shy to engage in a second round of embarrassment. Instead, the Transom watched Misha walk off into the distance. And so we parted ways, silent as the night.

The Known By Heart Duet has been plucked from a longer and more populated piece Tharp made for A.B.T. several years ago. The duet was created for Ethan Stiefel and Susan Jaffe, and was exactly right for them, catching Stiefel's cockiness and Jaffe's determination and anchoring the extended piece. Standing on its own now, and partly reconfigured, it still comes across as a sly, witty rethinking of the classical pas de deux, but somehow it's minimized rather than maximized. Its vocabulary of antagonism becomes an in-your-face statement of an attitude rather than one resonant element within a larger context of feelings.

Matthew Dibble, from England's Royal Ballet, is a good-looking, slender dancer with all the technique required for Tharp's windmilling, sliding, juddering inventions, but either he-or she-doesn't think that's enough: He's smiling all over the place, flirting with the audience. If Stiefel is something of a show-off, Dibble is something of a narcissist. And his partner, Lynda Sing, another strong and vivid dancer, is almost too lyrical and appealing. There's something odd when somebody's being choked and it's charming.

One of Tharp's quintessential early works, The Fugue , has been restored, and if you've never seen it-and you probably haven't-you should try to see it now. But The Fugue isn't easy. There's no music, only the sound of three dancers' feet on a miked floor; the dancers create their own percussion. Occasionally, someone will slap his thighs, or even count out loud: "One, two, three, four." The rest is silence. In a way, I wish this piece weren't called The Fugue , because, watching it, you get distracted trying to find the fugue in it. I couldn't find it 30-odd years ago-I think it was in 1971, a year after The Fugue was made-and I can't find it now. What I do find is almost limitless invention-Tharp proposing startling steps and combinations, then teasing them, challenging them, refining them, going back and around and into and out of them. This is a severe piece, a crucible in which an artist is finding and identifying herself.

Originally, The Fugue was danced by three women, including Tharp herself, and I seem to remember a heightened audacity and charge to the performance. Now it's two men and one woman, all three of them up to her virtuoso demands. Jason McDole, who comes from the David Parsons company, is a real find-utterly committed, very musical, with a deep suppleness to his back and hips. Dario Vaccaro, from Argentina, is more classical, more centered, less free perhaps, but no less energized. The girl, Whitney Simler, at first seems boyish, then reveals a modest but telling femininity and quietly holds her own between the rampant guys. The Fugue , though, isn't about gender, and isn't really about its dancers; it's about a burgeoning choreographer's mind at work. And like its choreographer, it's assertive, complex and brilliant. Do I like it as much as I did three decades ago? Probably not, because then it was a revelation and now it's a fascinating piece of recovered history. And the memory of the original cast is ineradicable. Yet it's exciting to be able to follow Tharp creating herself here, bursting with ideas that all these years later she's still amplifying and testing. This is bedrock Tharp material.

Not so Westerly Round , a piece two years old and having its official New York premiere. This is the work for four-three men and a woman in a gloss on that old fixture, the square-dancey Western. It's bouncy, it's rompy, it's an audience-pleaser, but 30 years from now we won't be impatient to see it revived. Emily Coates, a charming redhead we've been watching over the years at New York City Ballet and Baryshnikov's White Oak Project, is the girl, swinging effortlessly through the good-natured routine Tharp has assigned her. Since she's been given lots of pirouettes on half-pointe, and some specifically balletic lifts, it's not clear to me why she's not fully on pointe-the piece might be more interesting, more contrasty, if she were. Is the idea to further blur the lines between "modern" and "ballet"? To demonstrate that it just doesn't matter? (That would be un-Tharpian-to Twyla, everything matters.) The dancers burst into pyrotechnical displays-to impress each other, it would seem, as much as to impress us. They're rivals, but they're also a community. If only they weren't so ingratiating. This is another piece that would improve with less grinning, less selling. At least it offers a shot of Tharp's trademark pugnacity.

The program-closer is Surfer at the River Styx , now three years old and more and more clearly a major work. Its original stars-John Selya, Keith Roberts and Elizabeth Parkinson-are on Broadway, the leads in Movin' Out . They were spectacular in River Styx -Selya, in particular, was a revelation of dynamism, almost of frenzy. With their solid ballet background-both of them came from A.B.T.-Selya and Roberts were superbly matched; their conflict was not only between equals but between brothers. They've been replaced now by Charlie Neshyba-Hodges and Matthew Dibble, two dramatically dissimilar dancers. Neshyba-Hodges, who also dominated Westerly Round , is an explosive fireplug with an endearing bald spot. He hardly looks like a dancer-until he begins to dance, revealing a formidable talent. He doesn't make you forget Selya, but he keeps you from missing him. Dibble does everything right-Tharp requires a series of terrifyingly demanding pirouettes of him, and he's rock-steady in them. But he doesn't invest them with color or meaning. It's exciting, but it's not moving or frightening. The two secondary men-McDole and Vaccaro, together again-were extraordinary, adding to one's sense that this dark, mysterious work (Tharp tells us it was suggested by Euripedes' The Bacchæ ) is too large, too complicated, to be fully explored by any one set of dancers. We're lucky to have it back, to be reconsidered in the light of this new cast.

Tharp is a loner-relieved, she's been saying in interviews, not to be saddled with a large institution, with "real estate." Over the years, she's proved that she can do just about anything she sets out to do, so what does she want to do now? Can she stay small while getting bigger and bigger? Will she seriously commit herself to revivifying her important work from the past, either under own banner or elsewhere? And will she go on extending the language of dance, building on the foundations she established so long ago in The Fugue and other seminal works? We understand, I think, where Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham, Mark Morris are heading; they've mapped out their boundaries. But does anyone presume to guess what Twyla Tharp will come up with next?