By SUSAN REITER

Kansas City Ballet dancers Christopher Barksdale, Amber Metiva, and Logan Pachciarz are pictured in Twyla Tharp’s Deuce Coupe, performed last October during the company’s fall season. William Whitener, the company’s artistic director and a member of Tharp’s original cast in 1973, is setting the ballet on Juilliard’s dancers for this month’s Spring Dances series. (Photo by Steve Wilson )

Choreographers make dances that reflect the times in which they are creating, but if those works endure and merit subsequent productions, they may speak differently—but no less eloquently—to audiences of a different period. For this month's Spring Dances at Juilliard, the students will have an opportunity to perform two works whose impact Lawrence Rhodes, director of Juilliard's Dance Division, felt profoundly when he first encountered them. But in assembling this year's program, he chose them also because he sensed they would frame a thought-provoking evening.

Twyla Tharp's Deuce Coupe, the seminal work she created in 1973 for the Joffrey Ballet, launched the choreographer into a new realm of acclaim and visibility. Working with a ballet company for the first time, Tharp—at that point a highly regarded, uncompromising experimental choreographer—blended her own insouciant, brainy modern dancers with the youthfully exuberant, snappy Joffrey members in ingenious ways, setting them all moving with wit and daring to a collection of songs by the Beach Boys.

Jiri Kylian's Soldiers' Mass, choreographed in 1980 to Bohuslav Martinu's 1939 Field Mass, portrays the camaraderie and dedication of soldiers thrown together in battle. It was the first work Rhodes selected when planning the program. "It's a very powerful dance, and I have always thought it was stunning," he says, recalling the impact of seeing Kylian's Netherlands Dance Theater perform it in 1981. "The soldiers are shown as very much a community." Presenting it in the context of today is "a reminder to people about the difficulties of war, and a recognition of our troops."

"Juilliard students are process-oriented dancers. They enjoy the investigative nature of retrieving a ballet, and they are accustomed to going through a process to accomplish their goals."

Because Kylian's work calls for a cast of 12 men, Rhodes sought an all-female work to balance the program. He called upon Susan Marshall, who has been crafting delicate, quietly penetrating dances for her own company since 1982, to make a new work for women. A Juilliard alumna, she had choreographed for the sophomore class as part of the inaugural New Dances at Juilliard program in 2004. "The students loved her, and I knew they would be happy she was coming back," Rhodes says. Marshall's work, Name by Name, for 18 women, is set to two pieces by contemporary composer David Lang. While still at a very early stage of rehearsals, Marshall noted that "the dancers are being wonderful collaborators."

In addition to providing Juilliard students with their first opportunity to perform a Tharp work, Rhodes selected Deuce Coupe for the contrast it offers to Soldiers' Mass. "Deuce Coupe is a piece of nostalgia, evoking a much happier time in our world," he observes. Innocence and playfulness dominate the dance; its rambunctious youngsters may be around the same age as the soldiers conscripted and sent to the front lines in Kylian's work, but their world is, for the moment, carefree.

"I thought it was tremendous, really brilliant," Rhodes recalls of the original Joffrey production, which caused a sensation rarely found in the staid world of ballet. The sheer giddy thrill of ballet dancers showcasing their technical skills while cutting loose had audiences cheering from the moment a slippery, grooving line of dancers snaked across the stage to the revved-up strains of "Little Deuce Coupe."

Among those Joffrey dancers encountering—and being redefined by—Tharp's brilliance and originality in 1973 was William Whitener, who has staged the Juilliard production. Now artistic director of Kansas City Ballet, where he staged Deuce Coupe last year, he recalls being "instantly drawn to Twyla and her company of dancers. They were a group of highly intelligent, committed individuals who had a distinct way of moving that was intriguing to me.

Susan Marshall working in the studio with Juilliard’s sophomore dancers in 2004. (Photo by Rosalie O'Connor )

"I found her work extremely challenging, and I responded to her interest in all of us as individuals. It wasn't something that I could do immediately; I worked very hard at it. It took me a while to understand the release in her movement, the areas where you would hold the body so that there could be freedom of movement in the limbs. The use of the back was a different approach for me than what I'd been accustomed to with more classical work."

On a chilly January day, Whitener was in the midst of communicating those distinctions and other intricacies of Tharp's choreography to a studio full of eager Juilliard students. As they worked on the complex final section, in which the full cast of 15 fills the stage to the wistfully romantic strains of "Cuddle Up," he pointed out that its choreography is "about the generosity of accommodating people in a crowd." At times, he had the dancers watch a videotape of an earlier production he had staged, and he occasionally flipped through a thick sheaf of notes that he and others have made over the years of working on Deuce Coupe.

"Each time I stage the piece, I treat it like a first time. I go back to the source material, the original documentation. I'm still discovering things," he remarks. The documentation chronicles the various versions (there have been five) of Deuce Coupe. In 1975, Tharp adapted the material into Deuce Coupe II, a version the Joffrey dancers performed on their own, without Tharp and her ensemble. In the early 1980s, her own company performed a third version during a Broadway season, and that is now the template from which Whitener works.

On this day, the students had access to the knowledge and experience of another original cast member: Beatriz Rodriguez, an amazingly versatile Joffrey star for many years, had stopped by. Soon she was demonstrating a phrase of fluid figure eights and complex head and arm patterns, all delivered with perfect classical poise, and 34 years seemed to slip away.

On his final day of rehearsal (he is to return shortly before the performances), Whitener was intently refining and clarifying specific moves. At one point, he urged the dancers to "make it luscious, open, generous." He demonstrated how three dancers performing a series of isolations should shift in and out of unison. For another section, he warned them not to hold their weight too high, but to sink into their legs.

The Netherlands Dance Theater performing Kylian's Soldiers' Mass (set to Martinu’s Field Mass) in 1980. (Photo courtesy of NDT Archive)

At certain moments in Deuce Coupe, the dancers are working with choreographed phrases, but making their own choices within set parameters. "One of the first things I responded to was being asked to create the sequence of learned movement on my own," Whitener says. "It was liberating for me, as a 21-year-old, to be able to make selections on the stage. That was one of Twyla's breakthroughs in the ballet world, and now it's become something that is more familiar to this generation of dancers."

He speaks with open enthusiasm about his experience with the Juilliard students. "They are process-oriented dancers. That makes it very rewarding as a stager. They enjoy the investigative nature of retrieving a ballet, and they are accustomed to going through a process to accomplish their goals."

Spring Dances at Juilliard Peter Jay Sharp Theater Wednesday, March 28- Sunday, April 1 Please see the Calendar of Events for more information.

Preparing this ambitious and contrasting program has clearly been a rich process of discovery for the dancers. But Rhodes made his choices with not only their needs in mind, but with an eye to how the audience will experience the three dances. "I think Deuce Coupe and Soldiers' Mass are both important works that haven't been seen for a long time. They have very different sets of challenges for the dancers. I'm happy with the whole shape of this program; I imagine people will leave the theater with some thought about what's going on in the world."

Susan Reiter is a freelance journalist who covers dance for New York Press, Danceviewtimes.com, and other publications.