On a recent dusky evening, a dozen or so visitors to Little Island in Manhattan were gazing into its outdoor amphitheater from a nearby perch. They didn’t have tickets, sold out at $25 each, to “How Long Blues,” the first outing in a new summer festival that hopes to fulfill the site’s promise as a lively platform for the performing arts. So the slope of a rolling, manicured hill offered the best vantage point.
Halfway through the hourlong show, though, most of them had wandered off.
To be fair, the lush, dynamic public park, rising from the Hudson River and privately funded by the media titan Barry Diller for $260 million, can be delightfully distracting. But “How Long Blues,” a new dance-theater work conceived, choreographed and directed by Twyla Tharp, now running through June 23, is a chaotic head-scratcher. While a riverside setting can be overstimulating (a heliport is less than 20 blocks uptown), the action onstage pulls your attention in so many directions at once that you feel you’re always missing something.
In addition to an excellent band on elevated platforms, a standing piano rides in on the back of a tricycle. (The music, a mercurial flow of jazz that ranges from swingy and upbeat to trippy and dissonant, is by T Bone Burnett and David Mansfield.) There are appearances by performers wearing doll heads with cartoon features, a demonlike figure covered in straw fringe and Sisyphus carrying a rock on his shoulder — all of this while two smartly dressed men (played by the Tony Award winner Michael Cerveris and a Tharp regular, John Selya) vaguely pantomime amid a swirl of vibrant dancers. (The show has only a few spoken lines.)
You would have little way of knowing, without reading Tharp’s interview in The New York Times, that “How Long Blues” concerns the French writer and philosopher Albert Camus, and specifically elements from his 1947 novel “The Plague” about a pandemic in Algeria (coughing fits by a dancer or two are not sufficient clues). Notes shared privately with the press confirm that Cerveris is meant to be Jean-Paul Sartre, a close friend of Camus, played by Selya, and that “literal thinking” about narrative “is not helpful here,” according to Tharp.
That’s certainly true, but nor is “How Long Blues,” named for a song by Leroy Carr, coherently abstract. Consistent gestures toward an illegible story undercut the show’s components, which are less often in harmony than in competition.
Tharp’s choreography, when it has sufficient room to breathe, is the star attraction: a medley of vigorous and precise ballet technique — graceful suspension, expansive limbs — with the sort of unexpected pivots and urgent expressiveness that distinguish her muscular style.
Each scene presents an abrupt shift in situation and tone (a string of nightclub pas de deux, a succession of mental torments, a dominatrix kickline seemingly lifted from a Robert Palmer video), allowing Tharp to demonstrate a variety of movement qualities. There’s languor in the hips when illness strikes, and joy in the limbs that are swung overhead with momentum and abandon.
There’s ingenuity, too, in Burnett and Mansfield’s vocal compositions, which include a few conventional songs, like the title track and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” sung in dutiful, gravely tones by an underused Cerveris. Others showcase the lovely agility of the jazz singer Andromeda Turre, who often accompanies the band with otherworldly sounds.
The most striking moments of “How Long Blues” come from synergies in design, like undulating patterns of light (by Justin Townsend) catching the whirl of the dancers’ pale skirts (the set and costumes are by Santo Loquasto). The real coup, on the night I attended, was the perfectly timed passage of a massive cruise ship, little windows all ablaze, during the finale.
“How Long Blues,” though, is a curiously obtuse and muddled opener for this new festival in a space that aims to belong to the people of New York. Fortunately, the park’s thrilling beauty inspires patience while its arts program grows some sea legs.
How Long Blues
Through June 23 at Little Island, Manhattan; littleislandtickets.com. Running time: 55 minutes.
