There is nobody in the dance world like Twyla Tharp. She has defined, upended, and reimagined contemporary dance from the stage to the movie screen, and at 83 years old, she’s still creating new works. Her 60th anniversary tour stops at the Lensic Tuesday and Wednesday, February 25 and 26, to perform a work from her expansive archive as well as a new one to music by Philip Glass reimagined on custom percussion instruments.

The evening will open with Diabelli, set to the Diabelli Variations for solo piano by Beethoven. The piece premiered in the U.S. in 1999 at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Ten of the 12 dancers in the company and concert pianist Vladimir Rumyantsev perform the almost hourlong work.

Marzia Memoli is a longtime dancer with the Martha Graham company who has worked with Tharp for two and a half years. She says Diabelli is technical, fast, and challenging.

“It’s very concentrated, like you need to hit the step, hit the counts,” Memoli says. “Sometimes, we count so fast that I can’t even say the counts because they’re too fast. We are really dancing almost nonstop. You have 33 variations and some of them are really, really hard. There is so much to count, so much to say, and so much individuality — we also have characters we inhabit.”

The music for the second piece, SLACKTIDE, is a reworking of Philip Glass’ Aguas da Amazonia, composed on piano in the early 1990s and first danced by a Brazilian troupe. It was recorded by a Brazilian instrumental group called Uakti on bespoke instruments. The Chicago-based Third Coast Percussion company had been playing its own version for a decade when Tharp asked them to collaborate on SLACKTIDE.

“We all sat down with Twyla in New York when we were there for our first performance at Carnegie Hall almost exactly two years ago,” says Robert Dillon, a Third Coast musician. “She liked the version that we had done, but she also really loved a lot of the sounds in that Uakti recording, and she was sort of pushing us to reimagine a version that incorporated some of that sound world as well.”

Like Uakti, Third Coast made instruments specifically for the piece, including a glass marimba, a PVC pipe-based instrument, and xylophone made out of big pieces of red oak. “Then we realized that we might need a string or woodwind, so we reached out to an old friend of ours in Chicago named Constance Volk, who is a really fantastic flute player,” Dillon says.

Once Third Coast had gotten each of the eight movements (one is repeated) to a good place, they sent recordings to Tharp for input and made adjustments. “She has such a strong background in music and is very knowledgeable, and it’s wonderful to work with her,” Dillon says.

When Tharp was happy with the piece, Third Coast recorded it and sent it to New York. Memoli started working on SLACKTIDE with Tharp in May.

“I was going into her house in the morning, and we watched Twyla’s videos from the 1980s of her improvising in the studio,” Memoli says. “She was like, ‘OK, I would like you to learn some of the stuff, and let’s see what we have.’ It was an amazing process with her to say, ‘Let’s really watch it, let’s really look at the arms right now, and then look at the feet and then look at what she was doing.’ She was always saying ‘what she’s doing?’ — she never refers to herself as me or I. Something very beautiful came out of it. It’s a ritual — the audience will be on a journey for sure.”

Dillon says the first time Third Coast rehearsed SLACKTIDE with the dancers was shortly before the tour premiere, but first the percussionists got to sit back and watch.

“They had set aside time to run the whole piece for us with the recording, knowing that we probably won’t really be able to see it when we’re playing with them,” he says. “All of us were just completely blown away. I mean, jaws on the floor. It’s so beautiful.”

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