CHICAGO— In the 1990s, no less an eminence than Alfred Brendel urged Twyla Tharp to choreograph Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Why? “It’s so funny,” he reportedly told the contemporary ballet dancemaker.

Funny? That’s probably not the first descriptor that jumps to mind for the sprawling piano variations. But it speaks to Tharp’s vision that one leaves her Diabelli (1998)—sometimes zany, always ecstatic—very much taking Brendel’s point.

Otherwise, the thrill of accessing an unfamiliar emotion in a familiar setting proved elusive last weekend, when Tharp, celebrating her Diamond Jubilee (60th anniversary) as a choreographer, and the Joffrey Ballet presented new- and new-to-Chicago dances alongside local musical eminences: the Joffrey at Symphony Center with the Chicago Symphony (April 10), and Twyla Tharp Dance at Harris Theater with Third Coast Percussion, flutist Constance Volk, and pianist Vladimir Rumyantsev (April 11). Arguably, only Diabelli, the oldest dancework of the bunch, achieved it.

In it, Beethoven’s musical lines become dazzlingly corporeal—a dancer representing a counterpoint line here, another representing a fugal entrance there. But Tharp never falls into the trap of being overly literal. Even when a phrase ends, the dancers often extend their own kinetic “phrases” seamlessly into the next musical idea.

Most powerfully of all, Diabelli is a pantomime of the stuff that makes us human: swaggering overconfidence (Variation 5), petty feuds (Variation 13), grief so heavy is hurts (Variation 20). Then, of course, there’s that humor, the choreography sometimes winking at both the classical music and the classical ballet traditions in one swoop. (So did Geoffrey Beene’s tongue-in-cheek costuming, the dancers clad in tuxedo unitards.) One may never hear Beethoven’s variations the same way. Tharp’s choreography can even enliven a so-so performance of the Variations: Rumyantsev’s live accompaniment was articulate but mostly dutiful, his role as an accompanist, by necessity, prioritizing rhythmic steadiness of distinctiveness.

Stage and pit swapped fortunes in SLACKTIDE, a new work created by Tharp specifically for the Diamond Jubilee tour. The dance accompanies Philip Glass’s Águas da Amazônia, in a lively and lush reimagining by Third Coast Percussion and Volk. Volk’s explosive yet earthy flute dances atop an aclectic instrumentation spanning PVC pipes, glass marimba, and djembe; David Skidmore’s synthesizer adds insistence and futuristic dimension to the otherwise rustic soundscape. On the other hand, SLACKTIDE’s choreography was less fresh and narratively legible than Tharp’s older piece. It felt self-referential and circular, exhausting an arsenal of similar gestures—not repetitive enough to be entrancing, not unexpected enough to be engrossing.

That seems to have been at least partly according to plan, though the resulting emotional coolness surely was not. As Tharp recently told the New York Times, SLACKTIDE begins with a variation of the same motion that ends her iconic 1986 piece In the Upper Room, also set to a score by Glass: An extended, illuminated arm lowers and disappears out of the spotlight into the darkness of the stage. (Here and elsewhere, Justin Townsend’s bold, color-soaked lighting design was a refreshing foil to Diabelli‘s austere black-and-white.) But the repetitive couple dances and half-hearted evocation of SLACKTIDE‘s apparent jungle setting often rang hollow. Nonetheless, dancer Reed Tankersley deserves special kudos for taking on a taxing, lavishly athletic principal role with verve and liquid suppleness.

While nowhere near the disaster that was Davóne Tines’s ROBESON, the wholly inadequate Harris sound system still disappointed on Friday. Had the pit not been open to see the musicians beavering away live, you’d guess the accompaniment was a fuzzy recording.

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