✦ Origins ✦
Twyla Tharp created In the Upper Room in 1986 for her own company, Twyla Tharp Dance, premiering it on August 28, 1986, at the Ravinia Festival outside Chicago. She commissioned a new score from composer Philip Glass, whose driving, minimalist repetitions Tharp has described as leaving room for the choreography to build its own momentum rather than illustrating the music beat for beat. Costume designer Norma Kamali and lighting designer Jennifer Tipton completed the original creative team, and both remain closely identified with the piece: Kamali's black-and-white-striped and later solid-red costumes, and Tipton's use of dense stage fog that periodically obscures the dancers entirely, are as much a part of the work's identity as the choreography itself.
The piece entered American Ballet Theatre's repertoire in 1988, the same period in which Twyla Tharp Dance merged with ABT, and it has since been staged by companies including the Bolshoi Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, and numerous regional ballet companies internationally, making it, by a wide margin, Tharp's most widely performed single work.
What Makes It Distinct
The piece's central structural device is its division of thirteen dancers into two groups with distinct footwear, vocabulary, and costuming. Tharp called the sneaker-wearing dancers "stompers," who dance a grounded, percussive vocabulary built from boxing, yoga, and pedestrian movement, and the pointe-shoe dancers the "bomb squad," or "bombers," who cut across the stage in fast, classically rooted attacks. The two groups intersect, separate, and gradually blur across the piece's nine sections, so that by the end the distinction between a modern-dance body and a ballet body has effectively dissolved into a single unified ensemble.
That dissolution is reinforced visually: Kamali's costumes begin as black-and-white striped unitards and are progressively replaced or shed to reveal solid red beneath, while Tipton's fog, lit from low and raking angles, periodically swallows dancers as they enter and spits them back out mid-phrase, so that the stage itself seems to be generating the dancers rather than simply containing them. The combined effect - Glass's churning, layered score, the fog, the color shift from stripes to red, and the collapsing distinction between sneaker and pointe vocabulary - has made the piece one of the clearest practical demonstrations of the argument at the center of Tharp's career: that a ballet-trained body and a vocabulary built from athletics and social dance are not opposites to be reconciled but material that was always compatible.
Reception & Legacy
In the Upper Room won the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance in 1991 and has been described by dancers and critics alike as one of the few closing pieces that reliably produces a standing ovation regardless of the company performing it. Its combination of aerobic, near-continuous group choreography and instantly recognizable visual design - the fog, the stripes, the red - has made it a signature closing work on mixed repertory programs worldwide, often paired with quieter or more conventionally classical pieces earlier in an evening precisely because of the jolt of energy it delivers.
Beyond its popularity, the piece is frequently cited as the clearest full realization of the crossover argument Tharp had been building since Deuce Coupe in 1973 and Push Comes to Shove in 1976: that ballet companies could absorb an outside vocabulary at full scale, across an entire cast, without treating it as a novelty or a one-off experiment.
See Also
Read the full profile of choreographer Twyla Tharp.