tautness

A tautness comes over us as we watch it, a brace-your-body fear.

I think of Philip Roth’s “Everyman,” the tautness by which it re-creates the life of its protagonist.

In “Agon,” the masterful 1957 collaboration between Balanchine and Stravinsky, a performance of the first pas de trois — with India Bradley, Taylor Stanley and Meaghan Dutton-O’Hara — was mesmerizing in its tautness.

In Thomas’s hands, it had a brilliant moment-to-moment tautness that made you forget the expanse of Schubert’s canvas, in which fine-honed details can sometimes get lost.

Bowers’ works typically create a vivifying tautness between the individual and the group.