With its unique blend of boundless energy, endless invention and amazing beauty, the Wittenberg Series-sponsored Twyla Tharp Dance Company commanded the stage, Sept. 30, at Kuss Auditorium, Clark State Performing Arts Center.

Led by two-time Emmy Award-winning choreographer Twyla Tharp, the dance company performed “Westerly Round,” a playfully witty and charming abstracted square dance, along with “Surfer at the River Styx,” which revealed another dimension of Tharp’s infinite imagination and served as a dramatic, emotional ride from beginning to end.

The dance company also performed a more comedic, romantic number titled “Known by the Heart Duet,” which took the formal structure of the classical duet and mixed it up with witty, fierce, sometimes combative yet always surprising relationships between the partners. This dance is an excerpt from a suite of dances originally commissioned by American Ballet Theatre in 1998.

Audiences also experienced Tharp’s characteristically exuberant blend of ballet and modern dance in “Mozart Clarinet Quintet K. 581.” Noted for its shifting spatial patterns and daring off-center, off-balance partnering that explodes in experimental shifts, this sun-filled dance dazzled the audience.

Creator of the Tony Award-winning, Billy Joel-scored Broadway musical Movin’ Out, Tharp has produced more than 125 dances and choreographed five Hollywood movies including Hair, Ragtime and White Nights. Considered one of America’s greatest choreographers, Twarp has also managed to fuse classical, modern and jazz dance in a way that has catapulted choreography into the 21st century.

In addition to her Emmy Awards, she has also won the Director’s Guild of America award for Outstanding Director. Her autobiography, Push Comes to Shove, was published in 1992.