Howling Near Heaven: Twyla Tharp and the Re-Invention of Modern Dance.

Howling Near Heaven: Twyla Tharp and the Re-Invention of Modern Dance By Marcia B. Siegel. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006, 288 pages. Illustrated. $25.95.

Twyla Tharp's often turbulent career, now on the cusp of its fifth decade, may add up to the great American success story. And if one grasps the implications of Siegel's splendid scrutiny of her life and dances, the choreographer probably wouldn't have it any other way. Tharp, one quickly gathers, is an artist who demands that the world love, or, at the very least, respect her, and pay handsomely for the privilege, too.

Forty years ago, Tharp was a renegade, even belligerent experimentalist prepared to produce her first program of works at Judson Memorial Church. Today, with one phenomenally successful Broadway production, Movin' Out, to her credit, she is poised to conquer the commercial sector again. Between then and now, Tharp has assembled her own troupe under different names and disbanded it several times, created dances for major ballet companies, toiled in the movies and video, irked the press, confused her colleagues, and delighted the public. Beneath the skin of a pathfinder lies the heart of a populist And sometimes, one can believe that Tharp alone in her generation has erased the line that divides "high" from "low" culture.

Above all, Siegel remains true to her subtitle. Tharp has reinvented the art form by setting herself constant challenges, daring to invade arenas shunned by earlier modernists and conquering those realms on her own terms. For every landmark triumph, like Deuce Coupe for the Joffrey Ballet or Push Comes to Shove for American Ballet Theatre, she has flirted and yielded to failure. (In this category, Siegel cites Mr. Worldly Wise for The Royal Ballet or Tharp's first Broadway musical venture, Singin' in the Rain, and this witness can scarcely disagree with that judgment.) These were, however, ambitious misfires; envelopes were pushed and conventions demolished as much as hopes were dashed.

Tharp's autobiography (also tiffed Push Comes to Shove) covers much of this territory elliptically and a bit coyly, but Siegel's objective approach charts the choreographer's career trajectory more organically. Her writing on the ballets commissioned by Joffrey and ABT possesses enviable lucidity and analytic insight. For those of us who experienced these dances live, the book summons images of a heady era in recent dance history. For those who missed these works (even the ephemera), the prose makes us regret our absence.

This is where Siegel is at her characteristic best. One wishes she had applied her nonpareil gifts of observation more generously. Too often, she seems acutely conscious of writing an official history, citing contemporary reviews of Tharp's dances when we are more eager to know what Siegel thought. General readers may nod off at the doggedly chronicled account of the changing personnel in the choreographer's several companies. One longs, too, for an annotated works list. With over 100 works to her credit, Tharp has certainly earned it. The eight pages of photographs, however, are well chosen.