NEW MOVES MODERN DANCE LEGEND TWYLA THARP BRINGS A NEW COMPANY TO AHMANSON.

Byline: Evan Henerson Staff Writer

If anybody else were to talk about sensing movement in statues, she might be a candidate for a padded cell.

Not dancer/choreographer Twyla Tharp, for whom every art form imaginable is potential fodder for her own piece of artistic expression. She can drop $500 at Tower Records and not find a single note suitable for a new dance piece, but her dancers know inspiration will strike. Chalk it up to a kind of Tharpian intuition, which, by now, people don't question.

Well, OK, maybe journalists do.

``How do I know? Well, it has to be kinetic. I have a very strong connection to kineticism,'' says Tharp, who brings her new six-person company, Twyla Tharp Dance, to the Ahmanson Theatre this week for a two-program performance that includes two West Coast premieres and a world premiere.

``I sense movement in music, movement in paintings. Sometimes sculpture. It either moves or it doesn't. I sense it all the time in Beethoven,'' she adds.

Beethoven will be on the program, with his Grosse Sonata, Opus 106, ``Hammerklavier Sonata'' providing the backdrop for one of the performances. Tharp, who has configured the piece for six dancers instead of four, calls the 45-minute ``Hammerklavier'' ``an extraordinary piece of music, one of the best pieces of music he ever wrote. It's very difficult and demanding, one of the most difficult things in the piano repertory. So we figured, OK, let's tackle this one.''

``She knows that score inside and out,'' adds dancer Keith Roberts, a company member who has toured the world with Tharp. ``She'll be reading along with it, reading all the notes that Beethoven wrote and how it should be played.''

Tharp, who started taking piano lessons from her mother at the age of 2, is as apt to ``tackle'' the Beach Boys, Philip Glass and Jelly Roll Morton as she is to choreograph to Hayden, Brahms and Rossini. The Ahmanson engagement includes Mozart's Clarinet Quintet K581. It also features a world premiere set to Mark O'Connor's ``Westerly Round'' and ``Surfer at the River Styx,'' a collaboration with Donald Knaack - the composer who, because of his penchant for using discarded objects in his compositions, is known as the Junkman. Knaack is also the composer of the ``Known by Heart Duet'' which is part of the second program.

A little bit of Mozart, a little bit of Junkman ...

``She's always open to any possibility,'' says Roberts. ``Something comes into her life and speaks to her. There are so many forms of inspiration.''

Indeed there are. Tharp found the spark for ``Surfer at the River Styx'' from her rereading of Euripides' play ``The Bacchae,'' in which Pentheus, king of Thebes, after running afoul of the god Dionysus, ends up being torn limb from limb by the female devotees of the Bacchus. At one point in the performance, the men stop being dancers and turn into warriors.

``I was thinking about the content and there's some pretty heavy stuff in there. I managed to find the River Styx,'' said Tharp. ``It connects to the Mozart piece only in that both are pretty long hauls. For me, it's ultimately all about courage. I think I expect that of my collaborators living and dead.''

Born in Portland, Ind., and raised in San Bernardino, Tharp attended Pomona College before transferring to Barnard College in New York City. Her first dance, ``Tank Drive,'' premiered at Hunter College in 1965.

She has choreographed for the Joffrey Ballet, New York City Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, London's Royal Ballet and the American Ballet Theatre; she was the associate artistic director of ABT from 1988 to 1990. She has choreographed the films ``Hair,'' ``Amadeus,'' ``Ragtime'' and ``White Nights.''

Nicholas Goldsborough, vice president of capital programs and presentations for the Music Center of Los Angeles County, said he has been an admirer of Tharp's work since the early 1970s.

``She is very firmly rooted in the modern dance tradition, but to modern dance, she brought her own sensibility and her own kind of moves,'' said Goldsborough. ``She has created her own language of movement, and it's very quirky and fun.''

When she took the ABT position, Tharp dissolved her first company - also called Twyla Tharp Dance - which had been in existence for 23 years. She launched the new company in July 2000 at the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C. Tharp also recently scuttled plans to open what would have been her first permanent studio in a church near the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The new company, she says, is thriving. Many of its members - the troupe includes Roberts, Alexander Brady, Benjamin Bowman, Elizabeth Parkinson, John Selya and Ashley Tuttle - have worked with Tharp before at ABT.

``I'm planning a retrospective next year, and I may need a bigger company for that, but at the moment, I'm privileged to have such a small group. It's very one-on-one, and I'm savoring it,'' said Tharp, 59.

``Yes it can get bigger and we can develop more of a support system, but ultimately the spirit invested here is never going to get any better,'' she added.

Tharp's performance signals the beginning of a veritable dance fest at the Ahmanson. Next up is ``Contact,'' Susan Stroman's Tony Award-winning dance-inspired piece, which plays from July 10 to Sept. 2. After ``Contact'' comes ``The Car-Man, an Auto-Erotic Thriller,'' an update of Bizet's ``Carmen'' by the British director/choreographer Matthew Bourne.

Across the plaza, Korea's classical ballet company, the Universal Ballet, visits the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for a five-performance engagement July 20-25. Larger companies like Universal Ballet and Alvin Ailey Dance - which visited in March - have a better chance of filling up the 3,100-seat Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Opportunities for dance programming are likely to increase once the L.A. Philharmonic moves into its new home at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in fall 2003. Administrators at L.A. Opera are also in negotiations to bring the Kirov Ballet to Los Angeles for regular engagements once the Philharmonic moves.

``The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is the venue where we are confident there will be more time for programming dance and ballet once the Disney Concert Hall is open,'' said Goldsborough. ``Two and a half years from now, this is going to be a very different place.''

``TWYLA THARP DANCE''

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles.

When: Program 1: ``Surfer at the River Styx'' and Mozart Clarinet Quintet K 581, 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday. Program 2: ``Known by Heart Duet,'' ``Westerly Round'' and Beethoven's Grosse Sonata, Opus 106, ``Hammerklavier Sonata,'' 8 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday.

Tickets: $15 to $60. Call [phone] or [phone].

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) Kinetic ENERGY 

Twyla Tharp brings modern dance's motion, emotion to the Ahmanson Threatre

(2) no caption (Twyla Tharp)

(3) no caption (Three dancers from ``Twyla Tharp Dance'')