TWYLA THARP.

STILL PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES

One of the few choreographers I ever said "no" to was Twyla Tharp, and boy, was I sorry later. In about 1970, Sara Rudner and Rose Marie Wright, Tharp's two main dancers and scouts, watched a ballet class given by the popular teacher Maggie Black, and after the class, asked me to come audition for Tharp. I had seen only one work by her, which had seemed blunt and exercise-y. But I came to the studio, borrowed Sara's jazz shoes and danced with them for a couple hours. At the end, Twyla said, "I think you can do it." When she called me at home to talk details, I declined the invitation, saying, "I feel uncomfortable in the movement." She snapped back, "You're supposed to feel uncomfortable!"

Not long after, she held an informal showing of her work that included The One Hundreds, danced by herself, Sara and Rose. The inventiveness, precision and sheer bounty of different movements were breathtaking. As each eleven-second segment happened in all its vivid glory, it erased the one before it. Spectators were totally focused on the ebb and flow, but came away with nothing except the feeling that they'd seen something new and untamable. This dancing was about sensation, impulse, timing and camaraderie. For those of us looking for the pure excitement of "pure movement," this was it.

Robert Joffrey must have thought she was hot stuff too, because in 1972, after seeing Tharp's The Bix Pieces at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, he commissioned her to make a new work for his company. The result was Deuce Coupe (1973), in which Tharp's rugged and brainy dancers joined the Joffrey dancers on stage, and history was made. Her brash, complex, gorgeous works kept on coming, and now Tharp, at the age of 59, has more than 120 ballets to her name (see "Tharp 101," page 49). In just the last year she has given premieres to the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, overseen reconstructions of Deuce Coupe and started a new company. She is now on the brink of a new phase, having just found a new space in Brooklyn for the development of her company and a school. The company plays the Joyce Theater February 20-25 in its inaugural New York season.

Tharp recently dropped by Dance Magazine's New York office to talk about her new dancers, her new space and her hopes for the future. She is thrilled with the current incarnation of Twyla Tharp Dance. "I love my dancers," she says. Like a proud mother, she tells of their prowess in crossing the line between modern and ballet, even though they are primarily ballet dancers. They are Benjamin Bowman of the Fort Worth Ballet and New York City Ballet; Alexander Brady of the Joffrey Ballet and Miami City Ballet; Elizabeth Parkinson, formerly with the Joffrey, Feld Ballets/NY, and Donald Byrd/The Group; Ashley Tuttle, a principal with American Ballet Theatre; and Keith Roberts and John Selya, both previously with ABT. She wants only "great" dancers, so naturally I ask her to define the term. "Greatness; how do I see greatness? Ambition, sweetness, personableness ... I mean there's something absolutely connected, a commitment that goes beyond sincerity. English does not supply the right descriptions for greatness--you just feel it."

The two new ballets for this group (reviewed in Dance Magazine, November 2000) are nearly opposites. The Mozart Clarinet Quintet K. 581 is dreamy, playful, sublimely open and extended in the beginning, with daring partnering creeping up on you. Surfer at the River Styx is edgy, driven, grandly conflicted. Mozart is sweetly harmonious, full of light, while Surfer is dark, ominous, a modern version of the ancient Greek underworld. The program thus represents two sides of Tharp: the Apollonian and the Dionysian, lyrical and dramatic, harmony and conflict. The choreography plays with other polarities, too: long line vs. broken line, childishness vs. maturity, fluidity vs. abruptness, comfort vs. discomfort, earth vs. air. Tharp reconciles opposites not by arriving at a medium, but by bouncing off the ends of the continuum. If it's arduous, it's really arduous; if it's silly, it's really silly.

Like all her work, these two pieces demand the dancers to be fully alive every nanosecond and to merge ballet and modern dance seamlessly. From ballet, Tharp uses the strength and suppleness of the legs as well as the expansiveness of the upper body; from modern, the stirrings in the core of the body. Tharp herself brings the ability to create flow, no matter how disjunctive the movements are.

Keith Roberts, 31, recalled by phone the first time he worked with Tharp in 1988, when he was newly with ABT. "I thought she was crazy and really fun. The mood was completely different [from other rehearsals]. There were no absolutes--no right or wrong--just how you can explore what you're doing." Like Parkinson, Roberts dances in Fosse, doing eight shows a week. "Fosse is a commercial venture that gives me job security," he said. "Twyla Tharp Dance is an artistic venture that satisfies my soul." All six dancers have been in ballet companies a long time. "Twyla is giving us the opportunity of taking everything we've learned and being free with it. We've been able to rediscover the feeling of why we love dance." About the two new dances, he says, "Mozart and Surfer are incredibly hard. It takes a lot of mental power to rev yourself up. I always ask myself, Can I get through this?" But, he says, "We're pushing the boundaries. She'll give us material and let us play with it. Can I turn more? Can I twist more, be more off the leg? She'll see something she likes and then it goes in that direction. We're collaborating with each other."

Roberts, who appeared on Dance Magazine's cover in January 1999, is not the only dancer who wonders if he can get through it. In a recent rehearsal of Mozart, Selya joked about how he couldn't catch his breath between sections. "It must be the altitude," he said of the third-floor studios at ABT. Anna Kisselgoff of The New York Times described the performance of Surfer as "nonstop, fierce bravura, delivered with mind-boggling stamina."

Shelley Washington, who danced with Tharp from 1975 to 1990 and now stages her ballets internationally, said, "People always ask me, `How can you work so hard?' I work like this because Twyla works like this. Whatever I do, she's done it tenfold. If I work six hours in the studio, she's there two hours before me and four hours after. That's how you create energy and enthusiasm. Twyla's in the room before the dancers are in the room. She's there already. And it makes you want to be ready. It's infectious."

Like the great romantic ballets, Tharp's works turn dancers into heroes and heroines. Not because of the deeds of the characters, but because of the hugeness of what they endure, what they transcend. Think of Sara Rudner in The Catherine Wheel (1981), Shelley Washington in Nine Sinatra Songs (1982), Baryshnikov in Push Comes to Shove (1976), every dancer in In the Upper Room (1986), Kevin O'Day in Everlast (1989), Damian Woetzel in The Beethoven's Seventh (2000), and now John Selya and Keith Roberts in Surfer. Each of these dancers, and many more, comes through the experience bursting with a superhuman radiance.

Tharp has always deeply appreciated her dancers and was the first modern dance choreographer to pay dancers year-round. Roslyne Stern, Dance Magazine president, remembers that when Tharp was presented with the Dance Magazine Award in 1981, she surrounded herself with her dancers, saying that they deserved the award as much as she did.

Although Tharp has been known to be occasionally brusque in the past, Roberts says, "Twyla's incredibly supportive. Always listening, giving what we have to say a value of the utmost importance. She doesn't try to dictate; she's very giving. I think what we give back to her charges her."

The new space is an abandoned room adjacent to a church in Brooklyn that is, at press time, unheated, in disrepair and filled with debris. The plan, spearheaded by Harvey Lichtenstein, former impresario of Brooklyn Academy of Music and current chair of the BAM Local Development Corporation, is to gut and renovate the 6,500-square-foot space by early spring. Tharp wants to open rehearsal sessions to neighborhood folks for what she calls "live art." On such occasions, she wittily explains how she organizes movement, how she makes use of mistakes in the process and how she trusts her dancers. During these lecture-demonstrations, one gets a glimpse of the brilliance of her creative process. Tharp is well aware of this. "To see material being done--that's where I shine; they [the dancers] shine on stage, but when I'm making work I'm in my element. So I figure I need an audience, and I think audiences enjoy it and learn to attach to dance in a totally different way when they see how it's composed, as opposed to having all the magic inserted between them and the work."

Tharp has always made efforts to involve a wider population. For the set design for Deuce Coupe she invited graffiti kids to "write" on a scroll upstage during the performance. Not only did this historic piece merge ballet with modern, but it merged concert dance with street art. She admits that her decision to use Beach Boys music--and, at other times, Jelly Roll Morton, Chuck Berry, Fats Waller and Scott Joplin--partly reflects her desire for accessibility. "I must confess to having at one time thought, 'Wouldn't it be great to be completely accessible.

Whether Tharp uses popular, jazz or classical music, her approach is never obvious. She does not match each musical theme with a recognizable movement theme, but she meets the music at its own level of complexity. She matches the sassy joy of the Beach Boys in Deuce Coupe, the driving metaphysics of Philip Glass in In the Upper Room, the unctuous romance of Frank Sinatra in Nine Sinatra Songs, and the grandeur of Beethoven in The Beethoven's Seventh. Her choreography is never overshadowed by the music.

And yet Tharp says, "Music is a very big problem because, in some ways, I find working in silence to be the most gratifying and honorable because it allows an audience to see what the dancer actually does." She feels that the style of music has "an unbelievably overpowering flavor; it's like a cook who is going to put in an ingredient and it's going to take over the stew." Her first choreographic attempts were done without music. In The Fugue (1970), the boots stomping on the floor helped define the defiance of the three women (later three men) and the surging density of the rhythmic patterns.

Tharp has almost a moral feeling about her early work. "When I started working, I wanted to go to a place where I felt I had a right to be, where I wasn't taking somebody else's material ... I was getting to something that was so pure and nonderivative ... that I could call it my own and start from there. In terms of the invention of movement, it's a matter of honesty. It may have been an illusion, but nonetheless it drove me to do a lot of work in the studio." She continued to be rigorous with herself. "Whenever I made a new piece, I demanded that I try to make it completely unlike any of its predecessors, which meant tearing everything apart, throwing everything out and starting all over, all over again each time. It was kind of a horrific thing to do."

William Whitener, now artistic director of Kansas City Ballet, was in the Joffrey Ballet when Tharp, then known only in downtown circles, came along. "At the first rehearsal she carried a phonograph under one arm and a stack of Beach Boys records under the other. I was hooked, because that's what I had done in my living room as a child--dance to records." But other dancers had a different reaction. Says Whitener, "There was a section of sliding and skidding, and being close to the floor with knees bent that hurt people's thighs, and some of the dancers rolled their eyes. Within a few days there was a breakdown of those who were having a great time and those who were skeptical.... They were worried about looking silly, and yet when you saw the Tharp dancers, they were funny, witty, unusual, delightful.... At one point she made a statement that the people who didn't want to do it were free to leave, and some did." Whitener eventually joined Tharp and danced with her from 1977 to 1988.

Her use of ballet dancers actually dates back farther than Deuce Coupe. Trained in ballet herself, but briefly a member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, Tharp felt that any centered, well-trained, unmannered dancer could do her work. Rose Marie Wright, who danced with her from 1968 to 1980, was a purebred classical dancer. She had performed with the Pennsylvania Ballet Company from the age of 14 to 18, during which time she grew from five foot seven to six feet tall. Not surprisingly, she got fewer and fewer roles. Years later, says Wright, PBC director Barbara Weisberger "confessed that she really didn't know what to do with me when I grew. Twyla did know what to do with me."

Coming from the ballet world, Wright noticed two differences right away. The first was a positive working atmosphere: "Nobody was fighting for parts. Everyone was treated equally and everyone respected one another." The second was that, in the intimate spaces where they performed, they were not expected to smile or "project." Wright had to figure out, on her own, how to cultivate a new demeanor. "I was so used to smiling that I didn't know how to perform the work. Then I realized that it was about concentration and working among ourselves. Eventually, I learned how to interact with the audience and with the other dancers."

American Ballet Theatre has commissioned more works from Tharp--about fifteen--than from any other choreographer. Artistic Director Kevin McKenzie says, "She has unbelievable energy that homes in on individuals. ABT has always nurtured individual interpreters. She draws the best out of people, finds their uniqueness. She stretches your ability both musically and physically. She breaks down your perceptions of what training should be. It becomes about what you're doing right now--a useful lesson as you take it to other styles."

What is most difficult for dancers new to Tharp's work is, according to Washington: "Plie, getting into the ground, earth, dropping their weight, total abandon. They need to have a strong center to release the extremities. And the speed. No one can quite believe the amount of steps per second."

Now is a time for consolidation in Tharp's life. As she approaches 60, she is thinking about what will happen when she is no longer around. She is appalled by the battles that plague the Martha Graham Center. Her plans for the future include stabilizing her video archives, developing curriculum-oriented materials based on her repertoire, and offering videos and notes to dance departments to reconstruct her choreography "as though I were not here." Although she still gets to the gym by six every morning, works out on the machines, submits to a personal trainer and does a ballet barre, she no longer performs. "My middle period is over," she sighs. But she is still committed to keeping her body in shape to choreograph. "As long as I can learn lessons on myself, I will do that."

Like Martha Graham, she built her technique through her repertoire. Like Balanchine, she designed her repertoire to improve the dancers technically. She now envisions her works being used in the same way that classical composers' pieces are practiced by music students. "Think where music would be if it didn't have a backlog of scores and pedagogical material that was developed by composers to produce better musicians." When I question whether young dancers can really understand the material without the physical presence of a Tharp dancer, she counters, "How many students play Chopin beautifully?"

She hopes to establish a central training ground, offering classes in ballet, modern, yoga and repertoire. "As a dancer, my own study in the early '60s was spread across the city, from a ballet class here to a modern class there. Why do I have to go to all these different studios? This is all dance; it should all be in one place. One of the drives for me is unification, one of my big themes is unity, and the place to start with is the technique." She points out that now, many years after Deuce Coupe, ballet companies offer modern classes and modern rep.

Tharp and I were able to chortle about our first run-in thirty years ago. In contemplating her own comment, she showed how much she's changed. "At that time, if you felt comfortable, it meant you'd done it before. That was no good; we couldn't have that. But we passed quickly from that phase. Each piece is about getting to the next piece. I have, over the course of thirty-five years--hello!--come to realize that there are times when you want dancers to feel very comfortable and very easy with the material, where it should be very natural and that there is a beauty in that, a great beauty in that."

But something grittier will always be part of Tharp's legacy. Sara Rudner, who was a star of the Tharp company for nearly twenty years, now directs the dance department at Sarah Lawrence College (see September 2000 Dance Magazine). When I recently asked her what she passes on to her students from her work with Tharp, she answered, "The experimental nature of it. Take a big bite, take the big challenge, and see what happens."

THARP 101

Born in 1941 in Indiana, Twyla Tharp moved to Rialto, California, with her family when she was 8. Her musician mother took her to classes of all kinds, stuffing her daily schedule with lessons in ballet, shorthand, violin, baton, and tap. She also helped out at the drive-in movie theater run by her mother. She attended Pomona College before transferring to Barnard College, where she was allowed to receive credit for taking dance classes all over New York City. In 1963, she was graduated from Barnard, danced briefly with Paul Taylor, took a loft way downtown on Franklin Street, and saw performances of the Judson Dance Theater.

Since her first concert at Hunter College in 1965, she has created more than 120 ballets. She has received a MacArthur "genius" award, a Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Dance Magazine Award, fifteen honorary doctorates and dozens of other honors.

Tharp is known not only for her cutting-edge dances, but also for her pioneering sense of style. In 1971, all her dancers got fashionable Vidal Sassoon haircuts, banishing the ubiquitous bun for decades to come.

Pivotal works include Tank Dive (1965), her first piece; The Fugue (1970); The One Hundreds (1970); The Bix Pieces (1971), a brilliant lecture-demonstration that pits ballet vocabulary against modern vocabulary; the exuberant and historic Deuce Coupe (1973), which joined ballet and modern on the same stage; As Time Goes By (1973), a hauntingly beautiful ballet for the Joffrey; Push Comes to Shove (1976) for American Ballet Theatre, which presented Mikhail Baryshnikov as a virtuosic vaudevillian; The Catherine Wheel (1981) a narrative-based collaboration with David Byrne of the rock band Talking Heads; the elegant, slightly brutal but romantic Nine Sinatra Songs (1982); Singin' in the Rain (1985), a resounding Broadway flop based on the classic film musical; Baryshnikov By Tharp (1984), a TV production that won her two Emmys; In the Upper Room (1986), an exhilarating masterpiece set to Philip Glass music; The Men's Piece (1991); Cutting Up (1992), a evening featuring Baryshnikov; Known By Heart for ABT (1998); and The Beethoven's Seventh (2000) for New York City Ballet.

From 1988 to 1990, her own company was merged into American Ballet Theatre. She freelanced for the next ten years, creating dances for the Paris Opera Ballet, The Royal Ballet, the Martha Graham Dance Company, Hubbard Street Dance and The Boston Ballet, as well as ABT. Her works remain in the repertories of The Royal Ballet, New York City Ballet, Hubbard Street, the Royal Swedish Ballet, Australian Ballet and many other companies.

Tharp has also choreographed for films, working with director Milos Forman on Hair (1978), Ragtime (1980) and Amadeus (1984), and with Taylor Hackford on White Nights (1985).

TWYLA THARP DANCE SCHEDULE

February 16 and 17: New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Newark

February 20-25: The Joyce Theater, New York

February 26: McCarter Theatre, Princeton, NJ

June 15: Rouse Theater, Columbia, MD

June 21-24: Ahmanson Theater, Los Angeles Music Center 

June 27-July 1: Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Becket, MA

Push Comes to Shove, Tharp's 1992 autobiography, is no longer in print, but you can still find it at a number of "out-of-print" stores online and off or at your local library.

For more information, see www.twylatharp.org

Wendy Perron, New York editor of Dance Magazine, danced in Twyla Tharp's "farm club" in 1972.