Twyla Tharp's utopia

Twyla Tharp comes at you full force. In person, she is as engaging and provocative as she is in her work.

Considered by many to be the most important choreographer of her generation, Tharp has her dancers flow through a range of movements familiar and unorthodox. They run, skip, and jump, flex their bodies, and move through space in an energized mix of jazz, ballet, modern, urban, and other dance styles. They are en pointe performing an exquisite balletic duet in one scene, gyrating to a rock groove in tennis shoes and pumps in the next. They must perform gravity-defying and downright dangerous moves on a nightly basis, all while they are infused with Twyla Tharp's distinctive and engaging creative energy.

Born in Portland, Indiana, on July 1, 1941, Tharp grew up in Southern California, began studying piano at age two, and took her first dance lessons at age four. Her childhood was filled with a variety of creative pursuits. She explored jazz, ballet, tap, and other dance styles, played the violin and viola, learned French, took drum lessons and painting classes.

Tharp found herself making connections between verbal and physical communication at an early age. Three of her younger siblings "created their own language rather than learning English," she tells me. She moves and claps her hands in an odd gesture, saying, "This meant bread and butter. My parents didn't understand the language. I was the translator. So I learned that language and movement are interchangeable and that they reinforce one another."

After a year of studies at Pomona College, Tharp headed to Barnard in New York, where she pursued a degree in art history. Increasingly, however, her off-campus attentions were focused on dance studies at the American Ballet Theatre school. It was there that she first connected with some of the greatest talents in American dance, including Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Paul Taylor.

Tharp joined Taylor's company after graduating from Barnard in 1963, and started her own group just two years later. Her five-member troupe performed sporadically and made little money during their first five years of existence, but Tharp was in her element.

"I'm in a room with the obligation to create a major dance piece," Tharp writes in her latest book, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. "The dancers will be here in a few minutes. What are we going to do? Some people find this moment--the moment before creativity begins--so painful that they simply cannot deal with it." But the blank space, Tharp says, is "my job. It's also my calling. Bottom line: Filling this empty space constitutes my identity."

Tharp has been filling that space for almost forty years, and has created more than 130 dances and ballets. Her works have been commissioned and performed by dance companies around the globe, and she has won numerous awards and accolades.

"I often say that dance is the only art form without an artifact," Tharp explains further. "We exist in the primitive time before The Iliad and The Odyssey when it was just about storytellers."

Tharp is perhaps most famous for her work on Milos Forman's 1978 film version of the Broadway hit Hair, and director Taylor Hackford's 1985 film, White Nights. On the surface, White Nighty is the Cold War story of a famous Russian ballet star and defector who connects with an equally talented African American tap dancer living in the Soviet Union. But the more intriguing storyline of the film is the behind-the-scenes collaboration of three giants of dance: the two onscreen stars, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines, and choreographer Twyla Tharp.

"They're both wonderful and they're both very, very, very different, and neither of them is very manageable," Tharp says of her experience on the film. "Greg was a wonderful, wonderful human being. Really loved Greg. I hate to be speaking of him in the past tense." (Hines died in 2003.) "Greg obviously choreographed all of his own tap material," she says. "I'm going to tell Greg Hines how to put together a tap phrase? Yeah, sure!"

Her newest blockbuster is Movin' Out, a pioneering musical told completely through dance, movement, and twenty-four Billy Joel songs--including "Goodnight Saigon," "We Didn't Start the Fire," and "Angry Young Man." These are performed by one singer and a righteous eight-piece band. It's still a hit on Broadway, and won a Tony Award for Best Choreography. Now Tharp is sending it out on the road to great acclaim and packed houses in cities like Detroit and San Francisco. ("Powerful, uplifting, heartbreaking, sometimes all at once," said the Detroit Free Press of the show.)

Tharp's son suggested the idea of using Joel's music for a Tharp production, and after a phone call to Joel and a couple of meetings, the ball was rolling.

Joel had previously turned down requests to use his music in theatrical settings, but he was impressed with Tharp's vision and musical sophistication.

"Twyla is a genius," Joel told the San Francisco Chronicle. "She found all these rhythms in my music that I knew, and musicians knew, were there, but they had never been recognized. Counter-rhythms, syncopation, cross-rhythms, all kinds of movement she found to choreograph that was inherent in the song. She's bringing that to a visual level."

The central characters of Movin' Out--Brenda, Eddie, Judy, Tony, and James--are fictional residents of Joel's working class hometown of Hicksville, New York.

Movin' Out travels through troubled times. As one press release describes it, the show offers a "poignant narrative" comprised of three main elements: "post-World War II idealism, the Vietnam War, and its subsequent unrest, and, finally, survival."

She completed it right before 9/11. "My company was the last performance arts organization at the Trade Center," she says. "We danced at the Plaza on Saturday night, I finished this piece on Monday morning, and Tuesday was 9/11. I was very concerned about how this piece would settle into this new political world and what it would mean. But when the piece opened in New York, people in the audience did feel that it had a message for the moment and that parents and Congressmen should heed the message [that] we did not want to return to these killings."

There is no dialogue or singing by the dancers. When I ask Tharp if she's ever considered letting her dancers speak more, she immediately responds, "Oh, sure. Jerry [Jerome] Robbins and I used to have a big argument about this because I would do pieces that did have the dancers speaking. And Jerry would come into the studio and say, 'You can't do that.'

"And I'd say, 'Why can't I? We're doing this.'

"And he'd say, 'No, it's a burden on the audience. If they're dancing and they're talking simultaneously you're overloading the circuitry, it's not a good thing.'

"The original version of Movin' Out had the dancers speaking. But as I watched it from the front of the house with the audience I thought, 'God damn it, Jerry! You're right, God damn it!' "

Throughout her career, Tharp has drawn criticism for being too mainstream.

"There has been a lot of trouble with that concept of--let's just cut to the chase--selling out!" she says emphatically while I'm still fumbling for a way to ask the question delicately. "Yeah, right, OK. Movin' Out is, in a way, my answer to this. This show has a duet in the second act called 'Shameless,' which is one of the most challenging pas de deux ever done. It has a symphonic construction to a song of Billy's called 'Saigon' that is as operatic as any choreography ever done. It handles narrative as well as any choreography ever done, and it is paying its dancers really well, which is really important."

Tharp doesn't view herself as a sellout, but she says that "my art has rarely been activist--there were a couple of pieces in the '60s. 'Cop Out' was a project I did with police cadets, and there was a piece I did at Columbia that was a protest piece, but these were only one-offs. They were not sustained performance pieces."

Still, she takes a longer view of the politics of her work. "Much of what I did had to do with community in a more utopian, in a more idealistic way than we have in reality," she says. "It was not the real world that I was making onstage; it was an idealized world that perhaps we could, in quotation marks, 'aspire to' or that perhaps could help guide us, could elevate us just a tiny fraction of an inch above the realities of what activist work is about. It is about alerting us to what's really going on and this other kind of work is about an alternative."

Forget about asking Twyla Tharp what she's working on next.

"There are two reasons I don't talk about the future," she explains. "One reason is because I'd be lying to you. I'd tell you what I thought I was going to do but by the time it happened it will have changed ten trillion times, so I don't like to lie. The second reason is because often when we talk we actually think we've done something."

Twyla Tharp is doing more than just "something." Whether it's through conversation, the printed page, or--in the case of Movin' Out--muted dancers, the depth of her creativity leaves you breathless.

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Andrea Lewis is a San Francisco-based writer and co-host of KPFA Radio's "The Morning Show" in Berkeley.

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