Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 8, 1993 TAG: 9301080309
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHARLES PASSY COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: WEST PALM BEACH, FLA. LENGTH: Long
EVEN AT AGE 50, DANCE LEGEND TWYLA THARP IS STILL IN MOTION
"People ask, `How do you make a dance?' " Twyla Tharp writes in her new autobiography, "Push Comes to Shove" (Bantam, $24.50). "My answer is simple. `Put yourself in motion.' "And Tharp has been in constant motion for nearly all of her 50 years, first studying with such modern-dance pioneers as Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, then forming her own company and slowly creating her unique brand of "crossover" dance.
She ultimately became a dance legend who daringly entered the commercial arenas of Broadway ("Singin' in the Rain"), television (the Emmy-award winning "Baryshnikov by Tharp") and motion pictures (the dance sequences in "Hair," "White Nights" and "Amadeus"). Now at an age when many dancers have long stepped out of the spotlight, Tharp is keeping busy.
First comes her autobiography, a tell-all tale that explores everything from her puritanical upbringing to her two failed marriages (and her brief romances with ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov and Talking Heads founder David Byrne) to her radical philosophy of dance. Then there are her various commissions and projects, including ballets for the Boston Ballet and the Martha Graham Company and a movie that she not only will choreograph, but also direct.
Finally, there is her current 20-plus-city tour with her most famous of colleagues, Baryshnikov.
In many ways, the tour's program, a three-act ballet called "Cutting Up" choreographed by Tharp, promises to be a perfect summary of the Tharp aesthetic. She first began collaborating with Baryshnikov in the mid-'70s, soon after the Russian dancer came to the United States, and this early partnership resulted in the popular ballet parody "Push Comes to Shove" (1976), among other works. "It was an obvious challenge for us both," Tharp said recently.
Indeed, thoroughly steeped in the formal traditions of dance, Baryshnikov was the ultimate testing ground for Tharp's belief that all dance forms - classical and popular, old and new - could be combined in an altogether original choreographic vocabulary.
"I . . . was developing an encyclopedic sense of the different weights of the body emphasized by ballet, modern dance and jazz, of the various speeds, stances and shifts of center that could be explored," she writes of her formative years in her autobiography.
"And I was coming to understand that each of these demands could work together to combine, ultimately, into something more than a patois of isolated techniques, become a new language, capable of saying new things - or old things in new ways. I was beginning to imagine a special niche for myself, a place in this swirling kaleidoscope of choices that no one else could fill, a kind of dance no one else could do."
Or as dance writer Elizabeth Kendall has observed of the Tharp style: "[It] appropriates the mechanics of ballet: the articulation of the feet, insteps and ankles . . . muscularly permit a clean balletic action of the legs, in turns, kicks, traveling steps, jumps and poses . . . while Tharp upper bodies . . . speak much more of the inner rhythmic world of social dancing or tap dancing . . . with the casual backwards and forwards swinging that never stops."
"Cutting Up" is in that Tharp tradition of dance "no one else could do." Set to a score that ranges from rock to Pergolesi and featuring Tharp and Baryshnikov with a small group of dancers that Tharp has worked with over the years, it examines a different aspect of Tharp's philosophy and style in each of its three acts.
The first act, "Schtick," looks at the various "reference points" Tharp calls upon in creating a dance, be they classical, modern or popular. "It's about reconciling all these different influences and trying to keep them all happy under one roof," Tharp said.
The second, "Bare Bones," is a duet for Tharp and Baryshnikov, the bare setting of which underscores its stark physicality. "Although Misha and I both have a lot of training, we don't display that here," she said. "We just investigate simple movements, from walking to running to skipping."
And the third, "Food," is a kind of chronological history of ballroom dancing, "from ragtime to the current time," according to Tharp. The idea is that popular art is often the "food" that fuels high art.
As much as "Cutting Up" reflects Tharp's lifelong ideas of dance, she firmly declares that it is not a work she could have created earlier in her career. For starters, she says that Baryshnikov is "a very different dancer . . . he now has a rich backlog of experiences and is extremely sophisticated."
But more importantly, she believes that there is a greater sense of exploration that comes with age. "We can continually broaden our horizons as we work," she said. "Young artists tend to be very narrow-minded and opinionated. As we mature, we have a much deeper definition of what it is that we do."
In that regard, Tharp scoffs at what she calls the "romantic notion" that a dancer, like an athlete, is physically limited by age. "Balanchine was fond of saying that no one over 21 could dance anymore," she said. Tharp does maintain a vigorous regimen to stay in shape, but she observes that the key to longevity for a dancer is not the body, but the mind.
"After 21, if a body has an intelligent mind, it's going to start thinking for itself," she said.