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Twyla Tharp brings her inestimable talent to the stage with a new company.
By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 17, 2002
Twyla Tharp is back. With her original company, formed in the 1960s, Tharp made modern dance history, but she gave it up in 1988, fed up with the management and financial burdens of keeping it solvent.
Now, after working as a freelance choreographer and sometime performer, Tharp has a compact new company of six dancers and some large-scale works she created for it. She's with the company at Ruth Eckerd Hall, and after tonight's performance, she'll have a discussion with the audience.
Tharp has called her time without a permanent company of her own, when she worked with everyone from Mikhail Baryshnikov to American Ballet Theatre to England's Royal Ballet, "12 years in exile." Why?
"As a freelance, you are in exile from an ongoing working pattern with an ongoing group of people to whom there is an absolute commitment on both sides of the fence," she said from the office of her new company, which is the living room of her New York apartment.
"You are in exile from being grounded, and are working on the periphery of that kind of work situation. You go to other situations and take on their formulations and problems and attempt to work through their mechanism. Granted, you don't have to pay for the mechanism, but I think after 12 years of that, you can only do work to a certain level and depth. So it was back to some of the other problems in order to get some of the other rewards."
Tharp became legendary for her dances to pop music, such as Deuce Coupe set to Beach Boys songs and Nine Sinatra Songs, but she has also choreographed to much classical music. One of her new works, on the program tonight, is to Mozart's Clarinet Quintet in A major.
"Mozart has been with me a long time," she said. "I grew up at a keyboard, and I played a lot of Mozart when I was a kid. My first piece of Mozart was a set of variations that was in the Raggedy Dances in '72."
Tharp brings a keenly analytical viewpoint to Mozart's music.
"The illusion of ease with the sublime difficulty of the stuff is what makes him the almost unique being that he is," she said. "Beethoven, at points, can get as amazingly graced, shall we say, as Mozart, but he works hard to do it, and you feel him working hard to do it, and he wants you to feel him working hard. Mozart never wanted that effort, ever, to register in his work. I think the dignity and the bravery of his lack of indulgence is something that is an ongoing beacon, certainly for me, in these times."
The second work on tonight's program is the polar opposite of Mozart. It's called Surfer at the River Styx, with a percussive score by contemporary composer Donald Knaack. It was inspired by Tharp's reading of Euripides' Bacchae, but she downplays that.
"Ah, forget the Bacchae," she said. "I started this piece with some concepts from the Bacchae, and then it took on its own life. I will say, the Bacchae is a great piece of drama. It is shocking. There is something that strikes very true to it in the sense of a really subterranean look at the violent, destructive nature that resides in all of us. So, you know, let's get it together."
Tharp, whose excellent autobiography, Push Comes to Shove, came out in 1992, is a great reader of history.
"Right now I'm reading Herodotus. And after him will be Hesiod and Thucydides. Is there stuff in Herodotus that could serve as a springboard for dancing? Sure. There's something in absolutely everything that can serve as a springboard for dance."
Tharp's program Friday at Van Wezel Hall includes Surfer at the River Styx as well as Westerly Round and Sinatra Suite.
In a much-anticipated project, Tharp has collaborated with Billy Joel on a dance musical, set to premiere in Chicago in June before heading for Broadway in the fall. At a workshop last October, Joel standards used in the show included Innocent Man, Big Shot, River of Dreams and Movin' Out. There will be a 26-member cast, including eight covers, and a band.
"It has a narrative," said Tharp, who proposed the idea to Joel. "It springs from Billy's lyrics. I think Billy is an extraordinary short story writer. What I did is to give it a bigger context."
She finished her choreography to the musical on Sept. 10. "I am looking at it again before it goes up this summer," she said. "I won't change it that much, but it does feel like it needs to be opened and closed in a different way. Sept 11 is the date that there is before, and there is after."
At 60, Tharp is no longer performing with her company, but she doesn't rule out dancing again.
"I think for me to dance now it should be a hoot," she said. "I've put in my time. I'm not in the Joel. We'll see about thereafter. I still work in the studio and keep myself in shape."
Asked what sort of role onstage she sees for herself today, Tharp was emphatic and funny.
"Why, a featured role, of course! Get real! My own show, what else? Please! Are we talking diva here, or what?"
Twyla Tharp Dance performs at 8 tonight at Ruth Eckerd Hall. Tickets: $30-$40. (727) 791-7400. The company is at Van Wezel Hall at 8 p.m. Friday. Tickets: $40-$50. (941) 953-3368 or toll-free 1-800-826-9303.