Articles from Ballet2000

From humble beginnings - she was born into a Quaker family in the US state of Indiana - she has made her way to the top of everyaspect of New York’s diverse entertainment industry with determination, grit and total lack of fear. She has been the first such artist to succeed by launching into the cut-throat world of American arts, freely combining the high and low-brow; she was the first to speak directly and openly about herself using her own unedited words and is a woman who swims courageously against journalistic convention and rejects any limitation on her freedom of expression.
She grew up with her younger sister and twin brothers at the drive-in cinema run by their parents in Rialto, California and, after ballet lessons with Beatrice Collenette, an American protégée of Anna Pavlova and student of the Italian Ballets Russes ballet master Enrico Cecchetti, she trained with the luminaries of New York’s modern dance scene: Martha Graham, Alwin Nikolais, Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor, in whose company she danced for six years. Since that time, she has wanted to try her hand at all forms of dance.
Twyla immediately considered and continues to consider herself an ‘artist of talent’, not in a Martha Graham ‘high priestess’ way, but with equal conviction nonetheless, an opinion soon widely shared - despite a few failures along the way - by the worlds of dance, television, film and musical theatre and by their star performers and those she chose to work with on account of their understanding of her idiom and their own artistry.
Tharp is now 84 years-old, with over a hundred dance pieces, four Broadway musicals and six Hollywood films to her name, not to mention contributions to the world of sport, especially figure skating. She has now been chosen to receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from Wayne McGregor, current director of the Venice Dance Biennale, to add to her Emmy and Tony awards back in the USA.
She is bringing Diabelli to Venice, a 1998 work set to Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations alongside Slacktide, a new work to Aguas da Amazonia by Philip Glass, one of her most trusted musical collaborators.
In typically assertive fashion, she has said of herself: “I became the greatest choreographer of my time; it was my job and that’s what I tried to do”.
‘Arrogant’, ‘brash’ or ‘awkward’ are often labels given to women of character and Tharp certainly has a big personality and self-esteem to spare, as emerge from her books on such topics as ‘cultivating creativity and using it in life’ and ‘how to improve the ability to collaborate, in five lessons’. Their tone is that of American user-manuals, practical guides for a positive outlook in any aspect of human existence. On the cover of her most recent book Keep it Moving, Lessons for the Rest of your Life which was published in 2019, Twyla is shown wearing glasses, jeans and trainers and her familiar now-white bob of hair and hanging from a ballet barre.

Twyla and choreography
Twyla Tharp Dance was founded by her in 1965 by a bold young choreographer who immediately found success with Tank Dive, a classic minimalist post-modern work set to silence, the first showcase for her performers’ creative personalities, something she continued to do with the ensemble in performances around the world until in 1988 when it merged with American Ballet Theatre under Mikhail Baryshnikov. From this first creative phase, it is worth highlighting The Fugue, a highly structured work for female dancers from 1970 which uses mathematically precise percussion made by their feet (a work much later acquired Ballet de Lorraine in an all-male version), as well as the dazzling Deuce Coupe, made for Joffrey Ballet in 1973 to music by The Beach Boys which was immediately a massive success. Staged at the invitation of company director-choreographer Gerald Arpino who had been impressed by Tharp’s The Bix Pieces which used Bix Beiderbecke’s jazz works, it represented a turning point in American dance, a halfway house between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. Deuce Coupe was a welcome box office hit for the company – the title referred to a type of Ford engine in the 1930s – and stands out as the first ‘crossover ballet’, a successful hybrid of modern dance, everyday movements, jazz moves and ballet technique. Though they would later regret it, the majority of the company were very unhappy to work in Tharp’s ‘bastardised’ dance idiom; it was an unknown world to them and a new and risky approach, with young graffiti artists on stage drawing on rolls of paper to create settings which were therefore different at each performance. The work begins with a ballerina in white and on pointe dressed and then introduces something completely different to break the barriers between classical, contemporary as well as ‘lightweight’ commercial dance.
In that same year, she also created As Time Goes By for Joffrey Ballet to music by Haydn (which was later extended to become The Illustrated Farewell for The Royal Ballet in London) whose title evokes the famous song at the end of the film Casablanca starring Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart.
Baker’s Dozen to music by African-American pianist Willie “the Lion” Smith is another strong work by Tharp with vague suggestions of folk dance which helped develop a wider appreciation of a freer and sunnier approach to choreographed movement.

Twyla and Misha
This approach was a rich choreographic seam to mine for Tharp and in 1976 American Ballet Theatre saw her create Push Comes To Shove to music by Haydn and ragtime composer Joseph Lamb, which starred Mikhail (Misha) Baryshnikov, a Russian exile in New York, lit by skilled designer Jennifer Tipton with costumes by Santo Loquasto, creative names which have passed into dance history.
Misha was by then fully in his ‘American’ phase and was as completely at ease with the easy humour of Tharp’s off-axis fluid lines as in a series of astonishing spins. Wearing a bowler hat and soft, shiny satin trousers, he relished the role of a capricious seducer fought over by two beautiful women – a delicious ironic touch by Tharp allows the female corps de ballet to indicate that they find repeating the same movements over and over again really boring. At the time, nothing was off limits for Baryshnikov, who wanted to try everything in the land of opportunity, and a special understanding grew between the exile and the spiky choreographer who herself had also come to the Big Apple from far away.
Twyla and David
The enigmatic and slightly off-the-wall The Catherine Wheel refers to the revolving firework of the same name as well the martyrdom of St Catherine of Alexandria as well the challenges of ordinary family life. Made in 1981 for television (available on DVD from Warner-Kultur and on YouTube) it brought together Tharp’s creative forces with those of David Byrne, the acclaimed musician, writer, visual artist, filmmaker and lead singer of the New Age band Talking Heads. In an extravaganza very much of its the time featuring motion capture and an acoustic synthesiser, as well as a weird giant pineapple, traditional symbol of hospitality but also a reference to an explosive bomb. Kansas City Ballet staged the work in 2006 under the title The Catherine Wheel Suite and its central section was also acquired by the Alvin Ailey company in the same year.
A masterpiece
In 1986, Tharp created Untitled to commissioned music by Philip Glass for her own company, which was later renamed In the Upper Room, alluding to a celestial space for heavenly dancing. It was to be her masterpiece and sums up her mastery of choreography, technique and emotion, a visual interplay of red and white, of pointe shoes and trainers.
A plotless work, it entered the repertoire of American Ballet Theatre and several other US companies, Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the UK’s Birmingham Royal Ballet and Australian Ballet and has been seen on tour in France, Italy and around the world.
Another ‘easy’ but very classy work is Nine Sinatra Songs, made in 1982 and inspired by ballroom dancing. It is simply irresistible; seven couples at different stages of their relationships wear Oscar De La Renta’s 50s-style costumes and heeled shoes. The work has also been acquired by a number of companies; in a film of ABT (available on DVD Kultur), Baryshnikov again shines, at times elegant, romantic, mischievous, quarrelsome and mocking, he even spins while chewing gum, an artist at the height of his own multifaceted genius.

Twyla and the screen
Whilst some European choreographers ignored the medium of television, Tharp offered little gems of her captivating artistry to a wider TV public audience.
Eight Jelly Rolls, which was recorded and broadcast by the BBC in 1974 and later in the US on PBS, asks – in the words of the choreographer herself – what “women can and cannot do”. Twyla herself and her dancers wear jazz shoes and are bare-shouldered in white bibs, bow ties and black evening trousers; they perform “unfeminine” moves which draw on tap dancing, something Tharp herself had learned, which already looks forward to hip hop.
In the programme Baryshnikov by Tharp, broadcast in 1984 on New York’s WNET/Thirteen network, Misha at the height of his powers and his ABT dancers are recorded in three works: The Little Ballet, Sinatra Suite with Elaine Kudo, and Push Comes to Shove.
Twyla Moves was aired on PBS in 2021 featuring a star-studded lineup: Benjamin Buza, Misty Copeland, Herman Cornejo, Kaitlyn Gilliland, Maria Khorev and Charlie Neshyba-Hodges.
In 1979, Milos Forman’s film Hair showcased Tharp’s choreography, as did two further successful films by the same director, Ragtime and Amadeus. The 1985 anti-Soviet hit White Nights, starring Baryshnikov and super tapper Gregory Hines, can’t be left off the list, a successful combination of Tharp’s inventiveness alongside that of director Taylor Hackford.
Twyla and Broadway
Singin’ in the Rain, a musical based on the famous 1952 film with Gene Kelly, had its first stage version in 1983 at the London Palladium and arrived on Broadway in 1985 with new choreography by Tharp. Reviews were not kind: The New York Times judged this version as “a pleasant but innocuous matinee”, if danced with great enthusiasm.
Movin’ Out from 2002 is a ‘jukebox musical’ based on songs by Billy Joel, the best-selling US singer-songwriter, and features the generation which grew up during the years of the disastrous Vietnam war. Unusually for a musical, the dancers did not sing but appeared in a political ‘rock ballet’ which provoked mixed reactions. Admittedly, the plot about the conflicts of the life in a circus had nothing to do with the themes of the songs themselves; the opening in Chicago was not successful but it was better received in New York and the show went on to have a three-year world tour including runs in London’s West End and Japan.
The Times They Are A-Changin’, whose title was taken from a 60s Bob Dylan song, opened on Broadway in 2006 with the backing of the singer-songwriter himself, but the reviews were rather mixed.
Come Fly Away, using songs by Frank Sinatra, fared rather better in 2010, and was deemed positive and celebratory, finding not a little success. Tharp scored another hit with Sinatra: Dance With Me, which opened later that same year in Las Vegas and was set in an Art Deco ballroom ‘for couples in love in a gin-scented night’. The world of stage musicals is unforgiving, but Tharp’s self-belief means she does not shy away from the challenges, no matter the final outcome.

Non-stop Twyla
In 1991 Tharp re-founded her own company, inventing and staging dances for the new group, while also continuing to accept invitations from prestigious companies to create new works for them.
She returned to the stage alongside Kevin O’Day in Men’s Piece, created Octet and mounted Grand Pas: Rhythms of the Saints at the Paris Opéra for Isabelle Guérin and Patrick Dupond, who wore identical patterned shirts.
The following year, her forthright autobiography Push Comes to Show was published and she created Sextet for a number of Paris Opéra étoiles.
In 1993, Tharp created Pergolesi, a magnificent solo portrait of her now more ‘mature’ friend Baryshnikov for his White Oak Dance Project for highly experienced dancers, and staged Demeter and Persephone for Martha Graham Dance Company about two conflicted women; she made Americans We for ABT in 1995.
Since 1996, her own company was renamed Tharp! and she has never stopped making ballets for companies around the world.
Ever-curious about and open to new experiences, she was not afraid to turn to the USA’s ‘great enemy’ Cuba to make Yemayá, to music by Rubén Gozález, Batá drums and songs by the famous Buena Vista Social Club.
Whilst on tour in Italy, her company gave the first performance of Diabelli in Palermo, Sicily. Tharp’s ever-expanding portfolio of works also included several new pieces to classical music: Grosse Fuge and The Beethoven Seventh for New York City Ballet, The Brahms-Haydn Variations for ABT, Mozart Clarinet Quintet K. 581 and Preludes and Fugues to Bach and Hammerklavier, again using Beethoven, for her own ensemble, The Ballet Master to Vivaldi and Simeon ten Holt (the 20th-century Dutch composer), and All In to Brahms (New York City Center, 2021).
Tharp also dabbled with American jazz in Yowzie, made for the Joyce Theater in 2015, and also with European song in Brel.
In 2016 she took on the challenge of one of the composer’s greatest works with Beethoven Opus 130 while in 2017 she again took to the stage herself in Entr’Acte and staged Ghostcatcher for ABT set to Brahms.
In 2020 Four Zooms was seen on an extensive tour with a cast that included, among others, Misty Copeland, Herman Cornejo and Maria Khoreva, while in 2021 she mounted Cornbread to music by Rhiannon Giddens and starring Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia.

Super Twyla
A country girl with an awkward character, Tharp’s difficult nature has become her brand and characterises her contrary brilliance; she is no ‘divine’ figure like Martha Graham, but she is no less commanding or combative, forever the difficult yet surprising artist, and no-one can deny that Tharp always strives for excellence in all her undertakings.
She will always bring her proven expertise, judgment, personal charisma, ability to reflect on both her successes and failures, the appeal of her staging, lighting and costuming and, finally, her versatility.
She functions on a par with the stars of classical ballet, with the icons of ‘cultured’ popular music like Bob Dylan and David Byrne and the great exponents of artistic minimalism like Philip Glass and Bridget Riley.
Her name is a guarantee of quality, even when her work divides opinions, and she knows how to stand up for herself against anyone who wishes to criticise.
Venice, at the heart of the Old World and once the pivot between East and West, now adds its own confirmation of those talents which emerged from the heart of the New World at a time of intense optimism and hope for the future.
Elisa Guzzo Vaccarino

BALLET2000 n. 300 - Summer 2025