American Dancer

Twyla Tharp is the world’s most famous living choreographer. She is
also famously cranky. In person, she is almost the
caricature of
prickly genius. Before our interview, her press liaison discourages
questions about her 1992 autobiography but encourages questions about
her 2003 self-help book. During the interview, Tharp counters any
question about her most recent Broadway production—a critically
lambasted evening of dance set to Bob Dylan songs—with flat
refusal: “This is not a subject for this conversation.”

She is curt and evasive when talking about any dance other than her
own (“you’ll have to ask them” is a favorite rejoinder) but witheringly
loquacious about why it’s a good thing that theater and dance critics
are being fired wholesale from American newspapers: “Very few
journalists, critics, or writers in any arena of the arts have the
depth of information to give any fodder for thought.”

For any thought?

“For healthy thought.”

But the 67-year-old artist, who has come to Seattle this month to
make two world-
premiere ballets for PNB, has earned the right to
be ornery. She is not only the most famous living
choreographer—she may be the most influential.

Tharp structurally rearranged the dance world in the early 1970s
with her ménage à trois of classicism (ballet),
avant-garde (minimalism), and pop (rock ‘n’ roll and jazz). This
brought her both artistic and commerical success, though not always at
the same time. An early artistic triumph: Deuce Coupe, a 1973
dance for the Joffrey Ballet set to music by the Beach Boys. Later
commerical trimphs: Broadway hits (Movin’ Out with music by
Billy Joel) and film credits (Hair, Ragtime). “She was
one of the first to put many influences in her choreography,” says PNB
artistic director Peter Boal. “Ballroom, tap, kickboxing, pedestrian
movement.”

Tharp is relentlessly democratic. And because of Tharp,
choreographers have been pulling pop culture into the studio—with
mixed results—for decades. Which is why it is surprising to hear
Tharp refuse to comment on how the dance world, which she profoundly
shaped, appears from her perch at the top:

“I work, I do what I do, end of story,” she says.

You don’t see other contemporary dance?

“I work.”

Do you ever see dance?

“I work.”

So you don’t have any idea what other choreographers are doing?

“I work.”

Does that work involve any homework?

“I read a lot. I’ve been reading 19th-century novels. I’ve read all
of Proust, all of Tolstoy, and I’m currently reading all of Balzac.
I’ve read Stendhal, Flaubert, George Eliot. I’m a serious reader.”

Are you just not interested in other choreographers?

“I work—hello?—I work!”

It’s difficult to believe she’s that hermetic, and a pity if she is.
Tharp might enjoy seeing what her revolution has wrought. Two
performances last weekend exemplified how far contemporary
choreographers have tried to advance Tharp’s charge.

The Snow Project, by Seattle choreographer Allison Van Dyck,
is a young and flawed heir to Deuce Coupe: It is iPod
minimalism, cool and slick with a faint human pulse. In the quicker
sections, the four dancers whiz across a plain white dance floor in
metronomic phrases. The choreography is largely vertical, using tightly
curved arms and legs for flourishes, like electrons spinning around a
nucleus. The Snow Project is pretty but a little vacant. It is a
dance of gestures rather than ideas. Depending entirely on the
discipline of its dancers, it suffers when they wobble or have to think
their way through the choreography. (Corri Befort, who dances like a
strong, compact machine—with a human pulse—is the only one
who never seems to falter.)

Tharp’s democratic insistence on putting virtuosity and pleasure on
equal terms has
also changed European choreography, as

evidenced every year by companies touring to On the Boards. In
2006, Berlin’s Dorky Park drilled deeply into pop culture, discovering
genuine pathos and humor.

Last weekend at OtB, Superamas—from Paris and Vienna—did
not. Its BIG, 3rd episode (happy/end) was a shiny, lurid
spectacle, the opposite of The Snow Project‘s cool
detachment. A study of the commodification of happiness, BIG threw pop-culture clichés at the audience by the handful:
clichés about gender (sexist dudes drinking beer at band
practice, chicks at the gym obsessing about men), television
(commercials, Sex in the City), performance art (a lengthy quote
from Derrida), and so on. The only real dance passage in BIG was
a three-minute nightclub dance-off to a Gnarls Barkley song. BIG was a hotter spectacle than The Snow Project but also pretty
vacant. Its fusion of pop and avant-garde felt dishonest, like
slumming.

At a reception after the show, one of male Superamas—Philippe
Riera—explained, “We enjoy to bring things to the stage that are
not usually artistically valued, like commercials and fashion.” In
this, he agreed, Superamas has been influenced by Twyla Tharp. “But,”
he said, “her dancing can be a bit academic.” More academic than
quoting Derrida to give your show ballast? He just laughed.

Which is why, after all these years, we still need Tharp’s cranky
rigor. Her democratic impulse made true partners out of the high and
the low, insisting that we scrutinize pop with a new degree of
seriousness and not let the avant-garde intimidate us with its austere
priggishness.

But is her new work backing away from pop? Her recent European
reading list and reluctance to discuss the Bob Dylan incident suggests
so, as do her two world-premiere ballets for PNB.

The first, set to Brahms—the king of
romantic
seriousness—is described by Boal as a “traditional, balanced, and
symmetrical” ballet. Tharp says the second, set to Russian minimalist
composer Vladimir Martynov, “comes out of my bleak streak, wherein we
have a bit of existentialist theater, shall we say, and the end of the
world.”

The evening ends with Nine Sinatra Songs, some light and
witty ballroom vignettes Tharp made in 1982. Sinatra, apparently, is
the coda to Armageddon.