By the time Twyla Tharp left Southern California for New York City in 1961, she was pretty sure the pre-med major she’d embarked on at Pomona College would not be the degree she finished with at Barnard College on the Upper West Side.
“I came to Barnard all the while harboring in the back of my mind that I was coming to New York to study dance,” says Tharp, 83, on a recent phone call from her home in New York City. “Because I had pretty much passed through that which was available in dance on the West Coast.
“Coming to Barnard, P.E. was dance,” she continues. “I went to my first dance class there and I was asked to dance a sunrise. I just looked at the instructor and more or less said, ‘I did not come here to study sunrises.’
“Walked out the door, went to the president of the college, and said, ‘I will be conducting my own educational process in dance here. I will be studying at the Martha Graham studio.’ And I ended up working at the Merce Cunningham studio and Paul Taylor, of course, I went to immediately thereafter. Plus, everyone else who was teaching in New York.”
Art history became her new focus, though not with the same degree of focus as other students in her classes.
“I could cram the slides on the weekend, skip all my classes and, learning the New York subway system, take three dancing classes a day while I was at Barnard,” Tharp says. “Which is what I did.”
That confidence and drive had been part of Tharp throughout her life. Within months of graduating college in 1963, she launched into a year with Paul Taylor’s company, and she might have continued performing with Taylor or Cunningham or Graham, all of them legends of contemporary dance, but for a third and equally strong trait: independence.
“I always had very special feelings, as he did for me, but we were very different in terms of how we saw dance,” she says of Taylor. “Same thing with Merce. Merce also asked me to work with the company at that time. But I seemed to be very direct about my feelings as to the choreography, which was mostly not to my liking.
“I didn’t see things eye to eye with how Graham put dance on stage, or how Cunningham did, or how Paul did,” Tharp says. “Not seeing eye to eye, it was not really appropriate for me to be performing in their company.
“So I realized quite young, which I’m grateful for, that if I wanted to dance, I was going to have to make the dances.”
In the spring of 1965, Twyla Tharp Dance made its debut with a short piece titled “Tank Dance,” her first original work.
Six decades later, Tharp is celebrating one of the most acclaimed careers in modern dance with a tour by her company that this month includes performances in Costa Mesa on Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 15-16, and Northridge on Feb. 22-23.
Something old, something new
For this 60th anniversary tour, Tharp revived her 1998 work “Diabelli,” built upon Beethoven’s “The Diabelli Variations,” and paired it with the brand-new piece “Slacktide,” which uses a new arrangement of Philip Glass’s “Agua da Amazonia.”
“The ‘Diabelli Variations’ is an incredible tour de force of Beethoven’s having to do with a series of scenes that are transformative, one after another,” Tharp says. “What it suggests is an enormous landscape of potential, which is where Beethoven lived, and that is a piece that is purely music and dance. It’s on a clean stage and the performers deal with material that is re-expressed over and over again 33 times.
“The Glass – i.e., ‘Slacktide’ – is a very different musical experience,” she says. “Obviously, minimalism is a totally different expression of musical forces, and also more contained in the sense that these transformations, while they are somewhat expressive emotionally, for the most part, they’re very cerebral.
“There’s a lot of shifts, twists, turns, redirections, confirmations, revisitations, and conclusion finally reached,” Tharp says of both the choreography and Beethoven’s score. “The ‘Slacktide’ is very different. It’s much more of an ongoing, kind of interrupted passage of time that builds by accumulating layer on layer.
“They’re structured very differently. For the dancers, there’s a difference between a sprint” – the “Diabelli” – “and a four-mile run” – the “Slacktide.”
Becoming Twyla
Tharp was a child of 4 in Indiana when her mother Lecile signed her up for tap dance classes and baton-twirling lessons. Four years later, the family moved to Rialto just east of San Bernardino, where her parents owned and operated both a car dealership and the Foothill Drive-in Theater, where Twyla worked as a girl.
But artistic pursuits were paramount for Lecile Tharp and her daughter.
Her mother enrolled her first in the Vera Lynn School of Dance in San Bernardino, and then in classes with the sisters Fiala and Milada Mraz, the latter of whom was also a movie actress and dancer under the name Milada Mlodova, at their studio in Fontana.
When Enrico Cansino, the uncle of actress Rita Hayworth, and one of the Dancing Cansinos troupe, came to San Bernardino, Lecile signed Twyla up for flamenco classes, too. Her baton teacher was Ted Otis, the head baton twirler at USC at the time.
“So I had this plethora,” Tharp says. “My mother was an amazing person who insisted that we would have the best – we’re not spending our time on anything less – and drove me over 150 miles every week. To lessons in San Marino, to lessons in Big Bear, San Berdoo, Fontana.
“It was an incredible accomplishment on her part,” she says. “Southern California at the time, it might have been an outpost, but there were amazing people there.”
People have asked her whether, like many kids, she ever resented the time and commitment her extracurricular studies required.
“Assuming it was a bad thing,” she says. “I didn’t assume it was a bad thing. I assumed it was a good thing. I assumed I was very lucky and these folks all knew a lot more than I did. So I practiced my lessons and I’m very grateful to all of them.”
She eventually left the Mraz sisters for the San Marino studio of Beatrice Collenette, a protege of the legendary Russian prima ballerina Anna Pavlova.
“Beatrice Collenette was one of Anna Pavlova’s seven, I think, baby ballerinas in Ivy House in London,” Tharp says. “Collenette brought very much a feeling of the tradition and conventions of the classical ballet coming from Anna Pavlova.
“Again, I was very fortunate to experience that Collenette training, which is Cecchetti, essentially. The Mraz sisters, who were in Fontana, were from the Paris Opera, which is a different tradition. But both of them are substantial.”
As for Martha Graham and the American contemporary dance she helped found, Tharp says she remained oblivious in her Southern California adolescence.
“Did not exist,” she says. “I didn’t know anything about Martha Graham until I came to New York in 1961, I guess. I was fortunate enough to get to the Graham studio the last year Martha was still teaching, so I had classes directly from her, but I was not familiar with modern dance on the West Coast.”
Geometric movement
At 23, Tharp knew she no longer wanted to dance the choreography of others, even those as esteemed as Graham, Taylor and Cunningham, with whom she had studied and worked.
For “Tank Dance,” her first original piece, she found inspiration outside the world of dance in the minimalist geometry of visual artists who lived in the gritty downtown neighborhood where she landed after college.
“There was no music and it was very geometric,” Tharp says of “Tank Dance.” “It had a great deal to do with the fact that painting was resolving itself from abstract expressionism to what came to be called minimalist painting, and very geometric forms. Frank Stella, you know, Tony Smith, onward and onward, Barnett Newman.
“When I graduated from school I managed to very quickly get myself downtown, where nobody lived, and into a loft that was a bare space, no bathroom, just a bare space for $50 bucks a month,” she says of her home on Franklin Street in Tribeca. “This was the area where the painters were working, and that was the atmosphere of the day.
“And geometric forms have always made a lot of sense to me,” Tharp continues. “Geometry is something that helps me identify space, and space and time are what dance is. ‘Tank Dive’ is all geometry.”
The performance on April 29, 1965, took place in a small Bauhaus auditorium at Hunter College that belonged to the art department, whose chair offered to move out the sculptures it held and let her do the piece.
“I figured, ‘Well, girl, you don’t really know that much, so let’s go through, shall we say, eight minutes, maybe?’” Tharp says of her first choreography. “Because I had already seen this as the start of a career I decided, well, that’ll be the evening. So if you were late, you missed the show. It was, you know, eight minutes long twice.
“I might also say in my eight minutes there was a beginning, a middle, and an end. Just want you to know we covered all the bases in our eight minutes.”
From ‘The Fugue’ to the future
For her first five years, Tharp performed only new work, and once it had been done it was put away, in almost every case for good. With “The Fugue,” which premiered on Aug. 1, 1970, she created the first piece of what would become her repertory, a significant dance that her company and others have returned to over the years.
“By then, I felt that I understood enough in order to be able to make a point,” she says. “The point was, ‘Here’s how these things begin to fit together.’ ‘The Fugue’ is done on an amplified stage. The sound of the dancers – we wore high-heel boots, we were very striking – so the dancers’ footsteps were sort of crafted and built-in. The sound of the thing was built in.
“And that, ‘The Fugue,’ is the basis of the repertoire,” Tharp says. “It’s done a lot, which it should be, because it’s a really good tool for students to learn just about the possibilities of structuring movement. Take a single movement line, and here’s what you can do with it.”
In 1973, Tharp’s interest in knocking down the walls between different genres of dance led to “Deuce Coupe,” a piece commissioned by the Joffrey Ballet that incorporated ballet with modern dance, and score built around the Beach Boys’ 1972 ballad “Cuddle Up.”
“That was an era of high-low art,” Tharp says. “That was something that was very much in the air. You forgot to mention that I actually put on the stage the first graffiti, and it had a huge impact on people like Keith Haring and so forth. These guys were the first generation out there painting the trains, and we got four or five of them on stage doing these rolls in the background that went up at the same time as the dancing was happening in the foreground.”
She’d watched an entire season of the Joffrey company before making the piece for them, and she had come to the conclusion that something different than ballets by such choreographers as Frederick Ashton and Kurt Joost was needed.
“I felt the audience really wanted something more entertaining, if we might use a crass word in the art world,” Tharp says. “I said, ‘Well, let’s have both.’”
Her catholic interests and inspirations continued to mix high and low art, pop culture and the classics. She choreographed movies such as “Hair” and “Amadeus” for director Milos Forman, and “White Knights,” which starred dancer-actors Mikhail Baryshnikov, her frequent collaborator, and Gregory Hines.
In 1981, working with David Byrne of the Talking Heads, she created “The Catherine Wheel,” which played on Broadway. Years later, “Movin’ Out,” a work that used the songs of Billy Joel as its score, led to a Tony Award for best choreography.
And still, she works, something that becomes clear when she’s asked how she sees the world of dance today.
“I do not go to performances – everyone knows this – because I am still working,” Tharp says. “I don’t go to view, and frankly, I never really have.
“There were two gentlemen I knew, one much better than the other, who had diametrically different styles,” she continues. “Jerry Robbins and George Balanchine, who were very different. Balanchine went to nothing. He taught hard in class, he did his rehearsals, he went home, he cooked. Jerry saw absolutely everything. He did not teach, and his work pattern was far less regular than Balanchine.
“And so I have opted more for the direction of Balanchine, which is basically get in the studio, fight it out, do your work.”
And cook?
“I don’t cook!” Tharp says. “I can’t. I can do hard-boiled eggs. Sometimes they explode. I’m not very good.”
Dance classes over home economics – you’ve come out ahead?
“Yes, I hope so,” she says. “That’s kind of the deal. I want you to encourage folks to come and see this group. They’re really kind of terrific, and the span of the work is broad. I hope that’ll be encouraging for audiences now to see that you can have very different, in fact, quite opposed points of view represented in the same evening.”