Twyla Tharp's utopia

Twyla Tharp comes at you full force. In person, she is as engaging and provocative as she is in her work.

Considered by many to be the most important choreographer of her generation, Tharp has her dancers flow through a range of movements familiar and unorthodox. They run, skip, and jump, flex their bodies, and move through space in an energized mix of jazz, ballet, modern, urban, and other dance styles. They are en pointe performing an exquisite balletic duet in one scene, gyrating to a rock groove in tennis shoes and pumps in the next. They must perform gravity-defying and downright dangerous moves on a nightly basis, all while they are infused with Twyla Tharp's distinctive and engaging creative energy.

Born in Portland, Indiana, on July 1, 1941, Tharp grew up in Southern California, began studying piano at age two, and took her first dance lessons at age four. Her childhood was filled with a variety of creative pursuits. She explored jazz, ballet, tap, and other dance styles, played the violin and viola, learned French, took drum lessons and painting classes.

Tharp found herself making connections between verbal and physical communication at an early age. Three of her younger siblings "created their own language rather than learning English," she tells me. She moves and claps her hands in an odd gesture, saying, "This meant bread and butter. My parents didn't understand the language. I was the translator. So I learned that language and movement are interchangeable and that they reinforce one another."

After a year of studies at Pomona College, Tharp headed to Barnard in New York, where she pursued a degree in art history. Increasingly, however, her off-campus attentions were focused on dance studies at the American Ballet Theatre school. It was there that she first connected with some of the greatest talents in American dance, including Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Paul Taylor.

Tharp joined Taylor's company after graduating from Barnard in 1963, and started her own group just two years later. Her five-member troupe performed sporadically and made little money during their first five years of existence, but Tharp was in her element.

"I'm in a room with the obligation to create a major dance piece," Tharp writes in her latest book, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. "The dancers will be here in a few minutes. What are we going to do? Some people find this moment--the moment before creativity begins--so painful that they simply cannot deal with it." But the blank space, Tharp says, is "my job. It's also my calling. Bottom line: Filling this empty space constitutes my identity."

Tharp has been filling that space for almost forty years, and has created more than 130 dances and ballets. Her works have been commissioned and performed by dance companies around the globe, and she has won numerous awards and accolades.

"I often say that dance is the only art form without an artifact," Tharp explains further. "We exist in the primitive time before The Iliad and The Odyssey when it was just about storytellers."

Tharp is perhaps most famous for her work on Milos Forman's 1978 film version of the Broadway hit Hair, and director Taylor Hackford's 1985 film, White Nights. On the surface, White Nighty is the Cold War story of a famous Russian ballet star and defector who connects with an equally talented African American tap dancer living in the Soviet Union. But the more intriguing storyline of the film is the behind-the-scenes collaboration of three giants of dance: the two onscreen stars, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines, and choreographer Twyla Tharp.

"They're both wonderful and they're both very, very, very different, and neither of them is very manageable," Tharp says of her experience on the film. "Greg was a wonderful, wonderful human being. Really loved Greg. I hate to be speaking of him in the past tense." (Hines died in 2003.) "Greg obviously choreographed all of his own tap material," she says. "I'm going to tell Greg Hines how to put together a tap phrase? Yeah, sure!"

Her newest blockbuster is Movin' Out, a pioneering musical told completely through dance, movement, and twenty-four Billy Joel songs--including "Goodnight Saigon," "We Didn't Start the Fire," and "Angry Young Man." These are performed by one singer and a righteous eight-piece band. It's still a hit on Broadway, and won a Tony Award for Best Choreography. Now Tharp is sending it out on the road to great acclaim and packed houses in cities like Detroit and San Francisco. ("Powerful, uplifting, heartbreaking, sometimes all at once," said the Detroit Free Press of the show.)

Tharp's son suggested the idea of using Joel's music for a Tharp production, and after a phone call to Joel and a couple of meetings, the ball was rolling.

Joel had previously turned down requests to use his music in theatrical settings, but he was impressed with Tharp's vision and musical sophistication.