White Nights, Tuesday, Nov. 13 Produced by the Department of Theater, Dance, and Peformance Studies, Twyla Tharp’s postmodern work, Torelli, is reconstructed with Berkeley dance students in a program directed by Lisa Wymore and Shannon Jackson. For information, visit theater.
berkeley.edu . “These are some of the most successful pieces in modern-dance history,” says Cole.
“People who love dance and people who don’t know anything about it” find Tharp’s work “intriguing, because they can see that it’s incredibly difficult and athletic.” Tharp instructs her dancers to be relaxed and loose-limbed while performing movements at very fast speeds. “The combination is daunting,” explains Cole.
“You have a specific technique that’s only hers, and then you have the speed at which you have to execute it.” Tharp’s work is “original, physical, and contemporary,” says dance critic Marcia Siegel, who recently published Howling Near Heaven: Twyla Tharp and the Reinvention of Modern Dance (2007), an in-depth examination of the choreographer’s oeuvre and dancers. Siegel clarifies that by “contemporary” she means Tharp is “with the times.
She’s not wedded to any sort of style or vocabulary.” With Deuce Coupe Tharp loudly proclaimed that the boundaries between ballet and modern dance are artificial, says Siegel. Although such melding of styles isn’t radical today, when Robert Joffrey invited Tharp to choreograph a piece for his company, dancers “rebelled and didn’t want to be in it because they were tied to classical ballet,” recalls Henry Berg, who danced in Deuce Coupe when it debuted in 1973.
Two years earlier, Tharp had upset the dance world when she set Eight Jelly Rolls to the music of early-20th-century jazz pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton. “That was a real shocker,” says Siegel, because most modern dancers through the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s — though “determined to be modern” — did not use jazz. “The modern dancers considered their work ‘high art,’ so they would only use classic music or sometimes folk.
” Avant-garde dancers “weren’t supposed to use popular music. If anything, they would have music written for them, or they employed it in a way that was completely incidental,” says Siegel. Dancers such as Tricia Brown, Yvonne Rainer, and Lucinda Childs “all wanted a bigger audience, but their work was not accessible,” she explains.
Tharp, on the other hand, dared to entertain audiences with Eight Jelly Rolls, a piece that used jazz and big, explosive dance movements. Siegel, a longtime dance critic with the Hudson Review and reviewer for the Boston Phoenix since 1996, has followed Tharp’s work since 1967. “Good choreography is very rare when you get right down to it,” she says, and Tharp “was extraordinary and distinctive from the word go.
I have never felt there was anyone comparable to her in terms of talent and originality.” After Deuce Coupe, Tharp went on to choreograph works to the music of such disparate composers and performers as Willie “The Lion” Smith ( Baker’s Dozen, 1979), David Byrne ( The Catherine Wheel, 1981), Frank Sinatra ( Nine Sinatra Songs, 1982), and Philip Glass ( In the Upper Room, 1986). She also choreographed dance in three films by Milos Forman: Hair (1970), Ragtime (1981), and Amadeus (1984), as well as in White Nights (1985), directed by Taylor Hackford and starring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines.
In recent years Tharp has turned to Broadway, choreographing dance musicals, including Movin’ Out (set to the music of Billy Joel) and The Times They Are a-Changin’, featuring the lyrics and music of Bob Dylan. Tharp, now 66, won’t be in attendance at the upcoming Berkeley performances. She’s hard at work on a commissioned piece for the Miami City Ballet, set to a new score by Elvis Costello.
“She’s always looking forward to the future,” says Cole, who first presented the Twyla Tharp Dance Company in the late ’70s. “She doesn’t look back. That’s our job.
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