Kennedy Center Honors: Twyla Tharp

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The Kennedy Center Honors: Twyla Tharp

A look at the career of the dancer and choreographer, one of this year's Kennedy Center Honorees.

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"That was the [screw you] time," Tharp says. "We don't give a [fig] if you like it, you're not paying [to produce it], and that's why you can not like it and we're still dancing tomorrow. Screw you!"

Then, in 1972, this little-known modern-dance choreographer was asked by the Joffrey Ballet to create a work -- a novel idea at the time, when the ballet and modern dance worlds sneered at each other and were loath to mix. The ballet dancers were skeptical, and some were openly hostile. Who was she, a young woman from the underfunded fringes of experimental dance, to walk into their elite realm and tell them what to do? So Tharp pushed back in the best way she knew.

"It was a good thing we were such good dancers, because that's how we made it happen. We just went into the studio and basically shamed them into doing it," Tharp says of the project, which merged her own small troupe of dancers with the Joffrey members. "We just challenged them. Because they didn't want to hear about it. They didn't want to do this. The classical dancers had a stronger pirouette, they had stronger feet, they had a more clearly defined, open line than we had. But we could get down. And that really intimidated them."

The work that resulted -- "Deuce Coupe," accompanied by Beach Boys songs and using graffiti artists brought in off the streets to create a spray-painted set -- was an instant hit. Intricately composed, and as visually dense as a snowstorm, it preached the gospel of getting along in a way that audiences could immediately absorb.

The stamina and focus of the entire cast, their differing techniques spotlighted and honored, amounted to a re-imagining of concert dance, as Warhol had done to visual art. (Balletgoers started bringing their binoculars to watch the overtly sexy modern dancers, Tharp notes with pride.) Perceptive, cheeky and stunningly new, "Deuce Coupe" thrust Tharp into the mainstream of dance.

Having received $5,000 from the Joffrey (which enabled Tharp to buy her light-filled apartment, with its gorgeous views), she went on to command twice that from American Ballet Theatre when, in 1975, it invited her to make a ballet for its new star, Mikhail Baryshnikov. Tharp's $10,000 proposal made the ballet officials gasp, as did her further demand: She would take on the job only after evaluating the celebrated Russian defector herself, in rehearsal. She got both her wishes -- along with a brief romance with the ballet star -- and the new work, "Push Comes to Shove," was another huge hit.

Tharp framed the entire cast -- and particularly Baryshnikov -- in an entirely unexpected way. Where audiences had come to expect his flung-open physicality, his phenomenal leaps and turns in the conventional ballets, in "Push" he was all tease, wearing a bowler and tight pants, swiveling his hips in an ecstasy of restrained cool. When she finally let him fly, it was in a swift, off-balance, rhythmically tricky way. "Push" also took shots at the company's repertoire, satirizing "Giselle" and "Swan Lake"; it was full of jokes as well as sly analysis. "Tharp has a logician's mind and a vaudevillian's heart," wrote Arlene Croce, reviewing the ballet in the New Yorker.

With "Push," Tharp became a star in her own right. Choreography for major films followed ("Hair," "Amadeus" and others), and forays on Broadway, along with works for her own company and other ballet troupes. Since "Push," her work came to define ABT's contemporary direction. This year, one of the four new works (amazing productivity, even for the workaholic Tharp) she has made for ballet companies was for ABT.

"She's an inveterate explorer and a huge risk-taker," says Sara Rudner, who danced with Tharp for 20 years. "I know of no one who put in the numbers of hours she did. We did it with her, but then we went home and she kept working."

Tharp credits her mother with instilling discipline in her, the eldest of four. Tharp was born in Indiana, named for the reigning Pig Princess at the local fair (who was a Twila; but with her sights on marquee appeal, Lecile Tharp changed the "i" to a "y"). The Tharps eventually moved to California to run a drive-in movie theater, and Tharp was shepherded around to piano, violin, baton-twirling and ballet lessons. Her greatest source of inspiration, though, was that outdoor cinema, where she discovered "the art of the '50s movies was in sustaining forever the moment before sex," she writes in her autobiography, aptly titled "Push Comes to Shove." "I sensed early that this perpetually suspended condition could be translated into art."

Also, there were the cartoons. "Walt Disney was a master of the human psychology," Tharp says. "His sense of timing, sense of speed. In a sense, those cartoons are like Rorschach tests. . . . There was an extraordinary imaginative and kind of primitive violence in them, that was subdued and pressed down." She sings that galloping Looney Tunes melody, clapping out the rhythm and waving her feet around from her seat. "And don't go any slower, 'cause if you do, uh-uh, people are going to be outta there. They're gettin' a hot dog."

Tharp's creative rise coincided with the dance boom of the 1970s and '80s, when audiences were hungry for new work and companies had money to spend on it. Today she is one of the most expensive choreographers in the field, with the price tag on a new work rumored to be more than $100,000, a number she wouldn't confirm. But what is pricey in the dance world represents a pittance in other areas, she points out -- sports, popular entertainment. And being tough on fees, she says, is part of getting respect.