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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"Well, it's an old story," Tharp says. "It's called independence. It begins with Mozart. Haydn wasn't liberated. Haydn accepted that he ate in the kitchen with the servants and he wore the livery. Mozart wanted to eat at the table. It's about having control over the work that you do and controlling what you will do, and that is part and parcel of having the wherewithal to do it."

You get the sense that the control and respect are more important to Tharp than actual wealth. Her apartment, while spacious by New York standards, is spartan. The walls are white and empty. The few pieces of furniture are simple, either black or white; the wood floors are bare and uncluttered (just the way a dancer likes them). Jumbled on a windowsill in the living room are her Tony, Emmys and other awards. Continue down the hallway, past a small dining nook and a stainless-steel kitchen that looks sterile enough for surgery, and you come to the inner sanctum: a small dance studio, immaculately empty but for a slim pillar in the center.

What is conspicuously on view in Tharp's home is not rare art or fabulous stuff, none of the usual trappings of money and fame, but empty space. That small studio is a monument. She owns no other rehearsal facility, has no school, no headquarters other than her apartment. And few interests outside of her work.

Night life? "I don't go out. I read. And then I'm in here at 6 in the morning," she says, referring to her workout. "This is what I've got to do."

Her apartment is also the office where an assistant, Ginger Montel, and Tharp's son, Jesse Huot (Tharp and his father divorced when he was a baby), help Tharp manage the licensing of her works. Tharp, who started actively licensing her dances only in the past few years, is eager to show off this arm of her business. No sooner are you out of the elevator than she's got her fingers through your belt loop, directing you to Montel's desk, where you are positioned in front of a large bulletin board neatly arrayed with lists of what Tharp work is being performed by what company where.

The next stop is what at first appears to be a closet. Tharp calls it the Box, a windowless space crowded with files and electronic equipment, where Huot, 37, a boyish redhead, sits before three computer screens. Tharp asks you to name one of her works. You blurt out "Baker's Dozen," a warmly lighthearted 1979 piece set to piano music by Willie "The Lion" Smith. Tharp gives you an approving smile, and Huot begins to scroll through a chronological list of her pieces, 135 in all.

As the titles fly by -- "Tank Dive," her first work from 1965; "In the Upper Room," her explosive, furiously jazzy work to commissioned music by Philip Glass -- you murmur that you'd like to change your pick. Tharp won't allow it. So Huot opens the "Baker's Dozen" file and you watch a few minutes of grainy black-and-white footage of a young Tharp improvising alone, years before the dance was completed. And you're pulled in; it's marvelous. She's so soft and spongy, so utterly immersed, her head flung back in the enjoyment of moving. You've never seen anyone move like that, loose as silk, fluid and boneless. Now you know why she smiled at this choice: She was pregnant with Huot at the time, and as we watch she notes that she was being "careful -- just a little."

In endless computer files, Tharp has digitized almost every step of her choreographic process since she was 29 and first began to tape herself making dances. "Dance has never had this," she says with obvious pride. These archives can be made available to those who want to perform her works and to study how she made them.

"I've been very, very concerned about: Is all the work that I've done going to be there when I'm not around?" she says. "I want to leave something for somebody else to refer to, in the same way I can refer to a composer or painter or writer and say, look what they've accomplished in their lifetime. Here's where they started and here's where they got to."

Where they got to is critical. Tharp has made a study of the great artists' careers. "Ultimately, the ones who I respect are the ones who, at the end, make the end count."

Ah, the end. Now we get to the heart of the matter. Why the exercises, why the maniacal work ethic. For as gracefully as she is aging, Tharp feels the process heavily. She has always choreographed by putting her own body in motion. What will happen when no amount of push-ups or crunches can stave off physical decline?

For the first time this afternoon, she doesn't have a ready answer. She laughs, looks over at her bookshelves. "I don't know. I don't count on that happening." After a pause: "I think that's one of the reasons why Matisse is such a favorite of mine. He was crippled and lying flat on the bed and he figured out a way to work.

"I mean, when Balanchine was in the hospital I went to see him, when he was at the end," she continues. "And I remember being so disappointed that he hadn't figured out a way to go on working." She goes on to extol the blunt, large-scale cutouts that Matisse created when he could no longer wield a brush. You're struck by the fact that not even the dying George Balanchine escapes Tharp's critical eye. But her observation isn't heartless. It's practical. Time must not be wasted.

Like Beethoven composing through deafness, like the infirm Matisse, Tharp will keep pushing and shoving -- dancers, boundaries, her own raging self -- until the lights finally go out. As at the start of her career, when she had no interest in curtain calls or in basking in what she'd accomplished, she won't do it at the end, either.

"So you keep going," Tharp says. "And I think, ultimately, that is what one wants to have to offer, is that you keep going."