Twyla Tharp's utopia.

AuthorLewis, Andrea
PositionChoreographer - Biography

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...

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