Tharp, 50, has made a career of new beginnings, and next week she embarks on her latest: the New York debut of Twyla Tharp and Dancers. She herself will perform-for the first time since 1987-and she’ll unveil four new works and five revivals from her extraordinary backlist. Her 17 dancers include three from her former company; the others were culled from the New York City Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet and auditions. They’re an astonishingly talented bunch, and they may never again be seen together in this country-or maybe they will. Tharp, who has consistently broken every rule in the dance world and shows no signs of reforming, refuses to predict the company’s future or even to call it a company. “This is a group, which has been assembled for a project, “she says firmly.
Nearly four years ago, Tharp made a decision many considered outrageous, if not sacrilegious: she disbanded the hugely popular modern dance company she had been running since 1965, in order to work’ independently on whatever appealed to her. Dance companies have collapsed for financial reasons; no major troupe in memory has disappeared just because the artistic director said the hell with it. Tharp has always been too restless to stay home, artistically: even while maintaining her company she managed to work in TV and video, choreograph “Hair,” “Amadeus” and other films, make a string of hits for major ballet companies including Mikhail Baryshnikov’s great showpiece “Push Comes to Shove,” and direct the Broadway production of “Singin’ in the Rain,” a critical flop that ran for almost a year anyway. Now, without the pressures of administration, fund raising and training dancers, she is able to pursue her ambitions flat-out. Currently she is completing an autobiography, working on a film script with James L. Brooks (“Terms of Endearment”), about which she will say nothing, and readying her new, ah, group for the City Center season (opening Jan. 28) and a Japanese tour. “Chances are they will perform more, if there are engagements that warrant it, it’s. just that I’m not promising,” she says. “There’s nothing so special as developing your own dancers, but I can’t do that anymore-make dancers and make dances.”
Her new dancers are terrific, and they have to be. Tharp’s is still the most daring and complex style on stage today. What distinguishes it from other dancing is not only its casual regard for such traditional niceties as steps, counting and positions, but the demands it makes on a dancer’s mind. Tharp’s work is deeply rooted in bodily and musical logic, but the look is often spontaneous. (“Is all that stuff choreographed?” Tharp was once asked at a lecture-demonstration. “I daresay,” she answered dryly.) Ballet dancers can learn Tharp’s style, but they’ve got to dismantle the life-support system that keeps them in a state of triumph over the demands of gravity and balance. There’s no time for empty gestures if you’re thrusting yourself into a slithering, sliding series of turns at breakneck pace and Chuck Berry is shouting “Long live rock and roll!”
The Chuck Berry dance"Ocean’s Motion” (1975)-is one of the revivals slated for the City Center season. She’s also bringing back “Deuce Coupe,” the 1973 hit to Beach Boys music that made her a star when the Jeffrey Ballet performed it with her own company. Perhaps the biggest challenge for the new group will be “Golden Section,” one of the most electrifying dances ever made. The final section of a full-evening work called “The Catherine Wheel” (1981), created to music by David Byrne of Talking Heads, “Golden Section” is a kind of heavenly vision-if heaven had dances by Tharp: there are tearing leaps and sudden catches, wheeling lifts and slashing turns, with dancers pitching and sailing across the stage like jet-propelled aerialists, each moment pushed to the edge of peril. If Tharp’s new group can achieve the perfect teamwork demanded by this piece, she’ll have proved that great dance is possible outside the standard company format. (If they can’t, she’ll have major worker comp to dole out.)
As for new work, the most spectacular may be the duet for her Paris Opera Ballet stars (Patrick Dupond and Isabelle Guerin on opening night). To Paul Simon’s “The Rhythm of the Saints,” a driving, percussive score steeped in the accents of Brazil and Africa, Tharp has made a slick, luscious dance that turns these highly refined classicists into sophisticated jungle beasts who soar and pounce and sizzle. But the most talked-about dancer on stage is bound to be Tharp herself, who both narrates and performs in her new “Men’s Piece.” Graying by now, and less elastic than she used to be, she remains just as riveting a stage presence. Her daily regime includes a ballet barre, a session of improvisation (“Just to keep things alive and happening”) and an hour of weight training. “After three years of weight training, you have the mental security to know you can deliver,” she says. “I know I can curl a certain amount of weight, I know I can press even when I feel lousy. Then you get on the stage, and you have that bottom line. Either they’re gonna like it or they’re not gonna like it, but you can deliver.” And she does. Very probably, they’re gonna like it.
