Iconic Choreographer Twyla Tharp Returns to Her Roots at City Center.
Twyla Now, marking Tharp’s 80th birthday, runs November 17–21.
't is hard, though not impossible, to remember when Twyla Tharp was seen as something of a bomb-thrower. When Deuce Coupe premiered at New York City Center in 1973, The New York Times sputtered, “Twyla Tharp makes a piece for the Spring season of the City Center Joffrey Ballet, and the dance world is astonished. The idea of one of the most important and obstreperously radical young dancer-choreographers hooking up with a ballet company is unusual, but then, both Tharp and the Joffrey like to be first at things.” Scored to popular songs by the Beach Boys, Deuce Coupe was the first crossover ballet: classical stances mingled with stylized quotations of sixties dances like the frog, wheeling legs, and pas de deux dissolving into a little shimmy of the shoulders. The whole work is a marvel of still busyness, like a Calder mobile shifting on its axes. Tharp was 31.
Half a century later, City Center marks Tharp’s 80th birthday with Twyla Now, an ambitious program featuring dancers chosen by Tharp from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre (ABT), and New York City Ballet, which shaped Tharp’s career as much as Bob Joffrey’s trusting enthusiasm did.
Deuce Coupe was also Tharp’s first collaboration with City Center, but her relationship with the institution and ABT goes further back, and was formative. When Tharp arrived in New York in the early sixties, she knew plenty about ballet, tap dance, music theory, baton-twirling, German, and shorthand—the product of her mother’s dreamy, broad-minded educational program—but nothing about modern dance until she studied under Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham at ABT. In 1963 she joined Paul Taylor’s company, then left to start her own. Strapped for cash, the dancers rehearsed in condemned buildings (“gymnasiums that had half a floor missing or whatever,” says Tharp), sometimes sneaking into City Center to practice on an unattended mezzanine floor.'>>>
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