In 1965, at the age of 23, dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp started her own dance company, which continues to this day. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, she and the company are on a tour of major cities across the U.S., with shows in Los Angeles at The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts from Oct. 1-4.
But on the golden anniversary of Tharp's company, the choreographer is far from nostalgic. She is very much in the present and looking toward the future. In fact she’s a prolific blogger — you can find her dispatches of life on tour and her musings about creativity on the New York Times website. And Tharp is an active archivist of her company’s dances, which have been captured on video for decades and can be searched on her website.
When The Frame’s John Horn met with Tharp in a conference room at The Wallis, it was immediately clear that Tharp may be physically petite, but she’s a big and vibrant presence.
Interview Highlights
How how she measures the success of her own pieces
That's a complex question. For me, personally, a successful piece is a piece that suggests the next one — that put me in a place where I have the energy and the vision to move forward and tackle a whole other approach to something. Sugar — you want more and more of it and it's not really good for you. And sugar is the equivalent of applause, it's the equivalent of praise. It's the equivalent of what sways your mind from what you really need to have. You really need those vegetables.
On the art of dance
Look, dance has been called ephemeral — here today, gone tomorrow. It’s an action, it’s an activity and it’s been looked on as such for millennia. Those days are over. It does now have a reproducible history to it. In other words, one of the reasons dance has such a low standing, may we say, being at the bottom of the heap, culturally... It’s because, as I say, it’s the only art form without an artifact. Ok, that’s no longer true. It has video, it has its own references.
On why she started her own company at such a young age
In all truth, I did audition for The Rockettes. I did try to get into that line ... They called me up and said, “Young lady, you’re a very good dancer, but can you smile?” And I said, “No,” and walked out. There you have it. That’s why it became necessary for me to make my own dances if I wanted to dance.
On efforts to archive her dance pieces
Obviously, theater has had text, and so does dance. Dance has lab annotation ... But what they can’t really deliver is the intention, the degree of energy. What Leonardo liked to call degrees of fury in energy. And video, actually, can do that ... My first video is from 1968. This makes it probably the oldest dance archive on video.
If she were not a choreographer, what would she be? A politician?
I am a politician. I don’t debate. But what I do is ethics. My pieces provide an ethical base. Or at least that’s my intention. There’s justice in our pieces.