Twyla tharp autobiography of miss

Twyla began dance classes at age four, and soon was studying every kind of dance available: ballet, tap, jazz, modern. Her mother was determined that she become accomplished in as many fields as possible and also had her take baton lessons, drum lessons, violin and viola lessons, classes in painting, shorthand, French and German. At Barnard, Tharp studied art history, but found her passion in the dance classes she took off campus.

She completed her art history degree, but she had already resolved to make a career in dance. Shortly after graduation in , she joined the Paul Taylor Dance Company, but within two years, she left to start her own group, Twyla Tharp Dance. This company, originally composed of five women two men were added in , worked ceaselessly for five years, performing wherever they could, earning little or no money for their work.

In the cultural ferment of New York in the s, most young artists felt challenged to test the boundaries of their media. She worked less often with contemporary avant-garde music than with classical music, pop songs, a clicking metronome, or silence. Always, the choreography was dynamic, unpredictable and underpinned by an unusually thorough musical intelligence.

This became apparent to critics and audiences alike with her piece, The Fugue. Her group was invited to participate in major dance festivals where works like The Bix Pieces and Eight Jelly Rolls grabbed audiences with their physical daring and deep roots in the history of jazz. Twyla Tharp and many of her dancers were now invited to collaborate and perform with major ballet companies.

The Russian ballet star and the young American iconoclast were a powerful combination and collaborated frequently in the following decades. In the decades ahead, much of her work would appear on Broadway, beginning with an original Tharp production, When We Were Very Young , in The following year, she staged a full-length dance production, The Catherine Wheel , on Broadway, with music by David Byrne in his first venture as a composer outside of the rock band Talking Heads.

She continued to work in film as well, staging dances for the films Ragtime and Amadeus , both directed by Forman, and White Nights , starring Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines. The show enjoyed a solid run on Broadway and a highly successful national tour. In the late s, Tharp continued to create ballets at a slightly less hectic pace than before, while her past works became a staple of ballet companies around the world.

In , she reunited her company, Twyla Tharp Dance, with Baryshnikov joining the group in a program entitled Cutting Up. The work enjoyed one of the most successful tours in the history of contemporary dance. Although the project was originally conceived as a contemporary musical, the studio cut all musical numbers from the film before its release.

Returning to the world of pure dance, Tharp created new works at a feverish pace for the rest of the decade. From to , Twyla Tharp Dance toured the world to enormous popular and critical acclaim. The show brought Tharp a host of honors, including the Tony Award. A national company toured the United States for another three years and also made stops in Canada and Japan.

Bush in a ceremony at the White House. She received the Kennedy Center Honor in As of this writing, she has choreographed over works, including her work for Broadway, film and television. Her creative vision has had a pervasive influence on the work of younger choreographers and has permanently expanded the boundaries of contemporary dance.

When the COVD pandemic shut down live performance and dance rehearsals, Tharp immediately began to explore the use of digital technology to create dance remotely. In , the public television series American Masters honored her 80th birthday with a two-hour broadcast, Twyla Moves. In addition to interviews and archival film, the program shows Tharp employing Zoom to stage a short version of her piece The Princess and the Goblin.

A large consensus of critics, dancers, and dance-loving audiences would agree that Twyla Tharp has succeeded in her mission. No one making serious dances in this country since the s could ignore the challenge of her inventive, quirky, complex creations. No serious dance artist has ever stretched the boundaries between classical and popular, serious and silly, accessible and intellectual, as Twyla Tharp has.

When she first began to work with her own small company in the s, Twyla Tharp brought more intelligence, humor, originality and nerve to the making of dances than New York had seen in a long time, and she did it at a time when New York was the undisputed dance capital of the world. Over the course of her career, she has choreographed over works, from shorter dance works to evening-length ballets, along with12 television specials, four Broadway shows and six feature films.

Twyla Tharp: It depends on how you define vision. It was from the time I was a very small child, when I puttered around the house. I was four or five years old, I remember already having a regimen. It was the way I always identified myself. And consequently, it seemed like perhaps a not wise investment of a substantial portion of my life. But as it turned out, I decided that since it was the thing that I felt I did the best, that I owed it to all that be to pursue it.

That that was what I had to do, whether it meant I was going to be able to earn a living or not. Two years later, she formed her own company. She has created more than dances, choreographed for five Hollywood movies, directed and choreographed two Broadway shows and written two books. In she was named as a Kennedy Center honoree. Prior to the Kennedy Center honors, Ms.

Tharp had received many other honors and awards, including two Emmy Awards, 17 honorary doctorates and the National Medal of the Arts presented at the White House. I read this very recently published autobiography on the weekend before going to see Tharp and Baryshnikov perform in their touring show Cutting Up. I was glad I did, for it gave me a stronger sense of the personality behind the eclectic creativity I saw on stage that night, and also of the history and nature of the partnership of Tharp and Baryshnikov, surely if one looks at their beginnings one of history's more unlikely creative pairings.

The book is lavishly illustrated with photographs, both personal and performance, as well as some studio portraits by greats like Avedon. I am reminded however, as I look at them, how little the apparent candour of the snapshot actually reveals about Tharp's particular brand of dance, which is all in the movement and not at all in the pose.

It is part of Baryshnikov's particular genius that he manages to 'stop-action' Tharp's choreography as he dances, but even photographs of Baryshnikov dancing Tharp suggest only undisciplined movement without line of any sort. The reality only emerges fully in live action or videotape. Is it being perhaps a little precious to suggest that this autobiography shares some of the same characteristics - that its apparent candour, and there is plenty of it, does not in fact reveal the true nature of the autobiographicand, because it is a futile attempt to stop in midstream something which reveals itself only in motion?

In any case, one is grateful for the details and the candour, however little they throw light on questions one has wanted to ask. I was particularly interested to see, for instance, that Tharp's family ran a drive-in cinema, that they were, at best, an unconventional and unstable family her twin siblings developed a twin language , and that she herself started her career as an avant-garde "purist", making mathematical patterns not intended to be comprehensible to the much- despised audience.

Though she takes a stab at it, even Tharp herself does not seem to be able to explain how she moved to the opposite pole of populist dance. Possessed of far more decency and discretion than Gelsey Kirkland, she nonetheless cannot resist chronicling the first sexual encounter with Baryshnikov: "In my room, I found that the famous muscles I had only seen tensed in performance possessed an extraordinary softness.

As we explored each other's bodies, the confidence we had as dancers let us invent transitions that flowed as smoothly as well-drafted duets One gets the impression, though she does not say much about it, that the relationship settled fairly early on into one of mutual respect and affection, as Baryshnikov's passions moved on to other objects.

In any case, this book is a useful exercise in placing the Baryshnikov collaborations into perspective in a much longer career. Tharp's affection and admiration for the members of her company, particularly the female members, is sincere and so openly expressed as to border on the sensual if not the sexual. I find it interesting that it was only after she'd been in business for some time that she allowed men into her company, and even then they appear to have played somewhat subsidiary parts.

This may have been somewhat in reaction against the male-dominated modern dance world in which she served her apprenticeship Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor.

Twyla tharp autobiography of miss

The book itself is very well-presented - in addition to the illustrations, it has a good index and a full chronology of Tharp's work, and it has obviously been well-edited for language and typos. Hollie Rose. Author 1 book 5 followers. I was clued in to this book while reading her book on creativity. The title intrigued me.