Twyla Tharp Biography Quotes 30 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Twyla Tharp was born on July 1, 1941, in Portland, Indiana, and grew up in Southern California. Her parents operated drive-in movie theaters, a setting that immersed her in popular music and the rhythms of American entertainment from an early age. She studied piano and other disciplines alongside dance, developing a broad appetite for structure, discipline, and craft. After attending Pomona College, she transferred to Barnard College in New York City, where the ferment of the downtown arts scene shaped her vision. In New York she studied with major figures in modern dance, including Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, while sharpening a demanding ballet technique. That dual training would become essential to her artistic identity: she handled classical rigor and experimental freedom with equal fluency.

Forming a Voice in Dance
In 1965 she founded Twyla Tharp Dance in New York. The company began with spare, inventive works that distilled movement to its essentials, often presented in unconventional spaces. Early pieces like Tank Dive and The Fugue showed her fascination with rhythm, counterpoint, and the possibilities of the body as an instrument. She favored speed, stamina, and a cool, offhand attack that made difficult steps look conversational. Her dancers moved with a distinctive physical intelligence, negotiating complex patterns that could seem improvised yet were meticulously structured.

Crossing Boundaries
From the outset Tharp sought to erase boundaries between high art and popular culture. Deuce Coupe, created for the Joffrey Ballet in 1973 to the music of the Beach Boys, became a landmark of the American stage. Ballerinas executed classical phrases while, around them, modern dancers slipped in and out of gestures drawn from everyday life. The juxtaposition was not a stunt; it argued that virtuosity could belong as much to a pedestrian walk as to a bravura turn, provided the musicality and intent were exact. In Nine Sinatra Songs she shaped social dancing into luminous duets, while In the Upper Room, fueled by a propulsive score from Philip Glass, pushed endurance and timing to thrilling extremes. She collaborated with musicians from David Byrne to Glass and showed that pop, jazz, and classical traditions could coexist within a single choreographic voice.

Ballet Collaborations and Company Leadership
Tharp expanded her reach through deep partnerships with leading ballet institutions. For American Ballet Theatre she made Push Comes to Shove in 1976, a breakthrough work created for Mikhail Baryshnikov that fused sly theatricality with ferocious technique. She continued to choreograph for ABT and, for a period in the late 1980s, integrated her company with the larger institution to share dancers, repertory, and touring. With New York City Ballet she collaborated with Jerome Robbins on Brahms/Handel, bringing her contrapuntal clarity into dialogue with the repertory associated with George Balanchine and Robbins. These collaborations placed her dancers alongside celebrated classical artists and demonstrated that her vocabulary could enrich and challenge major ballet traditions without sacrificing wit or musical exactness.

Film and Television
Tharp brought her sensibility to film and television, contributing choreography to Hair and Ragtime with director Milos Forman, and to Amadeus, in which stylized stage movement had to register on camera with precision. She also worked on White Nights, a dance-centered drama featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines, where the language of the studio met the demands of narrative cinema. On television she created specials such as Baryshnikov by Tharp, translating the immediacy of live performance into a medium that required different calibrations of scale, framing, and timing. Her work on screen earned major recognition and broadened the audience for contemporary dance.

Broadway
On Broadway Tharp reshaped the dance musical by building full-length narratives from popular songbooks. Movin Out, set to the music and lyrics of Billy Joel, navigated the story of American youth through Vietnam-era turbulence using dance alone, with the band onstage driving the action. The production won her a Tony Award for choreography and toured internationally. She later created The Times They Are a-Changin, based on the catalog of Bob Dylan, and Come Fly Away, a tribute to Frank Sinatra that paired social dance idioms with exacting concert-dance technique. These shows made the case for dance as the principal narrator in commercial theater and placed concert-trained performers in sustained dialogue with mainstream audiences.

Process and Aesthetic
Tharp is as interested in process as in product. She refines steps through repetition, counts, and structural games that reveal multiple pathways through the same phrase material. Precision is nonnegotiable, yet she allows dancers to cultivate individuality within the frame. Her rehearsal room has hosted artists trained across traditions, from Cunningham-influenced movers to strict classical stylists, encouraging cross-pollination. The work often repositions familiar gestures so the viewer sees them anew: a jog becomes a motif, a shoulder shrugs to a hidden beat, a ballet phrase is re-timed to swing. This play with context is supported by demanding musical craftsmanship; she hears rhythm in unexpected places and lays choreography across a score with the confidence of a seasoned composer.

Writing and Teaching
Beyond choreography she has shaped discourse about creativity. Her memoir Push Comes to Shove traces the evolution of a life in dance. The Creative Habit and The Collaborative Habit distill lessons about discipline, risk, and working with others, drawing on experiences with collaborators such as Baryshnikov, Jerome Robbins, Billy Joel, David Byrne, and Philip Glass. Keep It Moving reflects on longevity and adaptation, offering practical strategies for sustaining curiosity and physical practice. Through lectures, workshops, and residencies, she has mentored generations of dancers and choreographers, emphasizing that artistry rests on daily labor.

Awards and Recognition
Tharp has received many of the highest honors available to an American artist, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the Kennedy Center Honors, along with a Tony Award and Emmy recognition. Universities and conservatories have awarded her honorary degrees, and companies worldwide keep her repertory active. The continued staging of Deuce Coupe, In the Upper Room, and other works by major troupes affirms the durability of her choreographic thinking. Critics often note that her dances both mirror and shape American culture, drawing on vernacular sources without condescension and holding them to the same standards as classical forms.

Later Career and Legacy
Into the twenty-first century Tharp has continued to create new works while restaging significant pieces for companies in the United States and abroad. She has reconstituted Twyla Tharp Dance for tours, refreshed earlier creations with new casts, and accepted commissions that test fresh configurations of space, music, and narrative. Her legacy resides not only in signature titles but in a methodology that prizes clarity, stamina, and musical intelligence. Dancers who come through her rehearsals tend to carry that rigor into other companies, inflecting the broader field. For audiences, her work offers a map of American movement across decades, from doo-wop to minimalism to big-band swing, filtered through a mind attuned to structure and surprise.

Impact
Twyla Tharp stands as a bridge-builder: between ballet and modern dance, concert stages and Broadway, studio craft and filmed performance. The names connected to her career form a tapestry of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century culture: Mikhail Baryshnikov in the studio, Jerome Robbins in the theater, Robert Joffrey supporting crossover experiments, Milos Forman bringing dance to the screen, Gregory Hines anchoring a cinematic duet of styles, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, Philip Glass, and David Byrne providing scores that challenge and inspire. Through those partnerships and through the relentless evolution of her own company, she has expanded what American dance can be, making virtuosity feel conversational and the everyday newly extraordinary.

Our collection contains 30 quotes who is written by Twyla, under the main topics: Art - Funny - Learning - Mother - Work Ethic.

Other people realated to Twyla: Mikhail Baryshnikov (Dancer)

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