Politics & Power Quote by Twyla Tharp

Choreography, for Twyla Tharp, isn’t decoration; it’s governance. When she says she can “make a world,” she’s naming the quiet power artists wield: in a rehearsal room, the rules are not inherited, they’re chosen. That’s a radical claim from a dancer, a profession stereotyped as pure expression rather than decision-making. Tharp reframes dance as a moral technology - a way of organizing bodies, labor, attention, and credit.

The phrasing does double work. “I think” slips in a necessary humility: even in her own constructed universe, morality is a practiced ideal, not a guaranteed outcome. But the repetition of “done” is unmistakably managerial. Morality, democracy, honesty aren’t feelings; they’re methods. Who gets time in the center? Who is heard when something isn’t working? How is authority exercised without humiliation? Dance becomes a compressed model of a society: hierarchies are unavoidable, but they can be designed with transparency and respect.

Context matters. Tharp came up in an era when modern dance was both aesthetic revolt and institutional grind, and she built a career bridging downtown experimentation and mainstream stages. That crossover sharpened her sense that “the world” is often run by opaque power - money, taste, gatekeepers. In the studio she can prototype an alternative: not utopia, but a functioning system where rigor doesn’t require cruelty, and excellence doesn’t demand dishonesty. The subtext is blunt: if we can build ethical order with nothing but bodies and time, why do we tolerate so much bad faith everywhere else?