Biography

     Twyla Tharp was born in Portland, Indiana, July 1, 1941, the daughter of Lecile and William Tharp. Her grandparents on both sides were Quakers who farmed the land. She was named after Twila Thornburg, the reigning Pig Princess at the 89th Annual Muncie Fair, with the "i" changed to "y" because her mother always said it would look better on a marquee. Twyla was the eldest of her siblings: twin brothers and a sister, Twanette. Her mother, a piano teacher, began giving Twyla lessons when the child was one and one-half years old.

     When Tharp was eight years old the family moved to the desert town of Rialto, California, where her parents built and operated the local drive-in movie theater. The house her father built in Rialto included a playroom with a practice section featuring a built-in tap floor, ballet barres, and closets filled with acrobatics mats, batons, ballet slippers, pointe shoes, castanets, tutus, and capes for matador routines. Her well-known tendency to consider herself a workaholic and a perfectionist began in her heavily-scheduled childhood.
     Tharp began her dance lessons at the Vera Lynn School of Dance in San Bernardino, then studied with the Mraz sisters. She also studied violin, piano, and drums, plus Flamenco, castanets, and cymbals with Enrico Cansino, an uncle of Rita Hayworth, and baton twirling with Ted Otis, an ex-world champion. At age 12 she began studying ballet with Beatrice Collenette, who trained and danced with Anna Pavlova. She attended Pacific High School and spent her summers working at the family drive-in.
     Tharp entered Pomona College as a freshman, moving to Los Angeles that summer to continue her dance training with Wilson Morelli and John Butler. At mid-term of her sophomore year she transferred to Barnard College in New York. She studied ballet with Igor Schwezoff at American Ballet Theatre, then Richard Thomas and his wife, Barbara Fallis. She began attending every dance concert she could and studied with Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Eugene "Luigi" Lewis, the jazz teacher. In 1962 she married Peter Young, a painter whom she had met at Pomona College. Her second husband was Bob Huot, an artist. Both marriages ended in divorce. Huot and Tharp had one son, Jesse, born 1971.
     Tharp graduated from Barnard in 1963 with a degree in art history. She made her professional debut that year with the Paul Taylor Company, billed as Twyla Young. In the following year, at age 23, she formed her own company, which began experimenting with movement in an improvisatory manner. For the first five years Tharp and her dancers struggled, but by the early 1970s she began to be recognized for a breezy style of dance that added irreverent squiggles, shrugged shoulders, little hops, and jumps to conventional dance steps, a technique she called the "stuffing" of movement phrases. She also made dances to every kind of music and composer from Bach, Haydn, and Mozart to the early American jazz of Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton; American pop, including the songs of Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon, the Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen, and David Byrne; and the experimental composers, including Philip Glass.




     Among the most innovative of her early pieces is "The Fugue" (1970) for four dancers, set to the percussive beat of their own feet on a miked floor. In 1971 she choreographed "Eight Jelly Rolls" to music by Morton and The Red Hot Peppers and "The Bix Pieces" to music by Bix Beiderbecke. Tharp performed as a member of her company until the mid-1980s when she stopped dancing to concentrate on her many projects for television and film, as well as for her company. She returned to performing in 1991. Other works for her company include "Sue's Leg" (1975), "Baker's Dozen" (1979), "In The Upper Room" (1986), and "Nine Sinatra Songs" (1982).

    Since graduating from Barnard College in 1963, Ms. Tharp has choreographed more than one hundred thirty-five dances, five Hollywood movies, directed and choreographed four Broadway shows. She received one Tony Award, two Emmy Awards, nineteen honorary doctorates, the Vietnam Veterans of America President's Award, the 2004 National Medal of the Arts, the 2008 Jerome Robbins Prize, a 2008 Kennedy Center Honor. Her many grants include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

   In 1965 Ms. Tharp founded her dance company, Twyla Tharp Dance. In addition to choreographing for her own company, she has created dances for The Joffrey Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, The Paris Opera Ballet, The Royal Ballet, New York City Ballet, The Boston Ballet, Hubbard Street Dance, The Martha Graham Dance Company, Miami City Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet.

    Ms. Tharp's work first appeared on Broadway in 1980 with WHEN WE WERE VERY YOUNG, followed in 1981 by her collaboration with David Byrne on THE CATHERINE WHEEL at the Winter Garden. Her 1985 production of SINGIN' IN THE RAIN played at the Gershwin and was followed by an extensive national tour. In 2002, Ms. Tharp’s award-winning dance musical MOVIN' OUT, set to the music and lyrics of Billy Joel, premiered at the Richard Rodgers, where it ran for three years. A national tour opened in 2004 and also ran for three years. For MOVIN' OUT Ms. Tharp received the 2003 Tony Award, the 2003 Astaire Award, the Drama League Award for Sustained Achievement in Musical Theater; and both the Drama Desk Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Choreography. For the London production Ms. Tharp won Best Choreography (Musical Theatre) Award of the UK's Critics' Circle National Dance Awards 2006. In 2006 Ms. Tharp worked with Bob Dylan’s music and lyrics to create THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’ which played at the Brooks Atkinson.

    In film Ms. Tharp has collaborated with director Milos Forman on HAIR in 1978, RAGTIME in 1980, and AMADEUS in 1984, with Taylor Hackford on WHITE NIGHTS in 1985 and with James Brooks on I'LL DO ANYTHING in 1994.

Her television credits include choreographing SUE'S LEG for the inaugural episode of PBS' DANCE IN AMERICA, co-producing and directing MAKING TELEVISION DANCE, which won the Chicago International Film Festival Award; and directing THE CATHERINE WHEEL for BBC Television. Ms. Tharp co-directed the television special BARYSHNIKOV BY THARP, which won two Emmy Awards as well as the Director's Guild of America Award for Outstanding Director Achievement.

     In 1992 Ms. Tharp wrote her autobiography PUSH COMES TO SHOVE. In 2003 she wrote, THE CREATIVE HABIT: Learn it and Use it for Life. In 2009 she wrote, THE COLLABORATIVE HABIT: Life Lessons for Working Together both of which were published by Simon and Schuster.

Today Ms. Tharp continues to create.




http://biography.yourdictionary.com/twyla-tharp
http://www.twylatharp.org/bio.shtml

Controversial Life for the Tharp Company

“In March 1970, at Sullins College in Virginia, Twyla Tharp presented her then all-women company in a dance subtitled “predicted on theories of supply and demand.” As she explains in Push Comes to Shove, the subtitle meant that the work was finished when the commission money ran out, which it did, fast. Not a dime was spent on wardrobe, and to hammer home the point Tharp had one of the solos danced twice, first topless, then bottomless. Within weeks, Tharp disbanded her company.  “We had nothing left,” she explains. 
     Unlike the choreographers most closely associated with the new dance born in the 1960s at New York’s Judson Church, Tharp never subscribed to minimalist, pedestrian movement.  From the start, she emphasized the physicality of dancing; both as a performer and as a choreographer she loved the challenge of technique, “the juice of moving.”  Still, her work embodied many of the radical social concerns of the Judson choreographers.  A number of her early pieces were conceived for nontraditional spaces, like parks and gymnasiums, and involved dozens of performers, most of whom were not professional dancers.  The women of her budding company ran a gamut of physical types; no one’s body was preeminent.  Everyone spent hours together in the studio, forging a feminist community.  They lived together, fed each other, and on the rare occasions they were paid for a performance the money was divided equally. 

     Her goal was professionalism of the highest order.  She wanted her dancers to be the best; she wanted audiences to respond to them as viscerally as she did; she also wanted to pay them enough to live above the poverty line.  So in the 1970s, she went “commercial,” as many thought, including her then husband. 
     Today, as many dance companies teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, Tharp’s story should be read as a cautionary tale.  Talent, drive, decency—she had them all.  What she needed for her community of dancers was something America remains unwilling to give even the best of its choreographers—a home.”

By:Lynn Garafola (article)

Relevance to Personal Dance Experience

     To me, Twyla Tharp is an inspiration.  She has always tried to make the most out of everyone that she is in impending. In her books The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life, and The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons For Working Together she helps people find their inner creativeness and be more collaborative with others.

     To see the strive of starting a new dance company and creating a new dance style seems complex and stressful, but she managed to pull through with perseverance and determination.  With her works still being used today, she clearly made an impact on dance history.
     As a growing dancer, Twyla's story leaves me with hope for some sort of dance career even through the hardest times.  In my recently purchased book The Creative Habit, Twyla leaves stimulating quotes that aid in thinking outside of the box, and may help me in my choreographic process. I hope to leave an impact on people some day just as Twyla has on the American dancing society.

To Best understand Twyla Tharp is to see the dances that she has created, and how different they were for the time that they were presented.

In The Upper Room


Movin' Out


Twyla Tharp's Waterbaby Bagatelles