Word: tharpe
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That prairie populism never left her, even as Tharp, a couple of decades later, became a darling of the avant-garde dance world. She shocked traditionalists with Deuce Coupe, her 1973 dance piece that wedded classical-ballet moves to Beach Boys songs. She worked with Mikhail Baryshnikov and David Byrne (and had romantic flings with both), shuttled between the American Ballet Theatre and Hollywood and then, in 2002, rocked Broadway with Movin' Out, her dance musical set to Billy Joel's greatest hits. Ballet choreographers like Jerome Robbins had done musicals before, but Tharp broke new ground, building...
...Tharp confesses she's never seen either show--she hasn't got a TV set, she says, and doesn't "know squat about ballroom dancing"--but cheers the trend. "It's great. I'm all in favor of it." And why not? Tharp has spent most of her career striving to expand dance's vocabulary and audience. "People often say to me, 'I don't know anything about dance.' I say, 'Stop. You got up this morning, and you're walking. You are an expert.' I'm very, very interested in how people who come to my shows with...
...Tharp, 68, is talking in her penthouse apartment overlooking New York City's Central Park. It's an airy, loftlike space with blond wood floors where, if you're lucky, she'll show off a step or two to illustrate a point. Pixieish and intense, she talks fast, stares hard, answers questions with more questions. It's not hard to understand her reputation as a prickly taskmaster...
...Tharp hasn't shied away from stretching her own conception of what art is. She has worked on Hollywood films (Hair and Ragtime, among others) and directed the 1985 Broadway revival of Singin' in the Rain, which got a critical drubbing that humiliated her. ("A catastrophe," she called it later.) Even after the success of Movin' Out, she had another misfire with The Times They Are A-Changin', in which she used a circus motif to illustrate the music of Bob Dylan--a conceit that no one much liked...
...wanted to do Dylan's love songs, she says, but was dissuaded for commercial reasons. Now she's returned to the basics: romance and movement--and winning over the audience. "It's called 'Make the folks feel a little better for an evening, and leave on a high,'" Tharp says. And if you miss the Balzac references, she'll probably forgive...