Word: tharpe
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DANCE Twyla Tharp is back, kicking hard about the sexes...
...Twyla Tharp is back in more ways than one. Having stopped dancing at 45, she is performing again at 50. Having lost her company in the toils of the recession, she has organized a new pickup group, with some of the sleek dancers on loan from other troupes. And Tharp is also talking. Not quite an unprecedented situation for this iconoclastic choreographer, but an unusual one. In Men's Piece, the highlight among four premieres, she tells what is on her mind about men and women and the dance they must do through life together, illustrated by duets with Kevin...
...work ends on a more serious note with an idea that seems close to Tharp. The last duet, she announces, is based on the principle of isometrics, "two equal forces from opposite directions . . . that combats earthquakes and other slippage." In the end she concludes, "If you're speaking of love, you really must include the element of uncertainty -- and perhaps it's best approached as the art of constant maintenance." That is sobering counsel for would-be participants in the sexual game, but it applies to choreographers as well. Tharp's current troupe is mostly new to her work...
More and more, however, Tharp is attracted to classical pointe work. Three of her dancers, Robert LaFosse, Stacy Caddell and Allison Brown, are from New York City Ballet. On opening night they appeared in Octet, a stringent black- and-white ballet set to an Edgar Meyer score. That was followed by a larky grand pas classique performed by Isabelle Guerin and Patrick Dupond, both visitors from the Paris Opera Ballet. Tharp says, "When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art." Perhaps that...
Glass has always been an enthusiastic collaborator, working with Theater Artist Robert Wilson in Einstein on the Beach, fellow Composer Robert Moran in The Juniper Tree and Choreographer Twyla Tharp in In the Upper Room. But 1000 Airplanes may be his most daring ensemble effort yet, involving Chinese- American Playwright David Henry Hwang and Scenic Designer Jerome Sirlin. The trio has produced a science-fiction music drama that is part Freud, part Kafka and part Steven Spielberg...