Word: twyla
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Starting with Push Comes to Shove, you could call Twyla Tharp Baryshnikov's inspired biographer. Push saw him as an immigrant dancer in a new and daunting company (A.B.T.) and country, determined to assert himself, join the fun, court the girls and still deal with the fact that he is irremediably different, set apart by culture and genius. By the time The Little Ballet came along in 1983, Misha was A.B.T.'s director, and that dance was a hilarious, poignant picture of a harried boss trying to cope with a fractious company. It was the dance equivalent...
...1970s and '80s, and probably for a long time to come. In those years the notion of this paradigm of nobility mixing it up with modern dance seemed absurd. But a closer look at the record reveals he was already seeking out alliances with modern choreographers. When Twyla Tharp created Push Comes to Shove for him in 1976, she revealed a whole new Misha: rueful, droll, an outsider trying to get in -- and just as eagerly bursting...
...James L. Brooks has endured his harshest professional challenge. Last August, after three years of work, he had the first test screening of I'll Do Anything, his Hollywood father-daughter story with musical numbers written by Prince, Carole King and Sinead O'Connor and with choreography by Twyla Tharp. It's tough enough under the best of circumstances for the fretful filmmaker to let go of his babies and present them to audiences. But this time Brooks saw his anxiety justified. Audience response was calamitous: 100 people walked out, and opinion cards showed they hated the songs...
...then there is that inimitable chatterbox Twyla Tharp, who lightens a dry, cluttered program on postmodern dance. She talks up a storm about her work and, in rehearsal, cows a dancer and his ballerina into showing more feeling for each other. How did she get into choreography? "Nobody else would tolerate me so I had to make up my own dances," she explains. And so the camera catches her alone in a studio, bulky in practice clothes and noshing on a carrot, as she starts designing some steps to a Sousa march. Delightful...
THIS HAS BEEN A BUMPER YEAR for Twyla Tharp. In January she staged a triumphant show of her quirky, inventive choreography at Manhattan's City Center. Next came a stint in Hollywood doing the dances for I'll Do Anything (to be released in 1993), and then the publication of her intelligent, candid-to-a-fault autobiography, Push Comes to Shove (Bantam; $24.50). That's enough for most busy artists, but energy is Tharp's signature both in choreography and in life. She has now renewed her partnership with Mikhail Baryshnikov for a 24-city national tour that started...