Interview with Twyla Tharp
Twyla Tharp is a dancer, choreographer, and author.
Twyla Tharp Reads Matt Drudge
Contents
Max Raskin: For someone who had been exposed to dance through your latest production — “In The Upper Room” — what would be the next thing you'd recommend they go see? How does someone get into dance?
Twyla Tharp: Unfortunately, you're asking the wrong person. I am not a critic, nor am I a historian. And because I work all the time, I never go to see dance myself.
MR: But must consume a lot of other art and media in your life?
TT: Yes.
MR: Where do you consume your art now?
TT: Are we talking media? Art? Internet? All of the above?
MR: All of the above.
TT: I read a lot because I like to stay off of the devices as much as possible in order to make it possible to sleep. And I began reading in books — I enjoy the printed page. So I currently just discovered Graham Greene.
It’s interesting to see the evolution of that format which I find to be almost nonfiction. There's a problem set out, and it's got to be discovered. Most of the writers were journalists. Even Balzac, who probably originated the detective story, was a journalist. The divide between fiction and nonfiction is kind of a rub.
MR: What about for music?
TT: Well, what do you want to know? I find that Bach is a very good source of everything living. Beethoven is a great favorite. I've done the complete Diabelli, the complete Hammerklavier, the complete 7th. Brahms is a huge favorite.
MR: Do you have records still?
TT: I do have a lot of these recordings, but they are unfortunately in storage. The digital realizations of this stuff I just get off YouTube or something horrible.
Why do I say horrible? It's only because there's nothing very personal about the internet. I suppose people who do Instagramming and who do Facebooking would take great exception to that remark, but I find it's almost anonymous.
I don't trust it. If I'm holding the entity in my hand, I believe it.
MR: That comes across in your work — the early stuff in Central Park was tangible to people.
TT: You're talking about Hair?
MR: No, I saw some videos of you practicing with your dance troupe in Central Park.
TT: Oh, a piece called “Medley.” That would be in the late Sixties. But I also did the choreography for Miloš Forman's “Hair.” A lot of it was shot in the Park.
MR: Do you feel out of step because everything today is so much on screens and digital and impersonal?
TT: Hello! I grew up working in a drive-in theater. Okay? My parents owned a movie house. I worked in the theater from the time I was 8.
MR: But did you like that?
TT: It wasn't a question of liking. I had a job. I was working in the snack bar, and I was car hopping, taking people's money at the age of eight.
MR: That reminds me of American Graffiti. It’s a different century.
TT: Well, we all have our different centuries. It comes down to curiosity, doesn't it? And I do read. What do I read? I read The New York Times. I read The Post. I read Drudge. I read the BBC…
MR: …you read Drudge?
TT: Oh yes — you better believe it.
Also the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Daily Beast. I check in pretty much daily because it's my business to try to get a feel for who, where is thinking what, why.
MR: Does that consciously come out in your work?
TT: Oh, I wouldn't know how to do that.
MR: So just subconsciously?
TT: It's way too time consuming. You'd have to take notes — oh, dear…not that.
The Company Line
MR: Were you ever influenced by any psychoanalytic thinking?
TT: Heavens, no.
MR: Why do you say, "heavens, no"?
TT: Because to me that is never ending. Starting with William James. That's a deep rabbit hole and it's got many, many caverns and twists and turns to it.
MR: But that's a little bit like your work, no?
TT: My work is concrete and tangible. It takes no argument.
MR: I think you're a genius.
TT: Well, gee. Wow. Thank you. I don't know what that means. I do know that I am very and have always been very interested in the simultaneity of thinking between what are ordinarily considered different genres where I can find a commonality. And I look to reinforce that which these days politically in this country makes life fairly confusing.
But one does not give up on the virtues of unification, which I think is a subject matter for a great deal of art and for a great deal of science.
MR: Do you think that your performers have changed over the years?
TT: Very much so. Because they're bombarded with information and their entire self-presentation mode is very, very, very altered.
In the olden days, when I began to work, work was a bit like a chapel. You went in, there was one source, that was it. That's what you were doing. And in some ways, it was very cult-like.
There were no “gigs” — everyone identified with the cause of the moment…whether you were in the Graham company, the Taylor company, the Cunningham company, the Balanchine company. That's what you did. That's who you were. That's what you believed in. And you yourself were at the service of that. Dancers no longer function like this.
Dancers now have a very strong identity, a very strong profile, a very strong agenda for themselves individually, which I cannot argue with.
I would have thought that that would make my life very much more difficult. In fact, working with this recent group that you saw — they were amazing to work with.
I worked hard, as did everybody, to make it possible for people to lead their own lives. It wasn't about doing my work — it was about their participating in this adventure to the degree that made individual sense to them.
I had dancers in there from four companies, from the City Ballet, from American Ballet Theater, from the Ailey, and from Graham company and they were all rehearsing separate schedules. The only time I could get them all together was 10:00 in the morning which means we were doing full bang-on run-throughs of the entire show including intermission beginning at 10:00 in the morning for three weeks.
Workers and the Creator
MR: Do you give reading recommendations?
TT: No — it's easy to tell people what to do. It's very hard to help guide them in such a way that they can discover what's important to them.
MR: Do you view yourself as an educator?
TT: No, I don't. I view myself as a worker and anybody who wishes to learn from me is welcome if they put in their time and can do the work. It's kind-of an apprentice situation and I'm happy to serve in that capacity, but I don't tell people what to do.
MR: You used the term worker. I would've thought that you would've used the word creator. What's the difference to you?
TT: There's one Creator for me and then the rest of us do labor.
MR: Do you believe in God?
TT: I would not go there. I'm a Quaker. At least my family is Quaker.
MR: Did you go to meetings?
TT: I did. As a very young child, my grandparents were rural, and I attended Quaker services three times a week including silent meetings.
MR: Did the spirit ever move you?
TT: I was a child. I didn't know how to speak. And even if I did, children were to be seen, not heard. That's why I became a dancer…so I could protest.
The Physical Instrument
MR: What do you eat?
TT: Because I am still working and still using the physical instrument, I try to keep my calories at about 1,200, or 1,000 even — to keep weight off my feet.
I have a wonderful house helper who makes me a very hearty soup once a week. I have soup for breakfast and a grapefruit. For lunch, I do heavy duty protein and vegetables. And then I either do or don't nibble later in the day.
MR: What do you snack on?
TT: I don't.
MR: There's a joke about synagogues with a punchline, “That's the synagogue I don't go to.”
What's the snack you don't eat?
TT: I don't. That's what I eat.
Listen, dancers are very disciplined. A good dancer is an extremely regimented person, and the body does what it's told to do, not what it wants.
MR: Are you an early morning person?
TT: Yes. Farm hours.
MR: You’re very Midwestern — what do you think you retain from the Midwest?
TT: Everything.
MR: I don’t know why but I imagined you being ethereal — but you're very in the real world. You're really engaged with everything.
TT: I'm curious.
MR: Were you curious from an early age?
TT: I've always been a big snoop.
MR: What does that mean?
TT: Well, comes to mind my brothers and sisters. My brothers are twins. And my sister was born three days before they were a year old. So ostensibly, they were triplets. They developed a private language before they learned to speak English. My parents could not understand them, but I could, and so I translated.
I began to see from an early age that the outsider who looked in was in a stronger position than the insider who looked out.
MR: In your life, have you ever been a part of any community that you feel really in tune with?
TT: My groups. Yes.
By the way, you realize I am pulling your leg most of the time. Right? You know that.
MR: Yeah.
MR: Are people afraid of you?
TT: I wouldn't know.
MR: You wouldn't know?
TT: How would I know? Do you think I walk up to somebody and say, "Are you afraid of me?"
MR: No, but you're a perceptive person.
TT: I told you I'm snoopy.
MR: Isn't that a perfect thing to be able to be snoopy about?
David Foster Tharp
MR: Did any of your dance groups have a class clown?
TT: I would say me. Check on our webpage and there may be a clip of “Eight Jelly Rolls” where essentially I portray a drunk. And I've always been a clown. Buster Keaton is my idea of righteous.
MR: There’s a clown-ness and a playfulness in what you do.
TT: It’s a point of view that I find to be very sustaining and to have a kind of energy to it and optimism. I realize that clowns and comics are bleak, sometimes, very black people. However, the overall thrust of that kind of humor is survival — whether it's the banana peel and you still can get up — you will make it through somehow.
MR: How were you exposed to Jelly Roll Morton for “Eight Jelly Rolls”?
TT: My mother was a concert pianist and I studied keyboard from the time I was two years old. I have made it my business to be attached to the beginnings — you might say — of American popular music starting with Jelly Roll Morton. That recording I used was from ‘27.
The reason that it is logical for dance is because there's so much vitality in the music and so much imagination in the music, and it's so extraordinarily, rhythmically sophisticated. I made it a cause to work my way selectively up from the beginnings of American jazz in the 20th century into whatever was contemporaneous at the moment.
MR: It just clicked for me who you remind me of. It took me a little while to get there, but I think this is a really good analogy. Do you know the writer David Foster Wallace?
TT: Of course I know the writer.
If only I had known the David Foster Wallace person earlier, I would've had him to a rehearsal and he would still be alive.
MR: You remind me a lot of him.
TT: Well, I take that as a mark of…yeah…he's great. And he has this depth of character and qualities and ultimately, it comes down to a huge degree of compassion with him.
MR: But the difference is that I think you care more about your audience than he did.
TT: I doubt that. You might believe that from him, but not ultimately. I doubt that.
MR: I don't think you write a big honkin’ book Infinite Jest if you care about your audience. That is not an accessible book, but your art is accessible.
TT: He was very young when he wrote that book.
MR: But your early stuff like “Tank Dive” was incredible.
TT: Where did you see that?
MR: I found a clip somewhere on something.
TT: No. I tried to keep these things in my archive. What did you see in “Tank Dive”?
MR: It’s the same thing that’s genius about the Zoom performances, which I haven’t seen — you take what would be a limitation, what would be a form, and you work consciously with that to say something.
TT: Yes. I had the opportunity to do a new work during the pandemic. I have a terrific assistant who happens to live in Brooklyn and she had a computer, and I had a computer. In two weeks, I was able to build a 40-minute work for 17 dancers because I could rehearse two studios simultaneously on Zoom. Yes, I could go in and out of two studios. I doubled my time. That was pretty good.
Why Go Out When You Can Stay In
MR: Do you live in Manhattan?
TT: Yes.
MR: Do you have a favorite place to walk around the city?
TT: I have a small studio in the apartment. I walk around that.
MR: No, but I'm saying, do you have a favorite neighborhood to just stroll around?
TT: Oh, I understood what you said. I go for days on end not going outside.
MR: Oh, really? Why is that?
TT: Because I can.
MR: You don’t like to go out?
TT: It's not that I don't like to go out, it's that I like to work.
MR: You're not agoraphobic or anything?
TT: No. I'm a farm girl, man.
MR: Do people recognize you on the street?
TT: On occasion.
MR: But is it few enough that you're happy to engage with someone who does?
TT: Depends on my mood of the day.
MR: But you're not one of these famous people like Kardashian or Barack Obama where you can’t walk down the street?
TT: Oh, I don't think so. Look, I make dances because I want to make dances. And I'm not saying that Barack Obama became president of the United States because he wanted to be famous, but I never thought about celebrityhood or even really money. I figured you just do the best you can do and either it's you or it's not.
MR: Where are your glasses from?
TT: I don't know. They're very ancient. It seems to say O’Day from l.a.Eyeworks. That's the best I can do to help you. Do you really like them?
MR: Yeah, I do. I think they're very cool.
TT: How come? What's cool about them?
MR: Because I have the same speckled thing.
TT: We all want real horn rims. They don't exist anymore.
MR: Are you interested in fashion at all?
TT: Yes. I'm curious as to what people are wearing and why. It also helps to give a sense of where peoples’ fantasies are. And also, of course, I worked with fashion designers, clothes designers since the beginning. “Deuce Coupe” was designed by a fashion designer named Scott Barrie, a man named Chester Weinberg did “As Time Goes By,” which was my second piece. Norma Kamali designed for me and so did Oscar de la Renta, Calvin Klein.
And it's because these people understand the body and movement and you have an opportunity when you look at fashion to see different notions of how the body can contain more space than it actually occupies.
Twyla Tharp’s Morning Wiggle
MR: I read that when you wake up, you’ll wiggle around?
TT: Oh, that's on a good day.
MR: What would you recommend to my readers as an early morning, still-in-bed stretch?
TT: It wouldn't matter what I told them to do, they're not going to do it.
MR: No, that's not true.
TT: They might do it for a day, two days. I would like to believe it could become habit.
MR: What would you tell me to do then? I do jiu-jitsu and I’d love to try to stretch.
TT: How well do you do jiu-jitsu?
MR: I started about two years ago and it changed my life. Anywhere between two and four times a week. You’re welcome to come any time you want with me to check it out; you’d love it.
TT: Three times a week is serious. That's real. And it's a very, very good practice. An insistence on, “we do this today, tomorrow we do that, and then you do that,” and it keeps going and it keeps growing — that's real.
MR: So what would you recommend to me for a morning stretch?
TT: You lie on your back. You start with the top of your body, with the head. Rotate it clockwise, then you rotate it counterclockwise. Right? Then you go to your shoulders, upper back, to the back, roll them forward to the back, roll them forward. Now we're going to move down to the abs. We're going to go in all the way in, exhale, in through the nose, out through the mouths.
Now in your bed, you're going to contract your lower back. Push it into the mattress, bring it back, straighten it up, hyper extend it, pull it back, push it down, pull it up, push it out, pull it down.
Now from the pelvis, you are going to rotate your legs to an open position to the best of your ability. It won't be pretty but do it. Open toes out. Now reach toes down, stretch your leg muscles completely. Reach the pelvis back and the heel forward — both sides. Now torque to the right. Now torque to the left. Now torque to the right. Now you can start to one and two and three and four and turn the one and two and just do this all up. Bap, bi, bap, ba. And you're done.
MR: Do you do that in the morning?
TT: Oh, I don't do that.
Twyla Tharp’s Deadlift Record
MR: What's the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?
TT: I get out of bed properly which is not to try and sit up on the edge of the bed but to roll over the edge.
MR: And then what's the first thing you do?
TT: It depends on whether it's an on day or an off day. Usually, I do three on, one off. Okay? If it's an on day, I will take a shower straight away in order to try and shock my body.
MR: Do you take cold showers?
TT: I alternate hot and cold to try and shock the body into its best possible zone for work. A long time ago, I trained myself to be able to start exercising at 6:00 in the morning which is brutal. But I did it because working on films, it’s the only time you can count on — so I learned to do this.
So I will start early and work for about an hour and a half which is going to include a lot of stretching, which is going to include aerobic, and which is going to include, for lack of a better term, “phrase work” which a composer at the keyboard would call perhaps a melody if they're lucky.
MR: Do you do any of this to music?
TT: Oh, sometimes. But music is not a requirement.
MR: Where do your thoughts wander?
TT: Well, I'm sometimes my coach because I have had to train myself through various disciplines. The classical ballet bar is not designed for an older body…in my forties, in other words, I transferred from doing ballet through boxing. You know who Teddy Atlas is?
MR: No.
TT: He’s a boxing guru type — I worked with him for about six months for getting into condition for the LA Olympics where we were dancing. I wanted to be really in top form and I was about 44. And after that period, I went to weight training, and I did serious weight training for about 20 years. Do you want to guess my deadlift record?
MR: Well, the way you asked the question, it's going to be higher than I think it's going to be. So I’d say 200 pounds.
TT: 227.
My body weight for three on the bench. Serious weight training, which I believe stands me in good stead. I like to think all this work I've deposited in the bank.
Twylight
MR: Do you think about the afterlife at all?
TT: Do we have to do this?
MR: No, if you don't want it, we don't have to.
TT: No, I'm teasing you.
MR: You're not teasing.
TT: I'm superstitious. Okay?
Look, it's a day at a time. I think that as with anybody who works during an entire lifetime in a focused way, you want to believe that you've made a dent, that you have made a difference, that you're leaving something for generations that follow to get to and then launch from rather than having to learn the same tiresome lessons all over again. Right? And that would be the archive. I have an intensive archive.
And when you go into questions of the afterlife, it just reminds me that I haven't located the archive yet.
MR: Do you have an archivist?
TT: No, I don't have an archivist. We've done a very simple archiving situation and most of the materials of this career are digitized and we currently have 80 terabytes, an enormous amount.
MR: If I didn’t have a job, I’d love to be your archivist.
TT: Okay, well, you're hired. What we have to do is threefold. We have to figure out where it's ultimately going to be housed. We have to figure out how we can get the material organized in such a way that people can understand how it is that dance A became dance B. And we need to be able to pull out technical matters that can become exercises, etudes, and training for future generations.
MR: What about your written archives? Do you have correspondence with people?
TT: All the above. All of that's in the archive and currently, it is simply organized by date.
MR: Do you have a biographer?
TT: I'd rather like to think I've done a good job.
MR: I think you should have a biographer.
TT: It is being discussed.
MR: Do you have any religious practice whatsoever?
TT: Well, the word religious is very slippery as our friend Wallace would say.
MR: He said you don’t get to choose that you worship, only what you worship.
TT: So I'm not quite sure what you mean by that word.
MR: Let me be more precise. Do you have any defined liturgical practice?
TT: In the sense of do I belong to Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Jewish, Catholic…?
MR: Correct.
TT: No.
MR: Do you say any prayers?
TT: Oh, I think really that's what a dance is.
MR: Okay, let me rephrase: Do you recite any written liturgy composed by others?
TT: I'm not good with poetry.
MR: Do you meditate?
TT: Again, I think that's what a dance is. When you transfer information from here to there, from there to here, the body is doing this and that's meditation.
MR: This would not be a dogmatic religion, but experiential.
TT: Well, in the sense that I think of them as discoveries and not dogma. Absolutely not dogma.
MR: You don't believe in dogma?
TT: Dogma being that which tells people what is right or wrong?
MR: Correct.
TT: That's difficult to say I do not believe in because as a child, I read the Bible deeply. You don't forget it.
MR: Do you read it still?
TT: On occasion when I'm feeling very, very depressed and I have nothing else to read, I might pull it out.
The Creative Habit and Fugue
MR: Do you believe in God?
TT: You've asked this question before. And I think that I believe in better practices as opposed to less good practices and that's the best I can do for you on that subject.
MR: Jerry Garcia said something like he hopes what he created with the Grateful Dead would be transmitted. It sounds like you want your excellence and this thing that you've created in life to be transmitted.
TT: Available.
MR: Do you see the impact you have had already?
TT: In some ways, I do. In terms of what dancers are expected to do physically. When I started working in the early Seventies, dancers were very segregated. You had the classical ballet dancers, you had the modern dancers, you got good, you got bad. Can we not please all just get together and do it all? Now dancers are expected to be able to do it all. That I think is something that I've been able to encourage.
MR: What would you view as your non-dance contribution to art?
TT: Oy. That one is way more difficult. That's a summa question, right? And I don't know that I can take it up really. Would you like to repeat that?
MR: Without specific reference to particular form, what is your contribution to art?
TT: There's a book called The Creative Habit. It's the second of four that I've written. I wrote it for young people because it reinforces the notion of tradition, the notion of discipline, and the notion of continuity. I think of all my books it’s the most valuable and I think it will have an impact.
Then there's a piece called “The Fugue” — which was done in ‘70. It's no music. It's done on an amplified stage. It's in three parts.
MR: Was that the one that was done in the warehouse in Brooklyn?
TT: That was called “Stride” — that was done in ‘65. “The Fugue” required five years of working to understand some of the rules and regulations of what's possible with the human body if you want to construct movement.
I'm sure that if I can figure out how to keep “The Fugue” visually preserved, that it will be valuable for people as long as people can move…which may not be all that much longer given the internet and all this stuff in the metaverse, right?
MR: I teach a class in crypto at NYU and I think next year we’re going to teach a class in the metaverse on the metaverse.
TT: One needs to learn how to address that world because that's where it's going to be. And the physical, tangible this-ness of us is going to alter and I'm interested in that.
That's one of the reasons I think “The Fugue” is very important because it deals with movement abstractly even though it's being done by physical bodies.
A Happier Body
MR: So what was the impact you think you’ll have on art?
TT: Well, it's on kids. It's on young people. It's on people who have a creative block and want to know what to do to be able to get back to work. It's on young people who say, “What do I do to start?”
I encourage somebody going, “I've been doing this over and over.” Yeah, yeah. Okay, fine. Now let's get on with it to somewhere else.
The book is designed to help people who are curious about starting or who are frustrated midstream. I think that that will be a value.
MR: I think that your contribution to art is in making something transcendent but also accessible to people.
TT: Right. Right.
MR: That's it.
TT: Well, that's not just my doing. That's been fairly common.
MR: I tell you, I've seen a lot of stuff. I'm telling you, I've seen a lot of stuff. I see stuff. Art pieces — drawing art, TV, this, that, and the other thing. I actually think TV they do pretty good. But for dance, going from something that is so highfalutin and making it something that is moving is so cool.
TT: I appreciate that. And it's a very real thing for me. As I told you, I grew up in a drive-in theater and we sold tickets to the general public. I've always thought the general public was very intelligent. I don't require an elite audience. I'm happy to have patrons, patronage. These are connoisseurs of a specialized sort. That's wonderful. But more, it's about how many people can you reach.
And it's always my belief that the greater the artists, the more humanity there is within their work. And that's why you got Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn. Why you have Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky — because they dig down into what everybody actually needs but they expand it out to a huge net.
MR: And play is what everyone needs. When I look at your stuff — play and fun and movement. Movement is what people need.
TT: Yeah, totally. Because if the body's in movement, the body's thinking better. The body is happier with itself. It hates everything a little less.