TWYLA THARP

  
Twyla Tharp has created some of the most innovative and popular work in contemporary dance since she formed her first company in 1965. She has always been interested in choreographing to pop music. She shook up the dance world in 1973 when she made Deuce Coupe for the Joffrey Ballet featuring the music of the Beach Boys, and she‘s set dances to music by David Byrne, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, and Supertramp. A few years ago, while working with her five-member company on some Billy Joel songs, Ms. Tharp hatched the idea “to do a big production.” She ended up conceiving, choreographing, and directing Movin’ Out, a dance musical based on 31 songs by pop star Billy Joel, which opened on Broadway in the fall of 2002.

Tharp had been on Broadway before. Her company has played short engagements in Broadway theaters, and she directed a 1985 stage version of the movie musical Singin’ in the Rain that ran for 367 performances. But the latter experience was, as she wrote in her autobiography Push Comes to Shove, “my worst nightmare” that left her “humiliated by the horrible reviews.” It clearly hasn’t deterred her from trying again. To her, being on Broadway simply means more people will see her work than if she stuck to two-week engagements at City Center or The Joyce. I spoke to her in late July over breakfast at her hotel in Chicago, where Movin’ Out was having an arduous seven-week pre-Broadway tryout. The Chicago reviews had been quite negative, yet Tharp, a small 61-year-old woman with owlish glasses and a no-nonsense demeanor, calmly talked about her work in the midst of completely re-doing the first act of the show.

What is it about Broadway theater that attracts you?
The audience. Reaching a broad audience has always been one of my concerns for dance. A restricted audience is not a healthy thing -- not just commercially but emotionally. It’s extremely important for the art form to reach out. Since Deuce Coupe premiered here in Chicago, it was exactly the same concept, making dance relevant to our culture in our time. Take it on. Deal with it. Bring in the broad spectrum of people, not just those who can afford to support the ballet and the opera, whom I also love and value. But I also want to know about what does the guy in the street think, how does his mind work, and the farmer, who comes into these shows here and says Oh, I see, ABCD. 

Do Broadway theater audiences really seem very different to you than the audiences for dance?
No, there are just more people in the audience. To me, an audience is an audience. I have great respect for them, every single audience, wherever, whenever. I want more of them.

I was fascinated to read in Push Comes to Shove that you conceived Deuce Coupe by studying the Joffrey’s audience. What did you see?
I saw an audience that wanted more “entertainment” than what we used to call high art. In the early ‘70s, that was a big dialogue: high-art/low-art. And I’m going “OK, nobody does higher art than The Fugue, say.” I don’t know if you’re familiar with that.

One of my all-time favorite pieces of art. I’ve seen it about 12 times.
Thank you. Nobody does higher or better art than that in dance. You don’t have to print the better part. Let’s just leave it at higher. I’m going, “OK, this [Joffrey] audience didn’t come to be challenged. The house is too big. The production component’s got to be overblown. It can’t be the intimate house The Fugue works best in, with absolutely no production whatsoever, stripped completely bare. That’s not what works here. Let’s go for presenting dance of high caliber in an envelope that works here, with the accoutrements, the music, the structure of the piece.”

I’m curious if there was some similar experience with this show of studying Broadway audiences.
No. By now I’ve had a career with audiences. I’ve done feature films, I’ve done shows, I’ve worked in commercial situations. Deuce Coupe I had never. That was my first commercial audience. This is a way down the pike. I think one of the huge gratifications for all of us working on this show is that we have very supportive audiences, enthusiastic, up on their feet yelling audiences, which is something you don’t often get with dance. Which has always been frustrating to me. I’ve always wanted a rock & roll audience when I’m onstage.

I always felt like I was at a rock & roll concert seeing your company.
We always wanted them to stand up and scream. Get up! 

Movin’ Out is an unprecedented hybrid of rock concert and story ballet in some sense.
What do you think we should call it, darling?

Good question. Tell me what your original vision was, what it looks like now, and what if anything it’s going to change into.
Right, beginning, middle, and end. The first workshop was obviously in the studio. The band was off to the side.

Even before the workshop, was it originally something that started as a project for your company, or was the intention to do a Broadway show?
The same as Deuce Coupe. My company was in Deuce Coupe. This is the same way. The six dancers who’ve been on the road as Twyla Tharp Dance for the last 2 ½ years they’ve also been working on this show. We were working on the original material. The idea was to do a big production. Rather than go to a ballet company to mount this or the Met, I decided we’ll go to Broadway to mount this because I think that’s where the audience will feel more comfortable, in that kind of house.

When you were envisioning a big production, it was...what? A dance concert, a book musical?
All of the above. It was a narrative that could build to a second act that would not just be a revue. Didn’t want to do a revue. Wanted a through-line so that I could have an emotional journey.

As opposed to something like Jerome Robbins’ Broadway or Fosse.
Right. I wanted to have something that could have big production with it, if we needed it. I probably structured it more closely to opera than to traditional musical comedy.

How so?
Mozart is a dear, dear favorite of mine, a real relative, if I may say so, a cousin. How he did Figaro, the way the narrative functions in that, or The Magic Flute, is very interesting to me. When the characters are introduced, when they have arias, when there’s recitativo, when is the action offstage, when is the action offstage, where are we going to, where are the choral passages. That kind of structure was always in my mind as a format for this. It wasn’t your standard musical comedy crossover number, the 11:00 number, that kind of thing.
One of the things I tried with this, which I’m now altering, was introducing the entire cast and then the lead players would have arias right at the top of the show. That’s what I tried. WRONG! OK. Get into the action. Get into the action. Get into the action. 

Meaning that it seemed too slow to stop and introduce all the characters. It needed action you could follow story-wise.
Forget the word story. Let’s come back to the word story. It’s an interesting word, but in this context let me just say action instead. Story involves adjectives and adverbs. We don’t have adjectives and adverbs, we can do action. As Balanchine so famously said, “There are no mothers-in-law in the ballet.” That would be called story. Action would be called who’s standing center stage and why. I’m striving to get all the mother-in-laws out of the first act. 

I hadn’t thought about opera structure -- it’s an intriguing way of understanding this show. I’m curious about the relationship to the song lyrics.
I’ll come back to the song lyrics, but while we’re talking about the opera component, let me say that it’s deep background. There’s also another one, which is music videos, the three-minute non-literal emotional context that that genre has developed. If it were a video, each scene would be different, would be realizable as a self-contained music video, which again is very different from musical comedy. It would be a string of these and they would hold themselves together. 
I’m interested in perception. How do people communicate and how do people receive information, alright? So there’s a woman who was seated next to a very good friend of mine, and my friend was watching her alternate between covering her eyes and covering her ears. At intermission my friend goes, “What’s happening?” She goes, “Oh, I’m loving it, but I don’t know whether to look at it or listen to it. I’m trying both. I think I’m liking looking at it better.”

People have trouble taking in left-brain and right-brain information simultaneously. What we’ve found here, which has been a BIG BIG piece of information, is that people will not easily connect what they see with what they’re hearing. I’d assumed that people would look at two people onstage, [bandleader Michael] Cavanaugh is up there singing about Brenda and Eddie, they’ll know this is Brenda and Eddie. WRONG! Wrong! Wrong! What you’ve gotta do is forget about Cavanaugh, Brenda and Eddie, forget about naming these people, and just take them to the audience as principal players and give them the materials to develop your own visual story. Don’t feed in Billy’s language, because then you become too literal, and dance does not work well literally.

If you listen to the words, it’s sometimes related to the action, but not always. And if you’ve been trained to listen, you’re still listening.
Exactly. What you have to do, which we did in the second act, is just go emotionally. Cuz by the time I got to the second act in the workshop, I went, “OK, all you guys out there wanting story and narrative and character, you’ve got ‘em, now leave me alone while we do what we do, we go through emotion and give you the second act.” The audience here is going, “Let’s get to the good stuff, let’s get to the gut.” Now I’m backing up and taking out the information given by language and going more strongly to the emotional condition realized through action. 

So now let me go back to the other thing we obviously have, which is the ballet. Probably my favorite 19th century ballet is Giselle. Two acts. First act is betrayal. Second act is redemption. We’ve got two acts. First act is betrayal. Second act is redemption. End of story.

I want to ask you about audience again. There are a handful of shows that have been successful on Broadway in recent years that paved the way for this kind of experiment. The ones that people talk about are Contact and Mamma Mia, but I think it goes back to The Lion King, Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, The Who’s Tommy.
I never saw Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. You see, there’s a big difference between someone who takes a creative masterpiece of another epoch, whether it’s Shakespeare or Petipa, and gives it a contemporary spin. That’s a very different situation than if you’re starting from scratch and concocting your own elements of story. 

Right. I’m just wondering if the success of those shows with audiences provided any inspiration or encouragement.
No, see, when I’m doing any commercial work, I don’t go to market research. I don’t go to “Who’s our target audience and how do I reach them?” I go to “How can I get to the most people possible?”

And how do you know that?
You don’t know that, you have to trust what you believe in. I’ve been fortunate to find that if I’m interested in something, chances are the audience will be. 

Do you go to rock concerts at all?
Not a lot. I don’t go to a lot of anything a lot. I read a lot.

How did you come to making a show with this music?
I’ve known Billy’s music all along, as it’s come out album by album. And I’ve always responded to it. I started hearing it differently probably around three years ago, and I started by responding to the energy of it. Billy’s interest in classical music seemed to me a very useful leaping off point. I thought he might really be interested in seeing his music in movement. Composers love to see their music in movement. Beethoven loved to write dance music. Mozart wanted to be a dancer. All the classical composers have had an interest in movement. I thought, gee, Billy’s probably going to be receptive to the idea. But I’m not going to go to him empty-handed. Let’s make sure we have something to say with it and that it really dances. Some music dances, some doesn’t. I went into the studio with six dancers and started working on some songs out of context. I developed about 20 minutes of work. We looked at it together, he said, “Yeah, I think this is something.”

Did he have any input on songs you used, or any restrictions?
Not a one.

“Piano Man” is an obvious absence.
By the end of that first meeting, I said, “Billy, I’m going to need ALL the music.” He said, “OK. Fine, you can have it all.” He didn’t hold anything back. At the end of our one-hour meeting, it was “Go!” It wasn’t, “My lawyers will call your lawyers, let’s talk, oh maybe, if it’s developed this way....” None of that. It was Go! Which is extraordinary, and which always gets a relationship off to a good start. 

In terms of “Piano Man,” it is in the subtext. The vocalist is the narrator of the show. What I felt was that the simple spine of the show was one line: “Sing to me, muse, of the rage of Achilles.” Do you know what it is? 

That’s the first line of The Odyssey.
The Iliad.

Of course, The Iliad. “Μήυιυ άειδε, Θεά, Πηληιάδεω Άχιληος…”
Go, man! Go! I envy you! 

So that was to me clear. “Sing to me, muse, of the rage of Achilles.” Achilles is the men of the Vietnam War in our time. Me is the audience. Who’s the muse? Muse is The Piano Man. It’s so much about the narrator as a repository, as Homer was, of so much cultural information. Now I’m not equating Billy to Homer -- let’s not go there -- but in my world of imagination, where I’m looking for constructs, that’s a big component. That tells you something about who your characters are and how to focus the material. 

Was it always thought that the music would be live?
Yes. Live music is so much fun and creates so much energy. I’ve always liked big energy.

Ever had a live rock band before?
No. We played all the old American music live -- the Fats Waller music [Sue’s Leg], the Beiderbecke with a whole swing band [The Bix Pieces], the Morton [Eight Jelly Rolls] was done live, that was an eight-piece band. The energy you get from live music is so different from the recordings. 

To what extent do you have a sense of this piece as pulling in or revisiting stuff from your past work like Hair and Short Stories?
Of course. I see this as encyclopedic, definitely.

Tell me about that.
First of all, I’ve been doing a lot of talking. You tell me what you saw last night, and then I’ll return to talking. 

What did I see? You catch me unprepared to say what I saw. Let me see if I can put words to what I saw. I want to answer your question but I have to shift my brain.
OK, so flip. And don’t censor.

All right. For me, the very beginning was tricky. It seemed to assume an audience connection to the music or something that wasn’t there. So the first 20 minutes was too much information and not enough information at the same time. “Movin’ Out” particularly, being the title song, didn’t give me what I thought I would get from that. The core dancers are amazing, John [Selway] and Keith [Roberts] and Elizabeth [Parkinson]. I went in and out of connecting with the lyrics and letting them go. I was more interested in the dancing and the music. I was sometimes surprised by how much feeling I had for some of the songs. I don’t always love Billy Joel’s songs. Some had a huge impact on me.
Like which?

I was really touched by “Just the Way You Are.” The song that had the most emotional impact of me in the show was “James.”
Oh, good for you! Excellent! We like that. These are good points. I totally agree about “Movin’ Out” -- it doesn’t tell you who’s doing what here and it needs to. That’s the next change.

Also it’s a very catchy song, and if it has a special meaning because it’s the title of the show, then the scene should have a special meaning.
Totally totally totally totally. I was trying to do something character-wise, which was misguided, rather than getting into action. These guys are doing yeoman duty. They come in at 10:00, rehearse 10 to 5, the same music but completely different action, sometimes not even with the same cast, then at night they have to go out and perform the socks off something they know is being changed and that they have a second version of going through their heads that they’re trying to remember from today! It’s a hard job. They’re fantastic.
The reason I’ve been able to do it -- these last 3 ½ weeks have been amazing -- we did our 50th or 51st show, we always get a standing ovation, spontaneous, generous, complete. The energy that gives to the performers is phenomenal. They’ve only been able to do it because the audience is up yelling and screaming. 

Were you aware of the problems as soon as it went up in Chicago or did the reviews tell you something you didn’t know?
I was aware of it when it went up. The problem with a machine this big is that you have to do a lot of planning before you can make a change. The wheels are spinning in one direction. The first thing you’ve gotta do is stop the machine, get it to move backwards, and then start it up again. You can’t do this overnight.

It wasn’t until it was all on its feet with lighting and set in place here that you could really see, “This isn’t what I envisioned.”
Remember, you’ve been in the studio, it’s got a mirror and three bare walls. You sit there very close, there is no wardrobe, there are no lights, it’s broad daylight or horrible neon light like in an underground parking garage. You have no sense of scale. None. You try to project it. You get better at projecting it. But then you get into a theater. You pull back. For the first time you can see the whole picture simultaneously, ’cause you’re not just on top of it. You see these elements in real scale. You see, holy shit! The feeling is very different.

And the audience is being stunned by this onslaught of visual information all at once.
It’s very very different.

I understand you’re working on changes. Any sense of what it’s going to be when it opens on Broadway?
It’s going to be a much more straight-through line. There will be more dancing in the first act. I’m not adding any new songs. 

So let me ask you another slightly different question. Thinking about Mark Morris’s experience with The Capeman and your experience with Singin’ in the Rain, I’m wondering if there’s something about the Broadway musical form or the industry that is unfriendly to outsiders or makes it difficult for outsiders to do a Broadway musical.
Listen, you know what, I don’t go there. I’m much more practical about it. I have an opportunity here. If I have problems, they’re my problems. I’ve got to get to work and address them. It’s not about the industry. Something’s not working. Make it work. So I can’t help you out with that sort of political issue. It’s not one that I look to. I never look at myself as being on the defensive or victimized. 

Here’s the situation with us. People respond to our second act. Our first act troubles them. There are real reasons. Not that we’re breaking format or being unconventional. We have real problems that keep it from working in our terms, not in somebody else’s definition of a musical comedy, which we’re not doing anyway. We have problems in our own terms, and it’s our responsibility to address them. This other issue is not my business. That’s politics. I’m doing this show, not politics.

Let’s go back to something I asked earlier, before you turned the tables and started picking my brain. The relationship of the material to some of your earlier work. Before I even saw the show I was thinking of Short Stories, a dance I really love because I love the Springsteen music, and it’s about relationships in turmoil. Some of that gets pulled in here. And also the Vietnam material, which figured in Hair. You mentioned this being encyclopedic in some way, I wonder if you’d say a little more about that.
We are obviously the sum total of our experiences.

May I quote you on that?
You may. I can’t help myself. Both in terms of structure and movement and characters and action, these are areas where I’ve been. I have more arrows in my quiver now than I did before, and I’d be foolish not to use them. So I could go through there and point out references and specific movements that are not just lifted from but borrowed and expanded on from probably 40 dances. I’m not going to do it sitting here right now. Sometime I might do it as a lecture with references on the side. 

The other big lesson was to clarify the genre. We were straddling the fences. There’s a horizontal line that divides the space. Above: sound. Below: visual. Never cross the line. We had been crossing two things -- we have got a full-length dance narrative evening that has lyrics. Swan Lake and Giselle didn’t have lyrics. There’s not a major dance narrative that has had lyrics behind it -- it’s like opera in that way. Now I’ve separated the lyrics from the dance, you never have to untwine them. Downstairs the narrative is told in movement. For something that’s been trying to call itself a musical, people expect a narrative in book-musical form, and we’re never going to do that. I don’t know if there’s ever been a show that completely invested its narrative in movement. I’ve gone about my business to clarify that we have, as opposed to tiptoeing around the edges. The whole reason I do what I do is there’s a truth in action that words sometimes belie. The Times called it a dance musical, which is probably the best definition. 

I was thinking about your question. Does Broadway want to change? I don’t know, and I don’t see myself as a missionary or a proselytizer. I’m affording entertainment and an experience to move people. It’s not outside the ken of what Broadway mandates. I’m just doing it in a slightly different way. I think there’s room for everybody.

Interviewed in 2002 for the New York Times -- see article here