ABSOLUTELY TWYLA : Tharp is in a no-nonsense mode as she shapes 3 ABT premieres

NEW YORK —  Watching Twyla Tharp rehearse four American Ballet Theatre principal dancers in her new “Quartet” is a kind of revelation. Tharp’s a tough cookie. All business. Beyond her striving for technical and aesthetic perfection, what emerges is a deep, unswerving, and entirely unsentimental respect for her dancers.

Tharp is not gentle, not warm, is disinterested in excuses. Her style is direct, driving, almost hard-hearted. Very little escapes Tharp’s hawk’s eye, and anything that does is caught by Wendy Walker, her assistant on this piece (“My Gestapo,” Tharp calls her, jokingly) whose job it is to remember “everything.”

But none of the dancers--Cynthia Gregory, Cynthia Harvey, Ricardo Bustamante and company newcomer Guillaume Graffin--are cowed by the fiendish pace of the rehearsal, by Tharp’s demand for accuracy, or by her needling humor. Her clarity of vision, her extravagant expectations for them, her ability to quickly analyze any physical problem that hampers the correct execution of a step or phrase seems to carry them beyond what they imagined they could accomplish in this dance.

The most balletic of the three new dances Tharp has created for American Ballet Theater, “Quartet” is an intimidating piece even to watch, demanding of strength and stamina. It’s set to the punishing spur of Terry Riley’s restless, impatient “G Song.” (“It’s always a good idea to start with good music,” Tharp remarks. “That’s something you can never make up later.”) This is the first time the dancers have managed to run the dance straight through, and--gasping for breath--they seem amazed, delighted, relieved to have survived.

Without having taken any notes, Tharp rattles off corrections at top speed, in a monotone, as if it would be wasteful, pointless, to permit any expressiveness to enter her voice. She’s dealing in facts. Anyway, her time, most particularly her time with the dancers, is exceedingly precious. She has been working daily, non-stop, on the three new works and on two older pieces--”The Fugue” and “In the Upper Room”--with dancers in the studio from noon until 6 or 7 at night, and, doubtless, working on her own before and after.

When ABT had a midwinter break, she grabbed time to make a new piece for the Paris Opera Ballet. (See accompanying article.) So, within just under four weeks, she has four premieres happening in four different theaters in Miami, Chicago, Paris, and San Francisco--perhaps an achievement worthy of the Guinness Book of World Records. And, no, she’s not planning to flake out when things calm down. She’s not fond of that. She’s working on her autobiography and she’s got a couple of projects she’s characteristically shut-mouthed about. “It makes no sense to talk about things that are proposed until they’re a reality,” she says sternly.

Her Company Folded

In July, 1988, Tharp and ABT’s administration announced that she was folding her company of 23 years and would join ABT as an artistic associate and resident choreographer. She brought with her seven of her dancers, including longtime company members Richard Colton and Shelley Washington, who came into ABT at soloist rank and also have responsibilities for directing rehearsals and keeping Tharp’s repertory in top condition. The intention was plainly not to establish a special Tharp enclave within ABT, but for ABT to endeavor to embrace Tharp wholeheartedly. The advantage to ABT of having an active, prolific, in-house choreographer of Tharp’s caliber and vitality is obvious. But how this plan would work out in the long run was and is still uncertain. Warily withholding judgment, Tharp says, “As far as I’m concerned, the success of the venture is witnessed by the work that comes out of it--and that is too soon to tell.”

On Tuesday, Ballet Theatre opens a 12-day engagement in Shrine Auditorium, with Tharp works programmed on three of the mixed bills. A four-part, all-Tharp bill is scheduled for Thursday

Firing the Dancers

Why would Tharp dissolve her company when it was thriving ? She says that giving up an operation stamped with her name was no hardship, that she doesn’t suffer from foolish vanity. But as someone who had, since 1974, made sure that her dancers were paid 52 weeks a year--something almost unheard of in the dance world--it must have given her a serious pang to discharge her dancers.

Tharp’s move was not a decision to ditch modern dance for ballet (though her specific interest in ballet has increased in recent years), not a matter of a 47-year-old enfant terrible “selling out” and joining the Establishment. What drove her to a decision that seemed sudden and drastic on the face of it, was that she felt she was routinely being prevented by circumstances from creating new choreography for her company.

This was intolerable to her. Tharp is absolutely about her work. Dance companies survive by touring, and her company’s necessarily heavy touring schedule meant she got little time to be in the studio with her dancers making new work. And an increasingly rapid turnover in dancers in the past few years meant that valuable time that should have been used for choreographing was being spent boringly teaching repertory to new people.

So what? These are problems that bedevil and eat the heart of every choreographer with a company of his or her own. They must grit their teeth and bear it, or else choose to work with pick-up companies, or trot around, making dances on invitation.

But Tharp had an extraordinary option. Her relationship with ABT and its artistic director, Mikhail Baryshnikov, was a longstanding one. Tharp had choreographed “Push Comes to Shove,” for Baryshnikov and ABT, back in 1975 (it premiered in January, 1976). And the possibility of forging a more permanent relationship with ABT had been floating around for several years.

“Twyla has tremendous energy and commitment,” says Cynthia Gregory. “She cares so much and she’s so intense, you have to become that way to work with her.” Gregory was in “Bach Partita,” which Tharp choreographed for ABT in 1984, but she met her many years before, when they both took ballet class with Richard Thomas on New York’s Upper West Side.

“ ‘Bach Partita’ didn’t require the stamina ‘Quartet’ does,” says Gregory, “but it was the same kind of movement--very many classical steps with Twyla’s unusual way of switching weight. When you want to go one way, she has you go the other. The whole torque of it is unique. It’s quick, tight, very contained, and then it’s lush--hard to switch back and forth.”

“I haven’t been in a new ballet since then. I love to work on something new and I wanted it to go well. Twyla could see I was excited.” Gregory’s also pleased as punch about managing to keep on top of the racing movement. In rehearsal, Tharp observed that “Cynthia always manages to have a composure--it can’t be less painful for her. She never gets behind. She’s always on or before the beat so she’s coasting down the hill, she doesn’t have to chug to catch up.”

“I knew I did ‘something’ to stay cool,” Gregory remarks. “The dancers in ‘Quartet’ with me are younger and it’s a matter of honor to be able to keep up,” she says happily.

“Twyla’s rehearsing all day, every day,” notes Gregory. “She’s part of us. Her energy, her commitment set us a good example. She pushes you and challenges you as she does herself. She’s, well, extraordinary--and that’s what ABT is about. Having people like Twyla to work with--like Antony Tudor or Agnes de Mille. She’s keeping up the tradition.”

Maintaining the Ballet

Regisseur Susan Jones first met Tharp when Jones was in the corps of “Push.” About a year later, Tharp picked Jones to be responsible for maintaining the ballet and, to this day, says Jones, “she takes credit for my rise to the artistic staff.”

Jones has been working with Tharp on “Gypsy Run-Through” (formerly “Everlast”), a big story ballet to music of Jerome Kern. Tharp sums it up as a ballet about a boxer who falls in love with the wrong girl. “She started out with much more choreography and music and had to edit more than usual,” says Jones. “The excess took your mind away from the story. But she had flexibility: She could add a song or get rid of one. It’s like working on a film, with footage left on the cutting room floor. That doesn’t happen much in an abstract piece.”

“Twyla is fascinating in the rehearsal room,” says Jones. “She’s very specific. She may revise later, and throw things out, but she’s very economical about her use of time. It’s challenging to keep up with her. Her material is very intricate to absorb and the pace is very hard. Still, working fast is a delight! I’m the person that makes the schedules and tries to please people. People want a lot of time generally, but Twyla is very aware of the pressure here at ABT and of the dancers’ responsibilities to other works. It can be trying--you don’t have dancers working just for you.

“She’s very direct about what she wants. She does her homework in every sense--she knows how and when she wants something done, she knows the order she wants her rehearsals in. It’s a lot easier than dealing with someone who wavers.”

Flexibility, Patience

Richard Colton was in Tharp’s company for a dozen years. “Usually when choreographers come in you get an instant version of what they’d do for their own company,” he says, “like instant oatmeal. But Twyla has come to ABT to do the real thing. In a way, what happens between the choreographer and the dancer has the aspects of a marriage. It calls for flexibility and patience and all those things. This isn’t a marriage yet. It’s been announced. It’s a beginning.

“With her own company,” he explains, “Twyla has worked with people devoted to her, who believe in her, who, in fact, changed their lives to work with her. Now, in ABT, you have a group of people in a repertory company who didn’t make this kind of decision. So we’re in the process of finding people within the company who’d like to do a glide followed by a jerk. Working with Twyla you have to like having the trapdoor open under you and have confidence that something will pick you up and set you down nicely.

“One of the reasons we joined Twyla’s company is we wanted to be surprised, and we’re being surprised now. The other guys never thought they’d be learning fencing or doing the mazurka in Act III of ‘Swan Lake.’ It’s not that we suddenly feel like ABT dancers, but this is part of the gamut of experience--like the film work, ‘Amadeus’ and ‘Hair,’ and ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ on Broadway--of what it means to work with Twyla. And we have the flexibility and open-mindedness to go with all these experiences and just try to learn as much as we can.”

Betrayed by Fate

Tharp is pretty testy during an interview. The company has been systematically decimated by the flu, and she’s just canceled a rehearsal of “The Bum’s Rush” rather than bumble through in a makeshift way. She knows no one’s at fault, but she’s not remotely reconciled to being betrayed by fate and having her plans set awry.

“ ‘Bum’s Rush’ is a piece about timing, and everything that’s in the piece needs to be with the piece,” Tharp says. “If people are missing, or marking, or unable to use their voices, the impulses that prompt the action are lost and its logic crumbles.

“It’s like a vaudeville variety bill. There are bits and pieces in it that have been floating around for a long time, and a certain portion of it has been performed. The piece didn’t jell though until I put the B.F. Goodrich tire in (a gigantic tractor tire with a dancer inside, which, in rehearsals, has been represented by a floppy foam rubber substitute). That rebalanced some of the quartets, duets, etc.

“The piece has been scored now with old-timey, silent movie music by Dick Hyman for an eight-piece band, it has a whole new connective tissue. This is, however, its final incarnation.”

Is she tired of it? “No. It works now. I never have enough till it works. Then, I have had enough.”

When questioned about “Gypsy Run-Through,” which she won’t allow outsiders to see because it’s not ready, Tharp teasingly asks, “Don’t you like Jerome Kern?

“Everybody likes Kern. Isn’t it so? How can anybody not like Kern is the question. There’s a genuineness about the sentiment of his music that I believe and which I find moving and compelling, even though it doesn’t have the kind of drive that we’re accustomed to these days. There’s a sweetness that people respond to.

“I was using it last summer in a workshop and whenever anybody would come in the room, this smile would just come across their faces. They didn’t know it was there. They couldn’t help themselves. And I wanted to build a piece that would make it possible for people to allow these smiles to steal upon their faces.”

There’s an excitement and eagerness in the latest “Quartet” run-through. “It’s the difference of a week of rehearsal. They’re getting stronger . . . the first run-through they were able to finish. They’ve already gotten through five run-throughs and they’ve begun to believe they can do it. They’ve learned something about pacing themselves and they’re not so afraid of it and not so tight with it which, ultimately, makes it easier to do. They’re starting to learn to dance it easily, which is the way it should be. After three or four performances it’ll be very different again.

“I’m obviously always interested in the dancer who’s an athlete and vice versa. I expect dancers to be in condition like an athlete is and to challenge themselves in the same way, to the same physical degree. I wanted to make a piece that would be useful in terms of challenging technique, so a lot of the material evolves out of that exercise. Now we’re coming to a point where it’s ‘interesting’ to rehearse because I can actually start to get to their technique through the material. And part of the technique that’s involved is ensemble work, which principals aren’t accustomed to doing.

“The thing about a rehearsal is you can only expect people to work as well as you do,” she continues. “So if you’re focused, you’re concentrated, you mean business, they should too. If you’re slow with your notes, you’re not focused, you’re having to go back and forth, humma, humma, humma, they are too. Regard for one’s craft and for the people that you work with is the point of the whole business. If there isn’t that, then, really, there’s no point in working. Because the point is to make progress and the only way you can do that is by having great regard for what you do.

“Some of ‘Bum’s Rush,’ particularly the men’s variation, is a virtuosic turn, and actually some of the partnering is very difficult. But that’s not its principal reason. And certainly ‘Gypsy Run-Through’ has nothing whatsoever to do with pushing technique, with the exception of Susan Jaffe’s role, which has something to add to the ballerina’s arsenal, though most people won’t notice it and that’s fine with me. There are times when you want to just excavate what you have, just use it, enjoy it and get over it and go beyond it. And other times when you want to examine what you have, rip it apart, reassemble it in a new way, and attempt to develop it and push it.

“A piece like ‘Gypsy Run-Through’ says, ‘O.K., guys, you dance fine, let’s go, we’re gonna do this.’ A piece like ‘Quartet’ says, ‘You dance fine--but what about this and this and this and this and this and this and then . . . !’

“I have a commitment to what the physical body can attain--to using the very best dancers and pushing them as hard as my experience and talent will allow.” She doesn’t care that we have the habit of dividing dancing into categories--ballet, modern, popular, you name it. “What comes from that striving, and whatever we can develop, whatever dance vocabulary we can master, is what I’m interested in doing. It’s simple. Whether it’s down, up, inside out, parallel, right side up, turned in, or turned out, doesn’t count.

“I’ve been doing ballet barres since I was 2 years old,” she says with exaggerated weariness. “It’s a part of the vocabulary that I use. Its part of what makes up the sentences and paragraphs that I make. It has always been.

“A piece like ‘The Fugue’ (the hard-stomping dance performed on a miked stage that she made in 1970 for three women, but which has been performed only by men in recent years) requires an extremely strong classical technique. When you see the three men holding those high releves, that’s exactly the same technical preparation as what’s required to do ‘Quartet.’ To be high on the legs, to be close to your center. Where your feet are doesn’t matter. And yet people are still calling this ‘modern’ and that ‘ballet,’ instead of calling the weight on the leg something you can use technically and the weight off the leg something you can’t.

“Modern. Ballet. The categories have disappeared. We might as well own up to that. They disappeared when dancers all started taking the same ballet classes.”