Dance : Star Tour : Twyla Tharp, Mikhail Baryshnikov reunite for a series of shows with the flavor--and price tag--of a rock ‘n’ roll extravaganza

Since their tour began in November, their 40-seat private jet has been hip-hopping the continent on a whirlwind performance schedule of more than 22 cities. A physical therapist stands at the ready on board to administer soothing massages during long flights between one- and two-night stands. Squeezed in between gigs are press interviews, promotional appearances and even plugs for a new kiss-and-tell celebrity autobiography that hit the bookstores shortly after the tour began.

Though a lucky few in Mexico City got to see this star duo perform for the modest fee of $18 (their view of the stage was also modest), ticket prices for the shows have averaged more than $75--and peaked at $110.

In some locations--including the recently opened Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, where the pair will appear Feb. 3 and 4--these artists demanded a performance fee of almost 100% of the box-office receipts expected from a sold-out house. And got it.

The performers in question are not a couple of temperamental rock stars on their Dangerous Ambition Serious Zoo TV Reunion Tour. This act is Twyla Tharp, 51, and Mikhail (Misha) Baryshnikov, 45.

Dancers.

In the middle of a dance bust that has left prominent companies such as the Joffrey Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and the San Francisco Ballet canceling tour dates and courting financial disaster, the Misha/Twyla tour is surviving, and prospering, nationwide. The appearance five weeks ago of Tharp’s autobiography, “Push Comes to Shove,” in bookstores has drawn added attention to the tour; it details not only Tharp’s history as a dancer/choreographer but her various love affairs, including a tryst with Baryshnikov and a longtime romance with Talking Head David Byrne.

Everything about this tour breaks all the rules of the low-rent world of dance. Cerritos Center general manager Victor Gotesman said that the costs of presenting the Tharp/Baryshnikov concerts are “probably 200% more than Alvin Ailey or any other modern dance company you could think of.”

Even before the recession hit the arts, ballet and modern-dance tours have traditionally been defined by modest bus-and-truck travel, not private jets. Money is scraped together from generous sponsors and government grants, not sold-out houses and hundred-dollar tickets. Audiences are devoted, serious and all-too-often small. Most dancers are expected to live on lettuce, inspiration and anonymity, and it is the rare star that can command hefty artists fees and big book contracts. Compared to their pop counterparts, few dancers are given to writing autobiographies detailing their monkish lives because--who cares?

And then there’s the age thing. Forty-five may be a good age to become, say, President of the United States, but it does not usually represent a career peak for a balletdancer. Fifty-one, is, well, older.

But concert presenters say that the middle-aged team of ballet’s “Misha” and contemporary dance’s “Twyla” is something special--and agree that they are the only team of dancers in the world today who could pull off a tour like this one.

“It’s really like a concert tour, as opposed to a theater-type tour,” observed Alex Hodges, vice president of the Nederlander Organization and head of their concert booking department. “They are not going in for weeks or multiple weeks; they are going in for one- and two-night stands.” Traveling by jet makes the tour “very analogous” to major pop acts “in the Elton John category, who will now do their tours by plane,” Hodges said.

“It’s real marquee value here,” added Hodges. “Great talent is often rewarded by having a true name and marquee value, and that’s the key to this success story.”

In a telephone interview from a tour stop in Atlanta, Tharp said she wants to see this tour make dance as accessible to American audiences as the Olympic Games. “(In sports) there are winners and there are losers--nobody tells an audience if it is good or bad,” Tharp said. “That is the feeling that I am trying to give audiences--that they are an authority. They are perfectly capable of telling an ‘8’ from a ’10.’ Critics should be looked at simply as commentators.”

Because the Tharp-Baryshnikov collaboration dates back to the mid-1970s-- when she first choreographed “Push Comes to Shove” for him--the tour also has the flavor of a rock ‘n’ roll “reunion” tour in which middle-aged artists rekindle the flame.

Tharp acknowledges that her confession of the pair’s brief and long-ago romantic liaison in her book stirs up the same sort of gossipy interest that dogs pop celebrities--but insists that does not constitute this tour’s main attraction.

“This is not a particularly overpowering event in anyone’s lifetime,” she said of the affair. “Audiences are aware of the fact that the chemistry--if you want to use that word--is between two professionals who have respect for one another. It really is love of a different order. It is respect and regard; people get hung up on the first details.”

Michael Blachly, director of the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts--which attempted to negotiate for tour dates but got priced out of the market--called the tour unique in the dance world. “It’s really a star package,” he said. “It’s a spotlight tour, not unlike a Frank Sinatra, or a Paul McCartney. They don’t tour frequently, and they are not part of an established company.”

Blachly compared the phenomenon to the interest in British actor Sir Ian McKellen when he starred in “Richard III” at UCLA’s Royce Hall last September. “(The tour) not only has the dance audience and the dance press, it has the popular audience and the popular press,” Blachly said. “Ian McKellen had that. He would be picked up by Vanity Fair and Newsweek and Los Angeles magazine and L.A. Style. It had that kind of broad crossover.”

James A. Doolittle, general director of the Southern California Theater Assn., which recently presented the Kirov Ballet’s “Nutcracker” at the Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, attributes the popularity of the tour among the general audiences to Baryshnikov, not Tharp (although Tharp, who is producer of the tour in conjunction with Columbia Artists Management, is doing the press interviews, not Baryshnikov).

“We’ve played Twyla Tharp, and she’s certainly an attraction, but nothing in the area (of Baryshnikov),” Doolittle said of a concert she performed with her company at the Doolittle Theater in November 1982. “She did fairly well, but nothing to even compare with a major ballet company. But Baryshnikov, at this point, is I guess the last of the great dancers. Possibly many people consider him the greatest of our time. I just feel that there is that kind of magic with him.”

Doolittle and Blachly both observed that the late Rudolf Nureyev was the last ballet dancer who could work that kind of audience magic, maintaining his popularity and selling out houses into his 50s despite wounding reviews. In a review of Nureyev’s 1987 appearance at the Greek Theatre, Times dance writer Lewis Segal noted: “Nureyev is nothing less than the Ronald Reagan of ballet: Dismay over his competence ultimately seems to matter less these days than questions about his awareness of what he’s doing and about the blind loyalty of his admirers.”

Doolittle, Blachly and other dance observers point out that the death of Rudolf Nureyev during this tour brings into focus the fact that Baryshnikov could be the last of a species. Though Baryshnikov’s age and injuries have dimmed his luster as a classical ballet prince, in this case age only increases the audience’s eagerness to see him, as well as Tharp, before the two stop dancing altogether. The breakdown of the Soviet Union also implies that the disciplined, government-subsidized Russian ballet training that produced the likes of Nureyev and Baryshnikov may never exist again.

“These dancers are not going to go on forever,” Blachly observed. While the death of Nureyev may not have directly affected ticket sales, he added, “the fact that he died during this tour is a reminder that we have a finite number of human resources performing at that level.”

Tharp noted that baby boomers in the audience are grateful to see two of their contemporaries still dancing. “In some ways, I am actually in better shape than I have ever been,” she said.

“As I have developed, so has the way I dance. I was dancing during my pregnancy (with son Jesse Huot in 1971), right up until the time I went into the hospital, and as my body changed, my dancing changed. I am still pushing the edge of what my body can do.”

Despite all the arguments in favor of this tour, these tickets still cost a bundle. The actual amounts of money involved in this 39-show, $4-million tour pale in comparison to any major rock tour. The most successful rock tour of 1992, the Irish rock group U2’s “Zoo TV” tour of the United States, which cost more than $10 million, took in $67 million in 73 shows. (No figures are available for how much the Misha/Twyla tour will earn.) In addition, touring pop stars usually reap even bigger benefits in increased record sales. While Tharp said that this tour has increased sales of her book, the benefit is insignificant in comparison.

Yet, in terms of percentages, Tharp and Baryshnikov are doing better than most rock stars on the road, Hodges said. In Cerritos, for example, the artists’ fee (including Tharp’s company of eight dancers) for two nights is $220,000. With ticket prices ranging from $82 to $90, and 1,450 available seats each night, the sold-out box office will barely exceed the artists’ fees--and won’t cover the additional $50,000 in production and promotion costs. That gives Tharp and Baryshnikov close to 100% of the box-office take. On most rock tours, Hodges said, even the biggest stars receive at most 60% of box-office receipts.

With pop artists, ticket prices usually don’t exceed $65 or so, and rear or lawn seats can often be had for $20 or less, Hodges said. The difference is that they play bigger houses, such as the 6,251-seat Universal Amphitheatre, so total earnings are higher. In Mexico City, the Misha/Twyla tour spent three nights at the 9,000-seat National Auditorium, but it is more often playing houses with between 1,000 and 1,800 seats, since audiences need to be able to see the stage.

Even though they will have to cover production costs, Cerritos Center’s Gotesman called the effort worth the money. Like other new performing arts centers, Cerritos is booking performances above what it can comfortably afford in order to establish itself as a premier performing arts center.

Gotesman said the Center went even deeper into the red to present Frank Sinatra, who charged double Tharp and Baryshnikov’s artists’ fee for his Jan. 13-17 performances, the center’s first. But ticket prices for Baryshnikov-Tharp are steeper ($82-$90 vs. $70-$76), partly because the theater is reconfigured for a dance presentation, allowing only 1,450 of the 1,800 available seats to be sold.

“We are in a strategic programming mode because we are a new performing arts center,” Gotesman said. “Part of the strategy is to present some of the greatest names in all of the arts, and to make a significant impact on the market.”

Other centers, such as the McCallum Theatre of Palm Desert’s 1,100-seat Bob Hope Cultural Center, which presented Tharp and Baryshnikov Jan. 11, added some expensive gala tickets priced at $1,250 and $2,500 to offset artists’ fees. Buyers were also treated to gala dinners and receptions.

“Yes, we made money,” said McCallum’s executive director Nancy Dolensek, who said the benefit performances netted “in excess of $150,000.” But she suggested that, like the Cerritos center, the McCallum might have presented Tharp and Baryshnikov even at a loss.

“Some things are worth losing money over,” she said.