Twyla Tharp (Alywt Praht)

Source: NY Times 5.6.2006- Critics Notebook, Gia Kourlas reviews "Howling Near Heaven: Twyla Tharp and the Reinvention of Modern Dance" by Marcia B Siege

FM-FM Comment:
Twyla Tharp is really Alywt Praht spelled backwards. Philistine! you charge. Perhaps this once.
I must admit that the stick figures I have seen in Ms. Tharp's choreography place me in another time and another place. Let's say pre-Twyla Tharp. The last time I saw her work was in Amadeus. The sticks were repetitive vertical and horizontal and moving. In this review of a new book about T.T. Kourlas writes that T.T. " has somehow avoided the cultural branding that afflicts other known choreographers." "Crusty, driven, demanding, and admiring, she hurls challenges to the dancers. It's the most subtle form of competition and cooperation, a process so intutitive, so intimate that no one can say in the end whose dance it is, and none of the parties can be removed without endangering its identity"writes the author of the book. Ms Tharp is quoted to explain her aesthetic, " It seems to me that art is a question of emphasis. That aesthetics and ethics are the same. That inventiveness resides first in choice and then in synthesis - in bringing it all together. That this action is repeated over and over again, the resoultions being marvelously altered each time" After accounting for T.T.'s dance history Gia Kourlas concludes the review: ..."but seeing her slippery, deviously difficult dances performed is something else altogether." No quarrel there! C.