PBS documentary tries to keep up with Twyla Tharp
NEW YORK — A new PBS documentary on dancer-choreographer Twyla Tharp is called “Twyla Moves.” In retrospect, that sounds a bit weak.
It really should be called “Twyla Moves And Won’t Stop As Long As She Has a Detectable Pulse,” a title that might perhaps begin to capture the fierceness with which Tharp, who turns 80 this year, approaches both work and life.
It would seem obvious that something like a global pandemic wouldn’t force Tharp off course or keep her on the sofa binge-watching Netflix. On a recent afternoon, Tharp began a conversation by explaining why she’d had to postpone a few hours: Since 4 a.m. that morning, she’d been choreographing a new work with ballet dancers in Dusseldorf, Germany. Choreography via Zoom, she noted, “is very strenuous — very limited from a sensory point of view.”
And perhaps especially for a choreographer like Tharp, who doesn’t simply sit and instruct dancers — she teaches by showing, even now.
Tharp didn’t want the film, directed by Steven Cantor and part of the American Masters series, to feel like a biography. She wanted a lot more present tense in there. “Often when you’re dealing with something that has as much history as I do or backlog, you can get lost in the past,” she says. “One of my conditions was that I’d be doing new work.”
So we watch her creating a new Zoom version of her work “The Princess
and the Goblin,” with several prominent dancers handpicked for the film, including Misty Copeland of American Ballet Theatre, Maria Khoreva of the Mariinsky Ballet in Russia, Herman Cornejo of ABT and Charlie Hodges, a longtime Tharp dancer. “Part of the mission here was that dance is always about getting the job done, that even under the most difficult of situations — no physical contact, good luck with that if you’re a dancer! — we can still deliver something, because we’re dancers. We’ll do it!”
But the jewel is her archive, which spans her career, beginning with her experiments in modern dance from the ’60s. She’s shown dancing with Mikhail Baryshnikov or working with him on “White Nights” with Gregory Hines. There are snippets from gems like the hugely popular “In the Upper Room,” a ballet set to the propulsive music of Philip Glass. Tharp began videotaping her work in 1968. “I have many thousands of hours of tape thoroughly documenting every piece I’ve ever made,” she says, “because I am an art historian.”
There’s nowhere near enough time to include her vast repertoire. About half the show is on the Zoom project — 41 minutes, she notes with a choreographer’s precision — “and that leaves you with 20 from when you were born to grew up and you’re not not quite dead yet, then another 20 for 150 works and four books ...”
And she’s not near done. Asked in the film whether she’s achieved her mission, she says: “Not quite.”
Asked by this reporter when that might be, she offered: “When I die?”