Twyla Tharp Takes Critical Look at Past

What started 25 years ago as the iconoclastic work of a very determined young woman and a few similarly dedicated female dancers has become Twyla Tharp Dance.

The “bunch of broads doing God’s work”--to use one of Tharp’s own wry references to her nascent group--has grown into an ensemble company of eight women and nine men that tours a good deal here and abroad offering a stable repertory.

But the process seems to have taken its toll on Tharp. At 45, she sounds angry, discouraged, tired.

“Twenty-five years of something is a long time--quite a long time--and I’m not sure that 50 is something that makes it that much better,” she said recently. “Perhaps 25 of doing something else would be a great idea.”

Like what?

“Don’t ask me what the future’s going to be, that’s the one topic absolutely verboten today,” she snapped.

Her company will perform at Royce Hall, UCLA, today, Friday and Saturday. But the dancer and dance maker said she did not want to discuss the differences between her last Southern California season (as part of the Olympics Arts Festival in 1984) and Twyla Tharp Dance as it is constituted now.

“Things change all the time, so why do people make such a philosophical to-do that things are constantly in transition?” she said. “Everything present is included in the past somewhere; nobody’s present pops out of nowhere.”

While her company’s present repertory includes ballet pointe work more prominently than in her more modernist past, Tharp insisted that “there was never a time when there wasn’t ballet in the company.”

“When it was Rose (Marie Wright), Sara (Rudner) and me, one-third of the company was ballet,” she said. Wright, a member of the Tharp nucleus in its formative years, was a ballet-schooled and skilled performer. Tharp noted that Wright danced en pointe in “Medley,” an outdoor work dating from 1969, and added “Dancing in the Streets,” also from 1969, to her brief list of pointe work examples.

Tharp said her current interest in ballet-trained dancers is largely practical.

“I find that dancers are only well trained in ballet these days,” she said. “There is not the range of training available to the young dancer today that there was 15 years ago.

“It was very different when Merce (Cunningham), (Martha) Graham and Erik Hawkins were still teaching, but these days you have two or three good ballet teachers in New York City and that’s about it. So what are you going to use for technique that’s not ballet?”

Besides wanting her dancers to be “very interesting to look at, and preferably gorgeous,” Tharp said that today her company members “have got to have, for better or worse, a very substantial technique.”

“This did not use to be the case. I could just take an interesting dancer. Now, because we carry a repertory (and the company will be on tour for 28 weeks this year), I can no longer take dancers into the studio and build something for them that will look terrific. I can’t just take a talented kid.”

Tharp said that she “couldn’t have taken Sara, Rose or myself out of an audition these days,” but quickly allowed, in a sly tone, “Well, maybe, we were kind of good.”

The days when Tharp, Wright and Rudner were the body and soul of the Tharp enterprise were days of working on a project basis rather than in a repertory format.

Once Tharp started to branch out toward her larger company and to present repertory seasons, she concocted a plan to split the company and have one group on tour with active repertory while another stayed put so the choreographer could work on new material. But the scheme didn’t really work.

“The group out was always so petty and unhappy about the group that was in. Then you had the ones who were in becoming the experts on the material, and when you decided to transfer and teach it, you had nothing but rebellion and revolt within the household.”

Tharp is somewhere between exasperated and outraged on the subjects of funding and of working space for her current 17-member group. She said she was reluctant to continue accepting individual outside commissions from ballet companies--American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet, for instance.

“It’s very difficult for me to do fund raising for my own organization if I’m working for other companies because sponsors will say, ‘Well, hey, man, if she’s doing a ballet for Ballet Theatre, we’ll give money to Ballet Theatre.’ ”

On the subject of space, she said, “The situation is getting worse by the moment. We don’t have a studio anywhere. We rent space.”

However, Tharp was unsentimentally sober about her own performing career, which she semiofficially brought to a close with “Fait Accompli,” a showcase work from 1983, and which she semiofficially reopened last fall by performing in the “Dancing for Life” AIDS benefit in New York.

“There is no point missing dancing,” she said, “unless you’re (Maya) Plisetskaya and you have no other curiosities in your life. Otherwise, there are a great many other things that I find can challenge, and that I’m trying to give a chance to.”