Another Turning Point : After splitting with American Ballet Theatre, Twyla Tharp is back with a revised life’s agenda: TV and film projects, a book and, yes, new dance works with a handpicked troupe

Twyla Tharp is having an exuberantly giddy, sweaty time rehearsing a duet with Kevin O’Day, being twisted and carried around in all sorts of slippery and daring maneuvers that inspire appreciative laughter from the dancers and associates watching from the corners of the studio.

A few minutes later, having donned her glasses and an extra layer of clothing, she leaves the dancing to others as she scrutinizes the rehearsal of another of her new works in progress, an intricate ballet set to a score by double-bassist Edgar Meyer.

It is a familiar yet novel sight--Tharp in the studio, working intensively yet affectionately with a dedicated group of dancers. Although she has been choreographing for more than 25 years, Tharp has not had a company of her own since 1988, and has not had any company affiliation since her short-lived association with American Ballet Theatre fell victim to the turmoil that engulfed that troupe in 1989.

Now, Tharp has assembled 16 dancers, ranging from veterans of New York City Ballet and the Paris Opera Ballet to a couple of regulars from her former troupe to several with experience in “downtown” companies such as Laura Dean and Nina Wiener.

They are learning some of Tharp’s earlier works as well as preparing three premieres, but Tharp makes it clear that they are not to be identified as a “company”--a word she has banished from her modus operandi . This group is properly called a “project,” one of several (including film, television and her forthcoming memoirs) in which the energetic and opinionated choreographer is currently involved.

Having navigated her share of turbulent waters within the financially risky dance world, Tharp has started fresh with this new arrangement, one she hopes will suit her creative needs as well as the dancers.

The current group’s commitment to Tharp began with an August rehearsal period in New York and a recently concluded four-week residency at the Wexner Center for the Performing Arts at Ohio State University in Columbus, and it continues with additional rehearsals and a two-week New York season in January, to be followed by a February tour of Japan.

“I don’t want to make--cannot make--a commitment to a group of people on a 52-week basis in an ongoing, annual situation, because what it becomes is supporting payroll as opposed to work,” explains Tharp, who is momentarily sitting still in the office of her manager, Penelope Curry. “What became impossible for me to support emotionally was the fact that no work was getting done, because payroll had to be met, which meant there had to be touring.”

She is describing the situation that led to the disbanding of her 23-year-old company in 1988; with her dancers on the road for seven months of the year, she had little if any time available to spend making new works, which is her primary concern.

Joining forces with ABT and bringing several of her dancers into its ranks looked like a promising alternative--the opportunity to work with a large and talented company (with which she was already familiar from earlier works such as “Push Comes to Shove” and “Bach Partita”) without the administrative and fund-raising burden of running her own operation.

The first year was productive--Tharp created three new works--but the abrupt departure of Mikhail Baryshnikov from ABT left Tharp without her main supporter and ally. Although she choreographed the highly successful “Brief Fling” in 1990 and four of her works were in ABT’s repertory through last spring, her position as artistic associate was not renewed by the Jane Hermann-Oliver Smith regime, and Tharp left the supervision of her repertory in the hands of her longtime dancer Shelley Washington.

The Twyla Tharp Dance Foundation continued to exist as an umbrella for various Tharp projects, particularly the organization and preservation of her extensive archival material. Nearly 900 hours of rehearsal and performance videotapes spanning 20 years are being transferred to master tapes and catalogued by an archivist. Along with files of written and visual material documenting Tharp’s work, they will be housed at Ohio State University.

The offer of the Ohio residency was the impetus for the reborn Twyla Tharp and dancers. With the Wexner Center covering all costs for the residency period, money provided by City Center (where the ensemble’s New York season will take place), Japanese tour sponsors and two individual contributions provided the rest of the project’s funds. With Curry--formerly of the Joffrey Ballet--handling administrative matters and Washington as ballet mistress, Tharp describes the project as “desperately understaffed.”

In addition to the three new works, the dancers are also performing “Deuce Coupe,” created in 1973 for the Joffrey; “The Little Ballet,” which Tharp made for ABT in 1983, and the virtuosic “Golden Section” from her 1981 full-evening work “The Catherine Wheel.”

As was the case with Tharp’s company in the mid-1980s, this new group includes dancers with a wide range of backgrounds and technical expertise. There are four from New York City Ballet (Allison Brown, Stacy Caddell and Shawn Stevens, who left the company, and principal dancer Robert LaFosse, who is on leave) and three (Lionel Delanoe, Stephane Elizabe and Delphine Moussin) on leave from the Paris Opera Ballet, where several Tharp works have entered the repertory in recent years. The remaining seven dancers were selected through a series of auditions and workshops. They join longtime Tharp regulars Kevin O’Day and Jamie Bishton (who moved to ABT with her).

Although Tharp claims to have little to say about the works she is still in the midst of choreographing, and responds minimally to any question she finds too obvious, she has plenty to say on certain topics, provided an interviewer is able to keep up with her hectic pace.

After a few relatively calm minutes in the office, she hurriedly gathers her belongings and heads out the door, rushing to the corner to hail a cab. She is headed for Pumping Iron, the distinctly unglamorous gym (not a health club, she makes clear) where she works out daily with a trainer. She’s more than willing to keep talking as long as she can stay on the move at the same time.

Settling into the cab and fretting about being late, Tharp at first tries to dismiss the subject of ABT and the appearance of conflict between herself and Hermann, particularly over financial arrangements, as boring and irrelevant.

The fact that some of Hermann’s quotes in interviews (she told the New York Times in May, 1990, that “the question of how deeply involved Tharp will be with the company is purely financial”) might deserve a response leads Tharp to snap: “I’m not interested in engaging in issues that some people are trying to create as controversy. I’m much more interested in getting on with a much larger issue, which is dance. I just make dances, not hype.”

The related, larger issue of the limited budgets and inadequate level of remuneration in the dance field is one on which Tharp is eager to expound.

“The big problem I have,” she says, “is why should dance accept being at the bottom of the pile, and how in fact is that going to nurture a future for dance. Can we get another perspective on what dancers and choreographers should be making, so that in the future we can have more dance, and better dance, and dancers who can respect themselves and their craft more, because they earn incomes like everyone else.

“I’ve seen and experienced many different ways of working during my 25 years in the dance world, and there are some that I think are more realistic in terms of accomplishing things. At this point in my life and in my career, I’m only interested in working very well and very productively.

“Do we really think that excellent dancers perform for nothing? There’s a disparity between what star dancers earn for an engagement and what choreographers are paid on a per-performance basis--especially when whole evenings are sold on my name. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who is making a fuss and furor over someone who is trying to point out that the economic standards in our business are rankly unfair is doing a disservice to the entire industry.

“This is something I try to look at a lot in my (upcoming) book--why dance is at the bottom of the pile. The most obvious answer is simply that there is no product attached to dance, there’s nothing you can buy and own, and this is a product-oriented culture. It’s becoming more service-oriented, and we need to begin to understand that dance provides a major service, in the sense of a kind of energy. People who come into the theater and see (powerful work) leave in a different state of mind, and physically in a different place, from when they arrived--this is a service.”

Tharp arrives at Pumping Iron and greets her amiable trainer Sean, with whom she’s worked for three years. After a full day of rehearsals and a business meeting, at a time when her dancers are probably home soaking their feet, Tharp plunges into her routine with weights and on assorted ominous-looking machines, with Sean guiding her and chuckling knowingly as she frames her answers to additional questions. He seems particularly amused when she says, concerning her current status with ABT, “No bridges are ever burned.” (For the moment, none of her works are in the company’s repertory, the contracts having lapsed.)

Tharp is not stingy with praise when she feels it is due and has particularly kind things to say about two ballet companies with which she has established a working relationship. She practically gushes when she discusses the Paris Opera, where she choreographed “The Rules of the Game” in 1989 and has staged “As Times Goes By” and, last spring, “Push Comes to Shove.”

“I like the Paris Opera enormously--I’m very fond of the dancers, the company, its tradition, its school, its theater, its place in the entire culture,” she says. “They have a very healthy attitude toward their tradition and are totally open to new things. The dancers work very hard, and they have less break time in a day than companies here do. The Paris Opera corps is the best in the world right now.”

The company’s switch from the Rudolf Nureyev directorship to the newly installed Patrick Dupond has clearly caused no interruption in Tharp’s association with it. Dupond danced the central role (made for Baryshnikov) in “Push” and forged an unusual exchange with Tharp: In return for the three Paris dancers who are part of her current project, she is choreographing a pas de deux for Dupond and Isabelle Guerin to music by Paul Simon that will enter the Paris company’s repertory.

An American company that has clearly won Tharp’s approval is the Boston Ballet, which will premiere its productions of “In the Upper Room” and “Brief Fling” in the spring and will have exclusive U.S. performing rights to those works for the next two years. In addition, Tharp will create an original work for the company in the fall of 1992, as part of the Kennedy Center Ballet Commissioning Program.

Another company that has earned Tharp’s respect is the Chicago-based Hubbard Street Dance Company, a modern repertory troupe that has already acquired four of her older works. Former Tharp dancers have been setting these dances--”Baker’s Dozen,” “The Fugue,” “Sue’s Leg” and “The Golden Section”--on the Hubbard dancers, with well-received results.

Tharp’s agenda also includes two French television projects, one of the segments of the upcoming eight-part “Dance Project” on PBS and possible film projects that are alluded to vaguely, but about which no one will give details because no contracts have been signed. Her plan is for each project to be an independent venture, with a beginning and an end but with the possibility of an overlap in personnel; some dancers who are involved in the current group could, for example, be asked to work on a film or television project.

There is also her book, to be published by Bantam late next year, which Tharp describes as a positive experience.

“I needed a period of time to put things into perspective,” she says. “I didn’t know whether what I was doing had become obligatory or whether I really wanted to be doing it. I had to examine it and figure out if I was where I was because I wanted to be there or because it’s where I ended up--while I still had time to do something about it. It was an extremely valuable exercise for me. The book has to do with looking at my life from the point of view of what has been useful in dancing and what hasn’t, of trying to find out what is critical and what isn’t.”

With all these future projects on her plate, Tharp is nonetheless clearly invigorated and content to be working intensively with dancers again--not to mention with the prospect of performing again herself. She is, as everyone around her remarks admiringly, in fantastic shape and seems amused that she is supposed to have “officially” retired at some point.

“Who said I was retired?” the 50-year-old Tharp asks in mock outrage. “I do that from time to time--the first time was in 1968. I always danced, working on my own in the morning, but now, yeah, I’ll let some folks watch.”

The good humor that marks the rehearsal of her octet--which features the ballet contingent of her group--is infectious and natural. “Try to make this extremely exciting--or I’ll put in more steps,” she says teasingly as a particular phrase is gone over in detail.

She gamely tries to use French when correcting the Paris dancers but needs help when trying to convey to the elegant, leggy Moussin that she is being “too ladylike,” and everyone confers to find a French equivalent. Hard work and respect are the order of the day--she addresses the dancers as “ladies” and “men” and clearly treats them as such. Later, she expresses great pride in how well they have been working and in the fact that she was able to choreograph the octet within three weeks.

Shelley Washington, the 16-year Tharp veteran who supervises rehearsals, believes that although this may not be a company in the traditional sense, the working process and atmosphere in the studio are familiar from Tharp’s earlier ventures.

“It’s very similar: Hard work all the time, then sometimes total laughter, and a little bit of chaos,” she says. “These are people who made a decision to work with Twyla, who really want to be there. It’s a lot of work, but the good part of it is her drive and energy, her determination and focus. Obviously, if she’s going to start again, she knows she really wants to do it.”