Twyla and Misha: Still Cutting Up : The former lovers and current collaborators will dance a new Tharp work on a 22-city tour that begins next week

Twyla Tharp’s autobiography, “Push Comes to Shove,” takes its title from one of the choreographer’s greatest hits. Next week, the creator and her chief perpetrator, Mikhail Baryshnikov, will be hitting the road together. No doubt they’ll be pushing away expectations that a 51-year-old and a 44-year-old should be shoved out of the limelight. These, however, are no ordinary middle-aged dance veterans. Since his youth, Baryshnikov has refused to be bound by ballet traditions. As for Tharp, she has made a 30-year career of pushing and shoving limitations out of her way.

According to her book, she was a groundbreaker right from the start. Her first dance, made in childhood, marked her triumph over a rattlesnake she bashed in her Rialto, Calif., back yard.

After Barnard College, her professional career began. She danced with Paul Taylor’s young troupe. She created a seven-minute piece, “Tank Dive,” and presented it as her first concert. Later came the wildly successful “Deuce Coupe,” set to the Beach Boys for the Joffrey Ballet.

She followed that with hits and misses, from “The Catherine Wheel” (with music by David Byrne) to the Broadway flop “Singin’ in the Rain,” her directorial debut.

She had personal hits and misses, too: a youthful marriage and divorce; a second marriage, to artist Bob Huot, that had begun when they were at a party, took off their clothes and got in the shower, beginning “seven good years together”; a son, Jesse, now 21; psychotherapy, and love and/or lust affairs with quite a few guys she met at work, prime among them Mikhail Baryshnikov.

So, does it seem a little pushy or shovy, or even awkward, that the weekend after the book comes out--the book that details their affair--Tharp and Baryshnikov will be dancing together in a 22-city tour?

No, she insisted.

“Misha has read his chapters,” Tharp said recently in her publicist’s Manhattan office, hurriedly downing carry-out spaghetti and tomato sauce. “He was comfortable, and that was fine. Had he wanted to discuss any changes, I would have considered that.”

She maintains the book was written first for herself, to clear her own decks, and then for the public. “I mean, the public is almost secondary. I hope the public will find that it is relevant, but I need to live with it.”

Her book, which she wrote herself after unceremoniously ditching intended collaborator Laura Shapiro, isn’t a tell-all; more like a tell-some. But what’s there is choice. Although her account of a relationship with Byrne runs a close second, the juiciest passages concern Baryshnikov.

“In my room,” she writes, “I found that the famous muscles . . . possessed an extraordinary softness. As we explored one another’s bodies, the confidence we had as dancers let us invent transitions that flowed as smoothly as well-drafted duets. Afterward he fell asleep. . . . It was dawn before I closed my eyes, and when I awoke he was gone.”

The payoff of her pas de deux with Baryshnikov is that it leads to a discussion about “Push Comes to Shove,” which she made for American Ballet Theatre and Baryshnikov soon after he joined the troupe.

She writes that she made a conscious decision not to fall in love with him (no word on whether Baryshnikov had a vote).

And then she calls Baryshnikov “a womanizer.” So when she was choreographing “Push,” she writes, “I decided to give him his wish: Every woman in the company.” Enough even for Misha. And enough creatively funny revenge even for Twyla.

“He’s obviously a very different dancer (today) from the one I made ‘Push’ for,” Tharp said. “And I want to capitalize on this new working body he’s become. Plus which, he and I have--we obviously have had--a lot of experiences in the meanwhile,” and if she didn’t investigate “how we relate to each other after a number of years,” she’d regret it.

“I feel very specially about Misha as a dancer, and that this relationship deserved to be acknowledged at a later phase in our careers.”

As for herself, at 51 she’s still dancing because Tharp remembers that last spring, during her sold-out season at City Center, she “enjoyed performing for live audiences and that I should do it whilst I could, and heaven only knows how long that will be.”

The new show, an evening-length piece, will be totally new. “It’s called ‘Cutting Up,’ ” Tharp said. “It’s in three acts. Act I is called ‘Shtik,’ Act II is called ‘Bare Bones’ and Act III is called ‘Food.’

“Act I is a sort of crosscut between the flashes in the mind and the reality in the studio, with different casts and very short segments. Act II is to Pergolesi, who was a wonderful precursor of Mozart, which is just about movement, since we’ve already exploited shtick in Act I, which leaves us with nothing but the fundamentals.

“Then Act III, ‘Food,’ is a history of social dance in the 20th Century, all set in a restaurant, because this is how bare bones get fuel to live on.”

The cast includes dancers from her City Center troupe as well as two singer-dancers, borrowed from the cast of “I’ll Do Anything,” an original James Brooks movie musical Tharp just finished choreographing.

The tour starts in Austin, Tex., and arrives in Berkeley on Dec. 4-5. The only Southern California dates are Feb. 3-4 at the soon-to-open Cerritos Performing Arts Center. Montreal’s about as close as they’ll get to New York.

“Traditionally, Misha is not happy dancing in New York” because of the critics, Tharp said. “It’s devastating for a performer to read, particularly one as identified with New York as Misha. It can be very painful.” Perhaps, she said, his recent success guesting with the New York City Ballet will make him think differently of the Big Apple in the future. “I certainly think he should, because I think audiences perhaps are growing up now to a point where they want to see what one has to offer, as opposed to being critical of what he doesn’t have to offer, which I think is a part of his fear,” she said.

“Obviously, a man at 44 is not the athlete he was at 24, but he has a maturity as an artist that is unique.”

She’s looking forward to their performances as “a sharing experience.”

Likely it will also be a profitable one; tickets in Austin sold out at a bottom price of $25 and a top of $100. Tickets for the Cerritos dates range from $82 to $90.

But Tharp’s never been shy about demanding to be well-paid. The entire fortune and future of dance, she said, is linked to whether there’s a living to be earned.

“When dance is a force economically, then people will perceive it as a place where there’s power, and it will take place naturally,” she said, and once again, as in primitive cultures, the extent of a man’s power will be linked to his ability as a dancer. For it to succeed, she said, more men must become involved.

“Dance is the most immediate of any experience. I can have an idea--boom! I do it. I’ve done it. That jump has been made instantly. No pencils, no teams, no getting uniforms. And dance is the place where you, everyone, can confront this condition if they simply train themselves to expect themselves to do it. That’s why it’s more relevant than sublimating war on Sunday afternoons.”