Unconventional account suits avant-garde Tharp

ALTHOUGH dance is probably one of our earliest art forms, the custom of having professional dancers perform for an audience is of relatively recent vintage. Where 19th or 20th century dance lovers flocked to theaters to see Taglioni, Nijinsky or Margot Fonteyn, back in Elizabethan times, the courtiers and queen herself were the ones to do the dancing. Whether it took place at a royal palace or a country village, dancing was both an art and a regular part of social life.

If the most valuable results of the professionalization of dance have been the refinement of technique and the development of choreography, along with these benefits has come a certain contradictory desire to return dance to its roots, so to speak, by breaking down the barrier between art and life.

This second impulse, generally identified with the avant-garde, can certainly be seen in the innovative work of Twyla Tharp, whose extraordinarily inventive career as a dancer-choreographer is the subject of Marcia B. Siegel’s new book, “Howling Near Heaven.”

Tharp started out in the 1960s, which is where Siegel’s book begins: “Just out of college, she had danced for a season with Paul Taylor, then quit to find her own way. To earn money, she’d appeared for a summer at the Alaskan Pavilion of the New York World’s Fair, dancing a ‘sort of furry hootchy-kootchy’ in a bearskin rug.”

In 1966, Tharp presented three of her works at a downtown New York City avant-garde venue. But from the outset, Siegel maintains, Tharp’s aims were rather different from those of other members of the so-called downtown set: “At once a rebel and a puritan, Tharp embraced the avant-garde as an opportunity to experiment with ideas, not as an aesthetic or political statement.”

A distinguished dance writer whose career spans the same years as Tharp’s, Siegel has written a work in many ways as unusual as its subject. Although drawing on many personal interviews and conveying a definite sense of Tharp’s character and personality, “Howling Near Heaven” contains very little of the material we’ve come to expect in a conventional biography. No evocative descriptions of its subject’s childhood; no blow-by-blow accounts of romances, marriages, divorces, childbirths; no juicy bits of showbiz gossip; no searching attempts at psychoanalysis.

First, last and foremost, this is a book about dance. Almost every ounce of Siegel’s considerable energy, intelligence and attentiveness is focused not on Tharp the woman but on Tharp the artist.

“Howling Near Heaven” is the work of a fan or acolyte, full of the kind of material that is likely to be of more interest to those who are already knowledgeable dance enthusiasts. Which is not to say it has nothing to offer the rest of us. Not only does Siegel furnish us with highly detailed descriptions of various Tharp works and vivid accounts of particular performances, she also tries to give us a real sense of the creative process as manifested in this particular artist.

Last but not least, the book also addresses the question of: How does a genuinely original and creative person manage to find enough financial support to enable her to pursue her work? It is fascinating to learn just how financially strapped Tharp’s enterprise was, how little she was able to pay her dancers, how loyal most of them were to the project and how generous she could be toward them.

An avant-garde enfant terrible or a closet traditionalist? Siegel makes a convincing case that Tharp uses the freedom of the avant-garde not as an end in itself but as a means of exploring the full potential of dance, including the challenges of classical ballet technique. In telling the story of her creations, which include “Medley,” “Dancing in the Streets,” “Eight Jelly Rolls,” “Push Comes to Shove,” “Variations on a Theme by Haydn,” “Sweet Fields” and “Surfer at the River Styx,” Siegel illustrates and illuminates the expansive nature of this artist’s ongoing quest.

But the strengths of “Howling Near Heaven” are also, ultimately, sources of its weakness. Siegel’s step-by-step descriptions of the dances at first infuse the book with some of the excitement of being at an actual performance, but after a while they begin to seem repetitive, even though the dancing they describe is not. Although it’s certainly commendable that Siegel eschews the kind of tell-all gossip fest found in too many biographies, her avoidance of the life and focus on the art finally make this a book more likely to thrill dance mavens than general readers.

Merle Rubin is a critic whose reviews have appeared in the Washington Times, Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor.