Twyla tharp biography photographers
•
Twyla Tharp: Still Creating After All These Years, Redux
[pending receipt of performance photographs]
The Joyce Theater
New York, New York
September 20, 2017
The Raggedy Dances, The Fugue, Entr’Acte, Dylan Love Songs
Jerry Hochman
So what’s a 76 year old to do after crafting some 160 performance pieces, including 129 dances, 4 full-length ballets, and 4 Broadway shows? Well, create a new dance, of course. And perform in another. And present one of the Joyce Theater’s finer programs.
Portrait of Twyla Tharp
by Robert Whitman
For its current three week engagement, and utilizing the formula she used in her Joyce program last year, Tharp and her company of seven dancers are presenting a mini-overview of her work, including one world premiere, two major revivals, and, at least at the program I saw, an unannounced addition: excerpts from a piece she presented earlier this year. As was evident last year, she’s still creating. And with
•
Bio
Twyla Tharp
Since graduating from Barnard College in 1963, Ms. Tharp has choreographed more than one hundred sixty works: one hundred twenty-nine dances, twelve television specials, six Hollywood movies, four full-length ballets, four Broadway shows and two figure skating routines. She received one Tony Award, two Emmy Awards, nineteen honorary doctorates, the Vietnam Veterans of amerika President's Award, the 2004 National Medal of the Arts, the 2008 Jerome Robbins Prize, and a 2008 Kennedy Center Honor. Her many grants include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1965, Ms. Tharp founded her dance company, Twyla Tharp Dance. Her dances are known for creativity, wit and technical noggrannhet coupled with a streetwise nonchalance. By combining different forms of mo
•
The PBS series “American Masters” specializes in packaging the lives of cultural luminaries into an hour or two of entertainment. For its latest subject, the dance-world legend Twyla Tharp, that doesn’t feel like nearly enough. Tharp has lived and worked (compulsively, ceaselessly) in New York City since the early nineteen-sixties. She has choreographed more than a hundred and thirty-five works; overseen the dancing in five films, including “Hair” and “Amadeus”; and won an Emmy Award, in 1985, for her work with Mikhail Baryshnikov, and a Tony, in 2003, for her work on the Billy Joel dance revue “Movin’ Out.” She’s received more than a dozen honorary doctorate degrees, been a Kennedy Center honoree and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, written three books, and run her own dance company, Twyla Tharp Dance, which merged with the American Ballet Company in 1988.
Tharp is seventy-nine years old. When the pandemic hit, she wasn’t about to sit by idly. She began choreographing a ne