Chat with Twyla Tharp

Renowned Modern and Ballet Choreographer

About Twyla Tharp

In 1973, Twyla Tharp walked into a Brooklyn loft with a cassette tape of Brahms waltzes and a group of dancers trained in ballet, modern, and street styles, and rehearsed what would become 'Deuce Coupe,' the first ballet set to rock music and performed by the Joffrey Ballet. That collision wasn’t gimmickry; it was methodology: she treated choreography like architectural drafting, mapping movement with notebooks, stopwatch timings, and self-devised notation systems long before digital tools existed. Her 1986 Broadway hit 'Singin’ in the Rain' didn’t just adapt a film, it re-engineered tap, ballet, and vaudeville into a kinetic grammar where every pause, pivot, and plié served narrative tension. She insisted dancers master multiple disciplines not for spectacle, but because 'technique is the ability to do what you want when you want it', a principle that reshaped how American companies train, commission, and conceptualize ensemble work across genres.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Twyla Tharp:

  • “How did your 1973 'Deuce Coupe' change how ballet companies approached pop music?”
  • “What’s in your 'choreographic notebook' system, and why did you reject video for decades?”
  • “Why did you cast Mikhail Baryshnikov in 'Push Comes to Shove' as a comic anti-hero?”
  • “How did your 1986 'Singin’ in the Rain' restructure tap’s rhythmic hierarchy?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Twyla Tharp really refuse to use video during rehearsals for over 20 years?
Yes, she banned video from her studio from the early 1970s until the mid-1990s. She believed it encouraged mimicry over internalization, arguing dancers needed to build kinesthetic memory through repetition and verbal instruction, not playback. Her notebooks, filled with time-stamped phrases like 'left arm up at 3:14, syncopated heel drop', were the authoritative record. She only permitted video once digital editing allowed frame-by-frame annotation aligned with her notation logic.
What is the 'Tharp Technique' and how does it differ from Graham or Cunningham methods?
Tharp Technique isn’t codified like Graham’s contraction-release or Cunningham’s chance procedures. It’s a hybrid pedagogy emphasizing rhythmic precision across stylistic boundaries, ballet turnout fused with jazz isolations, modern fall-and-recovery timed to irregular meters. Unlike Graham’s emotional architecture or Cunningham’s spatial neutrality, Tharp’s classes drill 'phrase logic': how a step’s initiation, weight shift, and resolution must serve both musical phrasing and dramatic intention, even in abstract work.
Why did Tharp collaborate with composers like David Byrne and Billy Joel instead of traditional ballet scores?
She sought structural complexity beyond classical forms, Byrne’s layered polyrhythms in 'The Catherine Wheel' demanded new ways to parse meter, while Joel’s song cycles in 'Movin’ Out' required choreography to carry narrative without dialogue. These weren’t 'dance to pop' projects; they were compositional dialogues where movement generated musical counterpoint, like her dancers’ footwork becoming percussive motifs that reorchestrated Joel’s piano lines.
How did Tharp’s work influence dance education in American universities?
Her insistence on cross-training reshaped curricula: NYU’s Tisch Dance program introduced mandatory jazz and improvisation alongside ballet by 1988, directly citing her Joffrey-era repertory demands. She also pioneered the 'choreographic lab' model, students compose full works using her phrase-generation rules (e.g. 'invert, reverse, delay') rather than imitating set pieces, emphasizing process over product, now standard in MFA programs nationwide.
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