DANCE: Don’t think twice, it’s all Tharp

JUST LIKE A WOMAN Twyla Tharp set her Dylan revue in a low-rent circus.

Photo: Craig Schwartz

Twyla Tharp has excelled in modern dance, ballet and, most recently, on Broadway with Movin’ Out. Her newest production is another tour through a rock icon’s songbook: The Times They Are A-Changin’ is set to music by Bob Dylan and takes place at a low-rent traveling circus. But Tharp’s dances seem to be everywhere this season, due to a recent push to license her work. American Ballet Theatre will perform In the Upper Room and Sinatra Suite this October; in December, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater will present The Golden Section from The Catherine Wheel (and keep in mind that next March, the Juilliard School will do Tharp’s landmark Deuce Coupe). Tharp, 65, sat down near her Upper West Side home to discuss her blessedly busy fall.

How did you get the idea for the show?

The Dylan office asked me to do it.

Why did it appeal to you?

Because of Dylan’s poetry, because he’s a very, very good musician and because there’s a huge range in his music. He is one of the very rare workers who’s had a beginning, a middle and a late career, all of which are clearly Dylan, but they are also, all of them, a development. It’s not just recycling the same old, same old.

You reworked the show after its premiere run in San Diego. Why did you hire more dancers?

I missed them. Plus, they were in another Broadway show and then they were available. I imagined them onstage together.

How did you rework the show?

The ensemble needed to be strengthened. Essentially, that was the big problem. If you put the onus on just the language, it becomes a recitation of songs that we already know and love. If you have an ensemble that can create character and that is a powerhouse in terms of dancers, all unique and amazing, that is my favorite statement. It’s a small cast. Everybody takes a solo call. But it needed a strong ensemble because there were so few people [onstage]. And this is not an insult to those who were in the other version. The changes aren’t about anybody’s shortcomings other than my own.

Are there still trampolines and stilt walkers?

There are tramps, and there is a stilt walker, but please do not get confused—just as I have no intention of going into any kind of hierarchy in relation to the Dylan canon, we’re not a circus. Nobody is going into competition with Cirque du Soleil. That’s not my business. Circus here is a metaphor for our world. The movie this was most closely aligned with is Fellini’s La Strada. There were obviously two male figures and a female figure in La Strada, and La Strada is about a low-rent circus and it is also a metaphor for a world: this post–World War II world. They do a great job of creating a reality for it, but because it’s Fellini it can easily become surreal as well.

Is The Times related at all to your 1989 work Bum’s Rush?

Not a stupid question. There’s some Eight Jelly Rolls and Bum’s Rush in it. Nothing literal, but the same kind of feel for movement. In Movin’ Out, there were literal passages from a lot of the repertory.

You are making a push to license your work to other companies. Why?

Now that my son [Jesse Huot] is running the business component, in conjunction with a wonderful woman named Ginger Montel, they can service the pieces in a way that I could not. As they’re remounted, we try to get very good documentation on them; we’re working on systems that will responsibly preserve this material so it’ll be available when I am not. You know the Bolshoi is doing In the Upper Room?

I do. Are you thrilled?

It’s weird. I’d like to try and go because apparently it’s the first time a woman’s work has been mounted there. They’re playing the Philip Glass [score] live; I never did. It’s obviously a rare privilege to see your work passed on to posterity while you’re still alive. And as I see these pieces being danced by different levels of dancers, by different nationalities of dancers, I get a very different view of them. It’s good. Dancers have videotapes now, which is extremely different. I think it’s both good and bad. When I was working, you just had to get a feel for it, so there was no attempt to try to duplicate it—thank God. You could just get the spirit of the thing. Now, dancers can learn perhaps quicker but they won’t learn as freshly. What they get will always be just slightly used.

Why didn’t you go to the final performance of Movin’ Out?

Because I was in San Diego. Because I do not travel well. Because I had a rehearsal on a Saturday and I had a rehearsal on a Monday, and because it is not my way to compromise my rehearsals and come in half dead and not allow other people to do that.

You were missed.

Fine.

The Times They Are A-Changin’ begins previews at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on September 25.

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