Tough mama and the jokerman

Oxford Professor of Poetry, Christopher Ricks (whom W.H. Auden once referred to as "exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding") calls Bob Dylan "the greatest living user of the English language." He writes: "Dylan has always had a way with words. He does not simply have his way with them, since a true comprehender of words is no more their master than he or she their servant. The triangle of Dylan's music, his voices, and his unpropitiatory words: this is still his equilateral thinking."

Dance artist Twyla Tharp is described by Alex Witchel in the New York Times Magazine article below as "a control freak, a perfectionist, a zealot in forming a vision and stopping at nothing to see it realized. But when it is realized, when her dances are good-better-best, flying off the stage like some biblical fire on a mountaintop, there is nothing in the world like them. Twenty-three years ago, Robert Joffrey said that Tharp’s work “didn’t look like anyone else’s.” It still doesn’t."

Now, for the first time together on Broadway...

Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune,
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Jokerman, Bob Dylan, 1983

Tough Mama
Meat shakin' on your bones
I'm gonna go down to the river and get some stones.
Sister's on the highway with that steel-drivin' crew,
Papa's in the big house, his workin' days are through.
Tough Mama
Can I blow a little smoke on you?
Tough Mama by Bob Dylan, Planet Waves, 1974

To dance beneath the diamond sky

by Alex Witchel

New York Times Sunday Magazine

October 22, 2006

Twyla Tharp has strong feelings about good coffee, just as she has strong feelings about dance, theater and the universe in general. So this particular moment, as she fished a dead fly from her coffee cup, was probably as good an introduction as any to Rule No. 1 in the World According to Tharp: Twyla Tharp is always right. Rule No. 2? See Rule No. 1. Rule No. 3? Yes, there is a 3. Though rare, it is possible for Tharp to be wrong. But only if she proves herself wrong. No one else need apply.

“Let me get you a fresh cup,” offered Artie Gaffin, the production stage manager of “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” the new Broadway musical conceived, directed and choreographed by Tharp, based on the music of Bob Dylan. Gaffin, among his other duties, had the unenviable job of coffee maker at Aaron Davis Hall, the theater in Harlem where the cast rehearsed during the summer. Located in a neighborhood improbably crammed with beauty salons, there was not a bodega to be found with a can of Maxwell House and a plug.

Tharp drank the coffee. “I don’t want you to remake it,” she told him. “I just want you to acknowledge that this coffee sucks.”

Once that was accomplished, Tharp turned her gaze on Kim Craven, the resident director who is her second in command. Craven was busy showing a dancer a change in steps that Tharp asked for the previous day.

“Thank you, Kimmy, for being so conscientious,” Tharp called. “That’s going to change again today.”

Craven kept her equanimity, which was impressive, considering that she had just given Tharp a note of her own, to which Tharp responded, “I understand what you’re saying, but I’m leaving it as it is.”

Bark, bark. You get the idea. But it is probably time to say this: There was not a person in that theater, including the 19 performers, musicians and production staff, who did not admire Tharp. Those new to her are scared of her, those used to her are over her, because they know that behind the barking lies a devotion to them, to the work — always, always the work — that is religious in its fervor. Yes, she is a control freak, a perfectionist, a zealot in forming a vision and stopping at nothing to see it

realized. But when it is realized, when her dances are good-better-best, flying off the stage like some biblical fire on a mountaintop, there is nothing in the world like them. Twenty-three years ago, Robert Joffrey said that Tharp’s work “didn’t look like anyone else’s.” It still doesn’t.

Tharp’s most recent success was the Broadway musical “Movin’ Out,” a danced narrative set to the music of Billy Joel, which won her a Tony Award for Best Choreography. The show ran for more than three years, and its touring company is still on the road. But Tharp is more than a Broadway baby; she’s an American artist of the first order. In her 41-year career, she has famously broken down the barriers between ballet and modern dance, fusing them into a genre specifically her own. She created 132 dances for her company, Twyla Tharp Dance, as well as for American Ballet Theater, New York City Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, the Royal Ballet, Martha Graham Company and others. This month, American Ballet Theater will perform her “Sinatra Suite” (1984) and “In the Upper Room” (1986), with music by Philip Glass. In November, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater will perform “The Golden Section” (1983), and in February, the Bolshoi Ballet will also do “In the Upper Room,” its first work by an American female choreographer.

Like Jerome Robbins, her late friend and fellow perfectionist, Tharp has never mistaken provincialism for artistic purity, and she has pursued a wide range of commercial projects; her work was presented on Broadway as early as 1976. For the director Milos Forman, she choreographed the films “Hair,” “Amadeus” and “Ragtime,” and she won two Emmy Awards as choreographer and co-director of “Baryshnikov by Tharp.” She is the author of “Push Comes to Shove” (1992), an autobiography, and “The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life” (2003). She has received the National Medal of Arts, 17 honorary doctorates and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation award, more commonly known as the “genius” grant.

Maybe she’s always right, after all.

Standing in the audience near the lip of the stage, she watched the dancers warm up — some jumped on trampolines or twirled lassos while others performed a makeshift barre — and she looked even tinier than her 5 feet 1ð inches. Although it was Dylan who approached her, after the success of ’“Movin’ Out,” to make his music dance as she had Joel’s, the show is completely her invention.

She listened to every song Dylan ever recorded and chose 25 around which to build a narrative. She conceived of a traveling circus run by an abusive father at odds with his artistic son; complicating things further is the woman who comes between them. Unlike in “Movin’ Out,” which literally split the stage in two, musicians playing on the top level, performers dancing beneath them, in “Times,” Tharp cast singers among her ensemble to fully integrate song and dance. The end result is a fable about growing up, love, death and acceptance, danced and sung to a Dylan hit parade, including “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” (“Everybody must get stoned”). It opens at the Brooks Atkinson Theater on Oct. 26.

Click here to read the entire New York Times Magazine article.