by Henry Alford
I asked Jamie how dancing Twyla’s work was different from performing other choreographers’.
“She allows you to be yourself,” he said. “Other choreographers want things a very certain way, and your challenge is to meet what they want. I worked with Mark Morris a lot and, not that he didn’t want my interpretation of his work, but countless times in the studio, Twyla would choreograph something on me and she’d be sitting in her chair and would say, ‘Okay, you’re gonna start from the corner, come in and run, and then jump, and as you’re jumping you’re gonna go into arabesque, and then bring your legs together and then you’re gonna land on one leg and come down into an arabesque.’ And then she would mold it to my body.”
I said to Jamie, “She does a lot with a shrug. Does she say stuff like ‘Throw it away’?”
“Not so much ‘Throw it away,’ more about release. Aggressive: yes. There’s an attack to her work.”
“She’s said in interviews that she asks for ‘insane commitment’ from her dancers.”
“And you want to give her that. Because she’s going to pull out of me as an artist what I didn’t even know existed. But she’s hard. Working with her is very hard. The hardest part is, when she’s done with you, she’s done. She severs relationships and communications. It’s because of the intense relationship with her in the studio. It becomes a kind of divorce. I’m one of the few dancers who left on a good note. But at the airport, when we’d finished the last performance of the work we were doing at the time, Diabelli at the Hancher Auditorium in Iowa, she said goodbye, and that was one of the last times I’ve ever seen her. I thought, Oh, there’ll be another project, something else will come down the line. But no, that was it.”
I’m reminded here of the weirdest line in Twyla’s memoir. It comes toward the end, after she’s chronicled a number of her romantic relationships with men, most of whom she worked with—painter Peter Young, artist Bob Huot, Baryshnikov, rock promoter Bill Graham, David Byrne.
Twyla writes, “Like primitive peoples eating the hearts of lions to consume bravery, I seemed to mate to acquire talents.”
* * *
Jamie is unusual in the world of Tharp dancers not only because when he rejoined her he served for a time as director of her dancers and her assistant, but because in 1991, while the company did a residency at the Ohio State University, Twyla had Jamie do half of The One Hundreds as a solo.
“It was a one-off,” he said. “And no one hundred volunteers.”
I asked, “Is it harder to learn a bunch of random movement sequences rather than something with narrative?”
“It requires a different memory chip. It requires mnemonics. I would think, This is the shaking hands one, this is Scratch My Foot.”
“This is Heidi Gets on a Plane to Scotland,” I said, remembering having read about the title another Tharp dancer had given to one of the moves.
“Exactly. It’s that children’s game, ‘I’m going to the market and buying apples and bananas and . . .’ It starts as a brain exercise but then physical memory kicks in.”
We talked more about the upcoming performance. I confessed, “For a nonprofessional like me, who’s a little daunted by the task, the saving graces are that (a) it’s about deterioration, and (b) Hermione Gingold did it at age eighty.”
At various times that The One Hundreds has been performed, celebrities like Dick Cavett, Estelle Parsons, Miloš Forman, and singer and pianist Bobby Short have been among the one hundred, as was Gingold, the British actress with the absurdly ribbitty voice who played the grandmother in the movie Gigi and the mayor’s haughty wife in The Music Man.
Jamie smiled at the mention of Gingold. He said, “You’re gonna be a star! When you get there, just make sure you have enough room to dance in. Everyone’s gonna be jostling for position.”
“I’ll get my elbows going.”
“Yes. And have a good time! What makes it a unique experience is that you’ll be doing it with ninety-nine other people. I mean, when do one hundred people ever agree to do anything for even one second, let alone eleven?”
* * *
I asked Jamie what he made of Twyla’s interest in deterioration, and he suggested that all dances suffer it. Referring to one of Tharp’s most beloved dances, he said, “That’s what I saw over the course of In the Upper Room, from being in the original company to various pick-up companies and to ABT: not that it got lost in translation, but in each new version there was deterioration away from what the dance originally was.”
“You mean that the dancers’ moves get looser in each new production?”
“Things get lost. It depends on who’s setting the dance, and what they remember, and what their understanding of the physicality is. It might be the right steps but not have the right intent.”
In the Upper Room feels like a masterpiece. Twyla has called it a “secular mass.” Set to a pulsating, soaring Philip Glass score that seems to burst through the rafters, the dance sees thirteen dancers, thanks to wonderfully spectral lighting from Jennifer Tipton, alternately materializing onto and disappearing from a fog-drenched stage. The dancers are in two groups: the three men and three women who are writhing and thrashing while wearing sneakers are known by the company as “the stompers,” while the other seven, including four women in fire engine–red pointe shoes, have a more slicing and shearing quality, and are referred to by the company as “the bomb squad.” Are we in Heaven? If so, this is the most aerobicized view of the hereafter on record; you’ll be able to eat anything here because the workout is so hardcore. It’s the Oresteia of leaping and wriggling. But maybe the more apt way to view this tour de force—it’s the one dance of Twyla’s that is invariably met with a standing ovation—is as a battle between the towering, sky-directed classicism of ballet and the dirt-born, shrugging unpredictability of modern. Here is the ultimate smackdown between earth and air.
But, in the end, what’s so galvanizing about In the Upper Room is its sense of urgency. The dance shares two qualities with the best suspense films: the stakes are high from the get-go, and the movement of the piece is one of constant escalation. It starts at 10 and builds to 17.
* * *
Back in New York, I kept trying out various One Hundreds moves that I found on YouTube. I could imagine a world in which Twyla’s shrugging and aggressive nonchalance were within my scope of bodily capability, but some of her sudden shifts of tempo, not to mention a lot of the ballet moves, were entities I’d have to resign myself to watching, not doing.
Part of me wondered if the three-and-a-half hours of rehearsal that us volunteers would get on the day of the performance would be enough to settle my mounting nerves. Another part of me thought, There’ll be ninety-nine other people dancing at the same time, so why worry?
But mostly I wondered what the dance as a whole would seem like. I couldn’t find a video of the whole twenty-two-minute-or-so thing, only parts thereof. Dance critic Marcia B. Siegel, who wrote a book about Twyla called Howling Near Heaven, once described The One Hundreds as “conceptual, boring, fascinating, spectacular,” which sounded about right.
Then, the day before the event, in a New York Times story, Gia Kourlas called The One Hundreds “glorious.”
From my office, I sent Greg a link to the Times story, and titled the e-mail “Pressure mounting!”
That night at home, we started talking about the event and Greg said, “I can’t wait.”
I said, “It should be really cool. I just read about another high-concept piece that Twyla did around the same time, though. When her company performed it in Paris, one French critic lamented having to endure quote-unquote ‘this hairy and untidy outburst.’ ”
Greg said, “By which he meant the 1960s.”
The meeting place for the event, which was part of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s River to River Festival, was a one-thousand-square-foot-or-so, ground-floor space right next to Rockefeller Park: a sparsely furnished glass box that might otherwise hav
e been a Citibank or Foot Locker.
I gave my name to one of the smiley young folk manning the table in the space’s entryway. She said, “I’m gonna assign Savannah as your teacher.” Savannah Lowery, the New York City Ballet soloist who would be missing that company’s fall season to dance with Twyla.
I had arrived in both senses of the word.
About thirty people milled around the space, many of them standing and chatting, some of them sitting on the floor, some of them stretching. There’d been no wardrobe requirements in either of the two e-mails we volunteers had received; the cumulative dress code on display suggested a Lululemon store that was hemorrhaging harem pants.
Gazing at the room, I was surprised to see Twyla herself, sitting on the windowsill. Silver-haired, she’s tiny and birdlike, and was dressed in jeans and grubby white New Balance sneakers. She was talking to her assistant.
Because there’d been no acknowledgment of my being a member of the press when I checked in, I took it that Twyla didn’t know I was in attendance. I also figured that there were probably a bunch of other press people taking part in the event. (I would later meet Claudia Roth Pierpont, who was participating, and writing up the experience for the New Yorker.)
Given that Twyla looked neither busy nor beset by admirers, I decided to walk up to her and try to say something that would make an impression. Though, in the moment, I was not trying to be rebellious, I would later come to think of it as so. In the moment, my brain went immediately to the time that Twyla herself performed half of The One Hundreds as a solo. While Jamie Bishton had done Half the One Hundreds to fill up a program of repertory, Twyla herself did it at the Spoleto Festival in Italy in 1975 in order, according to Howling Near Heaven, to show off to Baryshnikov, who Twyla knew would be in the audience, and with whom she was hoping to work. After her performance, she went to the after-party, where Baryshnikov, whom she had not really formally met yet, walked up to her and gave her a glass of champagne.
I’ll let Twyla’s memoir take over here: “The party was much too crowded. We became restless. Outside, the evening was clear, the air warm; the moon lit the winding streets that pitched steeply down from the palazzo to our hotel. Soon we were running barefoot down the town’s ancient sidewalks, laughing at the pleasure of moving together. When we arrived at the hotel we paused. We were both winded, speaking different languages; it seemed ridiculous even to ask. In my room, I found that the famous muscles I had only seen tensed in performance possessed an extraordinary softness. As we explored each other’s bodies, the confidence we had as dancers let us invent transitions that flowed as smoothly as well-drafted duets. Afterward he fell asleep and I watched his body shake, throwing off the remaining tension from his incredible dance efforts. It was dawn before I closed my eyes and when I awoke he was gone.”
So, taking a deep breath to calm myself, I walked up to Twyla on her windowsill perch and, without introducing myself, said, “Hi, Twyla, I just wanted to say what an honor it is to be doing this.”
Her head tilted back slightly, she looked down her beaky nose and over the top of her horn-rims at me. (“I am so near-sighted,” she has written, “that as a child, before I had glasses, I could not see into the mirror. So of course I understood that you play and dance by feel, not sight.”)
Twyla’s expression was pure deadpan, in the manner of a silent film comedian.
She reached out her hand to shake mine and said, “Thanks for doing this.”
ME: I just read the part of your memoir where you did part of The One Hundreds at Spoleto. You had such terrific results! I only hope our results tonight will be as good.
Slight pause.
TWYLA: Well, all right.
As soon as I skulked away from Twyla and disappeared into the crowd, I thought, I am an asshole. Who in his right mind, on meeting a woman in her seventies, let alone one who’s been nice enough to include you in one of her works, cuts right to her sex life?
Also, I had not expected this level of expressionlessness. Yes, when she accepted her Tony for Movin’ Out, Twyla said she’d once auditioned for the Rockettes: “I got through the 64 fouettés and they said, ‘That was all fine and good. Could you smile?’ ” Yes, the book Howling Near Heaven has dancer Sara Rudner, who worked with Twyla for two decades, saying that when Twyla watched rehearsals, “you could never tell what emotion she was feeling,” and that “Twyla didn’t come up to you and say, ‘God, that was great.’ She would not say anything.” (Rudner chalks up the blankness of Twyla’s screen to a kind of puritanism that grew out of her Quaker background.)
In retrospect I interpret my comment as both rebellion and homage. See, when you read a lot about Twyla, or talk to people in her orbit, her most oft-mentioned characteristic—besides the tireless dedication and the thrumming inventiveness—is her brashness. This reputation is partly self-fanned—in her memoir, she describes herself as “obnoxious” twice and “blunt” once; of her meeting with Bob Joffrey of the Joffrey Ballet to discuss making Deuce Coupe, she writes, “I was my usual brash, no-bullshit, direct and rude person.” In Paul Taylor’s beautifully written memoir, Private Domain, Taylor refers to this former member of his company as a “wisecracking little mole-twerp.” At the time, company member Twyla thought that Taylor had sold out as a choreographer; he’d assign her a phrase and she’d respond, “You’re kidding,” becoming, in her own words, “absolutely and intolerably obnoxious.” When Twyla leaves Taylor’s company, he writes, “Really didn’t want to lose you, Twyla honey, but why can’t you be less abrasive, less watch-spring tense? Because you’re talented and insecure and driven, that’s why. Like me.”
Yes, she’s famous for what she does with bodies, but that doesn’t mean she can’t deploy her mouth. There’s a funny passage in Howling Near Heaven wherein Twyla and some of her dancers are doing a site-specific dance at the Metropolitan Museum in 1970 that starts to go slightly awry. When Twyla launches into a solo that the other dancers have not had a chance to see before, they hover on the edge of the performance space, unsure whether or not to enter. So Twyla dances over to them and yells, “Get the fuck back!”
A few years earlier, when a janitor at Judson Church stumbled onto a Tharp rehearsal and indignantly asked how people could be dancing on a Sunday, Tharp fired back, “How dare you disturb a bunch of women doing God’s work!” (This churchly iconoclasm is immortalized in Hair, too: in the film’s LSD sequence, Tharp plays the airborne eminence in the chapel who marries Claude and Sheila, and who can be seen standing on the altar and kicking off her shorts to reveal striped panties beneath her surplice.)
Members of the media, too, can be the target of Twyla’s animus. “She hates being interviewed,” Bishton told me. “She hates having her picture taken,” Twyla’s assistant told me. In 1996, when a Los Angeles Times reporter writing a feature about Twyla’s new work—it was called Tharp!—asked her if the work marked a new direction for her, Twyla replied, “That’s only mostly a stupid question.”
Seen in this light, my comment made more sense to me. I must have been unconsciously trying to out-Twyla Twyla.
* * *
Some ten minutes after my brief interaction with Twyla, her assistant found me in the crowd and introduced me to her. I apologized for not having introduced myself earlier. Twyla asked that we talk off the record. I worried, of course, that she would bring up my earlier comment, but she did not. We talked for about ten minutes. I will say simply that it’s no surprise she’s a successful artist (she comes across as focused and direct, but anxious to talk about big concepts) or that she’s written three books in the self-improvement genre (she asks a lot of questions about you you you).
When a few of my awkward stabs at wit were met with blank-facedness, I focused instead on talking about The One Hundreds and complimenting her on her work. I told her that I loved the part of her memoir where she said her first dance was stunning a rattlesnake with a hoe, and I told her that I admired her bravery in presenting some of her shows in
Broadway theaters. I brought up our mutual interest in film, and it was only here that she let me know I had stumbled; when I suggested that film might save dance from being, as it is sometimes referred to, “the art that vanishes,” she had a sarcastic response that made me wonder if I’d ever heard an interview subject respond in earnest to a question with “Doy” or “D’oh” or any of the faux-primitive d-words deployed to acknowledge an interviewer’s apparent stupidity.
* * *
We split up into our groups. Savannah Lowery—a tall, warm, twenty-something who feels instantly like your fun-loving, jocky big sister—looked at the twelve of us in her group and asked, “Do we have any dancers, because I have two sequences with splits. One from a standing position.” Three young women volunteered. “Great,” Lowery said, “I want to get those harder ones out of the way first.”
We moved over to the corner of the room, and Lowery started patiently explaining the first sequence—the standing splits one—to one of the women while the rest of us watched, some of us standing, some of us sitting on long conference tables.
Lowery spent about fifteen minutes with the first three dancers. The sequences were intimidatingly complicated. I tried to offset my tension by looking at the chaos surrounding me; it looked like the room was about to burst into a Diet Coke commercial. Off in the distance I saw Twyla twirling 180 degrees while taking an iPhone video of the cumulative welter. Then she sat on the floor to photograph a woman whose sequence involved somersaulting backwards.
Hearing Lowery say, “Okay, now I have one for one of my guys. This one is a football one.” I snapped back to attention.
I looked at the only other male in our group—he was willowy, with misty, spaniel eyes and ringlets of hair down to his shoulders—and I thought, I got this. I raised my hand.