The remarkable life and work of the dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp I celebrated in a biographical “American Masters” (PBS, 9 p.m., check local listings) in which she forges on during the pandemic by trying to direct dancers including Misty Copeland, via Zoom.
She turned to Zoom, too, for a press event last month to talk about the project. Her wide-ranging session discussed her work in film (“Hair,” her work with Mikhail Baryshnikov and advice for people her age — she’s 79 — and how they incorporate movement in their lives.
“Begin in bed,” she said. “Before you get out of bed. Stretch in bed, and move your legs, flex
your feet. Torque, twist, push out into space. When you get up, exaggerate how you get out of bed. Bend over way further than you have to get up. So, by the time you start moving, it’s a fait accompli.”
At one point in her long journey through dance, she danced through a five year period without musical accompaniment at all.
I asked whether that changed her relationship to music when she returned to it.
“Yes,” Tharp said. “Because I had formulated my own musical structure without music playing. So, I had a conversation. It wasn’t just I went on the wave of the music. I could have an actual dialogue with the music because I brought something to the table.”
Tharp had done some striking and popular ballets to the music of The Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, David Byrne and Billy Joel.
But, she went on, “We also don’t really cover Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Haydn in this picture. I’ve done a lot of Beethoven pieces, and the thing that was interesting to me about Beethoven is, it was ‘you’re going to choreograph the 7th Symphony,” or “You’re going to do the Diabelli. Good luck with that. He really doesn’t need you.’
“Then I thought about it and I said, ‘Wait a minute. This is a guy who walked every morning with a small pad and a small pencil, and he made notes in movement. His music came from moving.’ So, my task for those five years, with no music, was to ascertain where the music began with the composer inside their body?”