Editor’s note: “Movin’ Out returns to the Buell Theatre June 13-18. Here is Kyle MacMillan’s advance interview with the show’s “Piano Man,” Darren Holden. It was first published May 21, 2004.
In the rambunctious dance world of the 1960s and ’70s ruled by creative giants such as George Balanchine and Martha Graham, Twyla Tharp managed to make a name for herself as the rebel upstart.
But even as she strived to subvert modern-dance conventions and earn a place at the forefront of the avant-garde, the choreographer never lost sight of the importance of reaching – if not necessarily pleasing – an audience.
“Even in the beginning, when I was being as rigorously unpleasant as possible, there was still underlying it, ‘Oh, goody, they’re going to hate it,”‘ Tharp said from New York City. “But ‘they’ was still operative.”
Such subversiveness is long gone – a natural outgrowth, Tharp says, of age and maturity. Today the 63-year-old choreographer is basking in the popular success of “Movin’ Out,” a new kind of dance-driven musical that opened on Broadway in October 2002.
A nationally touring production of the show, which is set in the 1960s and early ’70s and features 24 classic songs by famed pop vocalist Billy Joel, opens Tuesday in the Buell Theatre.
With Tharp’s sometimes-clipped responses and dismissals of certain questions about the show and her career during a recent interview, it quickly became clear that she doesn’t enjoy such exchanges – something she readily admitted.
It’s not that she necessarily dislikes critics or shuns exposure. She just wishes that her creations could speak for themselves, even if she realizes that public relations are an unavoidable part of an artist’s job.
“I’m not a publicity-driven person, OK?” she said. “I’m not a celebrity-oriented person. I believe in the work. The work is going to take care of it, and ultimately, if it’s any good, that’s what there is. It’s not about me.”
That single-minded focus propelled Tharp to the top of the dance world and has kept her there. She might not have anything approaching Joel’s fame among the general public, but no living choreographer is more widely known or respected within the
field.
Since creating her first piece in 1965 – “Tank Dive,” which related to the notion of jumping into a teacup of water from a 40-foot platform – she has created more than 130 dance works set to music ranging from Ludwig van Beethoven to Frank Sinatra.
“I figured I’d better couch my diagonals and spirals in sex and surprise,” Tharp wrote in her 1992 autobiography, “Push Comes to Shove,” explaining her early approach to dance. And that description remains apt nearly four decades later.
“There can be a very dry, accurate, precise, somewhat academic, idealized performance,” she said. “And then there’s something that’s a little more down and funky, and I tend to go in that direction.”
If “Movin’ Out” has brought Tharp some of the biggest audiences of her career, it is hardly the first time her work has been seen away from the dance stage by a broader public.
Tharp provided the choreography for such hit films as “Amadeus” (1980) and “White Nights” (1985), and she has worked on Broadway several times since 1980, including directing and choreographing the 1985 staging of “Singin’ in the Rain.”
“I’m a show-biz baby,” she said. “I grew up in a drive-in theater. It’s always about the folks is the audience, and what are they up to tonight and how do you get to them.”
Tharp is not ready to endorse the idea, as some critics have written, that “Movin’ Out” is a new kind of Broadway musical because it conveys its story through dance with no dialogue. For that to prove true, she believes it has to inspire follow-up projects in the same vein. No one knows if that will happen.
Among the show’s closest historical precedents are musicals such as “West Side Story” and “Oklahoma!” where choreography by Jerome Robbins and Agnes de Mille respectively was not just decoration but actually helped advance the plot.
“(Bob) Fosse’s ‘Dancin” is close to what this might be, but it was a revue,” Tharp said. And it had no continuity other than the standard kind of revue format. Whereas this does have ongoing characters, a beginning, middle and end without language.
“And in that sense, it’s historic, because it’s not been done in this way before. Not on the Broadway stage.”
Using characters from Joel’s hit songs, “Movin’ Out” follows five young friends as they confront the Vietnam War and other life-changing challenges arising from the turbulent 1960s and early ’70s.
Why Joel’s music?
“Some things have something to do with happenstance in combination
with design,” Tharp said. “And there were several popular musician-composers that I thought about, but Billy came to pass. So, there you are.”
Following the sometimes harsh reviews the show received during a pre-Broadway run in Chicago, Tharp revamped it with the help of her son, Jesse.
“The first act was essentially rewritten, more than half of it in two weeks,” she said. “I wouldn’t have been able to do it if the second act wasn’t intact. And as I often say, we had a party, which was the second act. We just had everybody in the wrong clothes.
That was the first act. So, all we had to do was get the wardrobe together. And that’s how we did it.”
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-820-1675 or
kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
