Biography
Art is the only way to run away without leaving home. -Twyla Tharp
Born Portland, Indiana, 1 July 1941.
Award-winning dancer and choreographer for stage, film and television, Twyla Tharp has created over 135 dances in her career. She studied a variety of musical instruments and dance styles as a child growing up in California. Intending to become a psychiatrist, Tharp attended Pomona College only to transfer during her second year to Barnard and to study ballet, modern and jazz in NYC. After dancing briefly with the Paul Taylor Company, she founded her own company in 1965 creating work that only partially reflected the reigning postmodern sensibility; she believed in classical technique and in dance movement that was distinct from pedestrian activity. Tharp created Fugue in an effort to develop movement as intrinsically logical as music, with a structure based on retrograde, inversion, reversal, and other manipulations of the phrase. Fugue is choreographed in twenty sections, each with a discrete beginning.
Twyla Tharp's Works:
The Fugue
Premiere Date: 1970