Their programme at Sadler's Wells - including her minimalist classic Fugue and the dazzling Surfer at the River Styx - promises to be vintage Tharp. Then there is the Twyla Tharp Dance troupe, which performs her "off-Broadway" repertory. The two casts of Movin' Out require "heavy-duty maintenance" and Tharp sounds oddly hysterical as she talks of being trapped between the "tentacles" of her old projects and her desperate desire to embark on new ones.
Another musical is also being planned, but progress is proving slow. And she has been so successful that a touring production of Movin' Out is already on the road. "It's for the general public, yes, but it's about everybody, rather than about everybody's money." She deliberately set out to initiate a wider audience into the language of dance. She vehemently denies that the commercial aspect of Movin' Out diminishes the work. "I was always gimme some of this, gimme some of that." She sees no contradiction in fleshing out her complicated dance structures with the energy of pop, the elegance of classicism, the louche slipperiness of jazz and the "ranting soul" of modern dance. Tharp's dance style has always been eclectic: as a little girl she would strain for perfection in tap and baton twirling as well as in ballet.
After all, she says, "Beethoven and Schubert did folk songs as well as high aria. And, she insists, directing the show was as challenging as anything she has attempted. It was, Tharp points out, her own idea to convey the action entirely through dance, and she who arranged the score (a sequence of Billy Joel songs). But none have been so successful or so entirely her conception. Movin' Out isn't Tharp's first musical (her other credits include Singin' in the Rain and the film version of Hair). We are here for an interview, not for gossip. She has a million things on her mind, and Nicholson's presence at her show is of scant interest. At 62, her gym-honed body is tensed for action, her gaze sharp, her speech impatiently peppered with italics and verbal short cuts. Nor does Tharp look like a woman basking in easy success. Yet she hasn't abandoned her pure-dance audience - her small-scale touring company appears at Sadler's Wells this week - and it would be foolhardy to suggest to her face that Movin' Out represents her art's dumbing down. Tharp is even publishing a self-help book on the art of creative thinking this autumn. Sellin' out might seem a more appropriate label for a career that has advanced so publicly from avant-garde to Broadway. And Tharp's choreography, a virtuoso marathon of jazz, classical and dance steps, recently won her a Tony award. Celebrities followed suit - Jack Nicholson was a regal presence the night I saw the show. Critics not only came to her latest musical, Movin' Out, but left a glowing trail of superlatives behind them. These days, Tharp's name is written in lights on Broadway. The critics didn't exactly disagree - they simply failed to attend its downtown premiere. Tank Dive was a seven-minute number whose meticulous moves Tharp considered a groundbreaking deconstruction of the art form. It had sold over 1.06 million copies by 2017.I t is 38 years since Twyla Tharp blazed a fierce experimental trail with her first public piece. It was the second biggest-selling single of 1983 in the UK, and was the 19th biggest-selling single of the 1980s, selling 975,000 copies. It was a number three record in the US, and reached number one in the UK, his only number one in the country. The couple have remained good friends over the years while raising Alexa. They had one child together: Alexa Ray Joel, born December 29, 1985. However, the marriage ended in August 1994.
Guests at the wedding included singer Paul Simon and members of the band Stray Cats. They first met in 1983 on the Island of St Barts, in the Caribbean, and were married on a yacht on the Hudson River, the second marriage for both of them.
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