Dance Chapter 5 – Flashcards

Dance is the only art in which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made. *Ted Shawn* I do everything I know how in a dance. *Twyla Tharp* Dances commissioned by kings were traditional and strengthen the existing order. Dance creators saw themselves not as artist but as craftsmen. The 20th century brought a revolution in dance. Lead by the choreographer, they saw older dance forms having little to do with the contemporary world. The idea that dances could be a medium of personal expression was revolutionary at the beginning of the 20th century. In this chapter we will discover the when, where and why of this dance movement.

Artists were influenced by events and social issues in the world around them. They wanted to express their personal visions through movement. This 20th century revolt against the formality of ballet developed primary in the United States and Germany. Each generation of modern dancers has a flavor of its own, and a place of its own in history. Two 19th Century movement theorists inspired the movement. François Alexandre Nicolas Chéri Delsarte developed a system of natural expression and gestures. Émile Jaques-Dalcroze utilizes physical movement and musical rhythms to reinforce the concepts which affect the students' performance and rention of musical basics. He called his theory Eurhythmics. François Alexandre Nicolas Chéri Delsarte was trained as an actor and tenor with the Opera Comique. His singing career was shortened by vocal damage. Delsarte was interested in enhancing performance through pose and gesture. He studied and recorded everyday life human gesture. Delsarte recorded thousands of gestures and identified their time, motion, space and meaning. Émile Jaques-Dalcroze developed eurhythmics, a method of learning and experiencing music through movement. The Dalcroze Method involves teaching musical concepts through movement

Rudolph Von Laban devised systems of analyzing and notating dance and all movement. His 1928 publication of Kinetographie Laban, a dance notation system that came to be called Labanotation and is still used as one of the primary movement notation systems in dance. Labanotation is a system of analyzing and recording of human movement. Similar to music notation Labanotation uses a staff. It consists of three lines and runs vertically. The score is read from the bottom to the top of the page. Movement on the left side of the body is written on the left side of the staff and movement on the right side of the body is written on the right side of the staff Marie Wigman studied under Emile Jaques-Dalcroze and Rudolf Von Laban. Wigman started a school in Dresden in 1920, which became known as "DRESDEN CENTRAL SCHOOL" a center for modern dance innovation. Her schools in Germany continued to operate under Nazi rule in World War II where she obeyed the rule of government and fired all her Jewish dancers (which was customary at the time). The primary musical accompaniment for her most well-known dances was percussion, which contrasted greatly with her use of silence. Mary would often employ masks in her pieces, influenced again by non-western/tribal themes. Mary Wigman's "Witches Dance" Mary Wigman's dance company toured the United States. She was asked to open a studio in New York City. Hanya Holm was sent to direct and teach the Wigman technique. Due to the rise of fascism and a need to distance the school from German ties, it became known as the Hanya Holm Studio. Holm's technique stressed the importance of pulse, planes, floor patterns, aerial design, direction, and spatial dimensions. Holm's dance work Metropolitan Daily was the first modern dance composition to be televised on NBC, and her Labanotation score for Kiss Me, Kate (1948) was the first choreography to be copyrighted in the United States.

Loie Fuller (1862-1928) Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) Ruth St. Denis (1879-1968) Ted Shawn (1891-1972)

Loie Fuller (1862-1928) was from Illinois and had been a vaudeville and burlesque performer. She moved to Paris to perform with the Follies Bergere where she found fame. Fuller received a voluminous skirt of transparent white silk. Playing with the skirt in front of a mirror, she had an idea. Fuller, an inventor and held a number of patents for stage lighting. With dramatic lighting she could create, shapes suggestive of flowers, butterflies and flames on stage, using yards of silk and a pair of hand-held wands. To her audience she was a living magnification of Art Nouveau. This movie was made of a dancer that imitated Fuller. Each frame was water colored by hand .

Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) was born in San Francisco. At the age of 15 she began teaching ballroom dance to Californian in need of social polish. At the age of 18, she moved to New York and joined a traveling theatre group. The more she saw of theatrical dance the less she liked it. She wrote, "I am an enemy of the ballet, which I consider a false and preposterous art." To Duncan, ballet was unnatural requiring "deformed skeleton" and "sterile movements" whose "purpose is to create the delusion that the law of gravity does not exist for them." To Duncan, the real source of dance was to be found in nature, the art of classical Greece and inside herself. She began performing in salons recitals (society women who spend their leisure time by supporting the arts) to put her theories to the test. With the money she raised at salon recitals she went to Europe to develop her art. At a concert in an art gallery in London, she removed her dancing shoes and danced barefoot for the first time. Socking to some in attendance, dancing barefooted became her trademark and the defining characteristic of "modern dance" in the first ½ of the 20th century. Her movements were based on the natural rhythms of walking, running skipping, and jumping matched to the dynamics of the music played (Chopin, Schubert, Beethoven) Although her movements were planned she liked to give the impression she was improvising. Duncan went to St. Petersburg to perform in 1904. At the apartment of Anna Pavlova, she met Michael Fokine. He would be the first to put barefoot ballerinas on the classical stage four years later in Serge Diaghilev Ballet Russes in Paris. Duncan defined herself and her art, controlled her own career and forced the world to accept her on her own terms. Duncan died in 1927 on the French Riviera when a scarf caught in a rear wheel snapped her neck. Isadora Duncan was: first American dancer to define movement based on natural and spiritual laws rather than on formal considerations of geometric space. the first American dancer to compare dance to the other arts, defending it as a primary art form worthy of "high art" status. first American dancer to develop a philosophy of the dance. first American dancer to deemphasize scenery and costumes in favor of a simple stage setting and simple costumes. By doing this, Duncan suggested that watching a dancer dance was enough. Like many artist of her time, she did not want to be recorded dancing because poor quality film of the era distorted movement. This is the only recording of Duncan dancing.

Ruth St. Dennis early training included Delsarte technique, ballet, social dance and skirt dancing. Ruth began her professional career in New York City in 1892, where she worked as a skirt dancer in a dime museum and in vaudeville. In 1904, she saw a poster of the goddess Isis in an ad for Egyptian Deities cigarettes. The image of the goddess sparked her imagination and she began reading about Egypt, and India. By 1905, St. Denis began a career as a solo artist. She had designed exotic costume and began her story telling dances. Her dance "Radha" was St Dennis's attempt to translate Indian culture and mythology to the American dance stage. After 1911, the vogue for solo dancers on the professional stage died down. Around 1913, St. Denis began adding other performers to her touring productions. In 1914 she hired Ted Shawn, to perform ballroom numbers. Soon after, St. Denis and Shawn became dance partners and were married. St. Dennis was the First American dancer to incorporate the practices of the vaudeville stage into the world of serious concert dance. Her solo "translations" were unique combinations of dramatic scene and contemporary dance steps that successfully combined theatrical and concert dance traditions. She was the cofounder of Denishawn

Ted Shawn was the first man to achieve a high level of recognition in the world of modern dance. St. Denis and Shawn opened their Denishawn School in 1915. The institution would be a successful source of income and allow St. Dennis and Shawn to pass on their ideas of Modern dance. The Denishawn School was housed in a Spanish-style mansion on top of a hill in Los Angeles. $500 covered the cost of a 12-week program that included daily technique classes, room and board, arts and crafts and guided reading lessons. Denishawn came to an end in 1929 due to tough circumstances both in Shawn's and St. Denis' marriage as well as the economy. On leaving Denishawn, he began an all-male dance company. Shawn wanted to make America aware and accepting of the importance of the male dancer in the arts. With this new company came the creation of Jacob's Pillow, a dance school, retreat, and theater. Jacob's Pillow has become a major American Dance Festival.

The Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, founded in 1915 by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in Los Angeles, California, helped many perfect their dancing talents. Some of the school's more notable pupils include Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman

Martha Graham's impact on dance is often compared to that of Picasso's on painting, Stravinsky's on music, and Frank Lloyd Wright's on architecture. Martha Graham was born May 11, 1894. At age14, her family moved to Santa Barbara in search of a cure for her younger sister's respiratory condition. Her father was a psychiatrist. He taught her that a person's movements never lie. In 1911, Ruth St. Denis performed at the Mason Opera House in Los Angeles. Inspired by St. Denis' performance, Graham enrolled in dance at a community college, and later to the newly opened Denishawn School. She would remain in the Denishawn School for eight years, first as a student and later as a teacher. Graham would take a position at the Eastman School of Music, where she was given complete control over dance program. Graham saw this as an opportunity to engage her best pupils in the experiential dance she was beginning to create. She wanted to evoke strong emotions through movement. She began her studies of contract and release and of giving into gravity. With her Eastman students, she formed the now famous Martha Graham School for Contemporary Dance in New York. Graham brought a young ballet dancer named Erick Hawkins into the company. The next ten years he would remain with the company and perform in many of her great pieces. The most famous work from this period was "Appalachian Spring" (1944), score by Aaron Copeland. In 1948 Graham and Hawkins married. He was fifteen years her junior. The marriage was short-lived. They continued to work together for a while and then made a permanent break. She believed the performances should exist only live on the stage. Graham would not allow her dances to be filmed or photographed. She would later change her mind about recording her dances. In this 1959 performance of Appalachian Spring Ms. Graham is 65 years old. Graham continued to perform until her company and friends convinced her she was disserving her audiences. In her 1991 autobiography Blood Memory, Graham lists her final performance as "Cortege of Eagles" in 1970 when she was 76 years old. One of the most important choreographers in the history of dance, she preferred to be known as a dancer. Retiring from performing, Graham descended into a deep depression. Graham's health quickly declined as she abused alcohol. In Blood Memory she wrote: [When I stopped dancing] I had lost my will to live. I stayed home alone, ate very little, and drank too much and brooded. My face was ruined, and people say I looked odd, which I agreed with. Finally my system just gave in. I was in the hospital for a long time, much of it in a coma. In 1972 she quit drinking, returned to her studio and went on to choreograph ten new ballets and staged many revivals. Her last completed ballet was 1990's Maple Leaf Rag. Graham choreographed until her death from pneumonia On April 1, 1991 at the age of 96. She was working on a new ballet for the Olympic Games of Barcelona, called The Eye of the Goddess. Graham's movement system and her theory of contraction and release are central to the development of modern dance in the United States. Graham was the first modern dance choreographer to fully use collaborations with other modern artists to create her dance theatre masterpieces. During her life her company only performed her choreography Graham trained and inspired generations of dancers and choreographers. Her pupils included Alvin Ailey, Twyla Tharp, Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham, and countless other dancers and actors. She collaborated with some of the foremost artists of her time including the composer Aaron Copland and the sculptor Isamu Noguchi. costumes by Calvin Klein. She danced and choreographed for over seventy years, and during that time was the first dancer ever to perform at White House (for Franklin Roosevelt), the first dancer to receive the highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of by President Gerald Ford (the First Lady Betty Ford had been a Graham dancer) the first dancer ever to travel abroad as a cultural ambassador. She was the first choreographer to regularly employ both Asian- and African-American Dancers. In her lifetime she received honors ranging from and the French Legion of Honor to Japan's Imperial Order of the Precious Crown.

In 1970 Ron Protas, then in his twenties, dropped out of Columbia Law School and decided to be a show-business photographer. He started to hang around Graham's studios. He was not well liked by company members, as he was not a dancer and had no reason to be involved with the company. When Graham's health began to fail, as a result of her alcoholism and depression over having to retire from her performing career, Protas moved into her home as a full time nurse and secretary. He wanted to make himself indispensable. After Graham's death, her will left Protas in control of her legacy. He registered the trademarks 'Martha Graham' and 'Martha Graham Technique', stating in an affidavit that he owned these names. He set up the 'Martha Graham Trust', to hold and license all of the intellectual property that Protas claimed to have inherited. He named himself as its sole trustee and beneficiary. In the 1990s the dance company ran into deep debt. It had to sell its headquarters in New York. It performed less and less. Sponsors, alienated by Protas, threatened to withdraw funding. Protas was leaned on to resign as artistic director. He lashed back, forbidding the Graham Center to teach the Graham technique and would not license the ballets to the company. The state of New York decided that the public interest was at stake. In a preliminary court case her opinion, Judge Cedarbaum found that Protas "misled" the United States trademark office. In order to obtain trademarks, he stated the Graham Center and Graham School only used Martha Graham's name due to an oral agreement Graham. As her heir, he had the right to revoke the agreement. The Court found that Martha Graham had permanently assigned rights to her name to the organizations when they were incorporated at her request in 1948 and 1956 respectively as not-for-profit corporations. Martha Graham intended that the Center and School continue after her death and that Protas' actions were "undermining" Martha Graham's arrangements, the court stressed. In a later case, it emerged that what Graham had left to Protas was 'any rights' she might have. However, Graham did not copyright many of her most important works. In American law, notation is a crucial condition of copyright. Graham had resisted notating her ballets The court concluded the Martha Graham Center owns the overwhelming majority of Martha Graham's dances. The Center (Defendant) owns fifty-four works; 10 works are in the public domain; 5 works are owned by commissioning entities; and the Plaintiff (Mr. Protas) has been declared owner of one dance.

Doris Humphrey (October 17, 1895 - December 29, 1958) studied and taught dance in Chicago. She opened her first dance school in 1913 at the age of 18. In 1917, she moved to California to enter the Denishawn School where she studied, performed, taught classes, and learned choreography. In 1928, she and fellow dancer Charles Weidman separated from the Denishawn School and began their own company in New York. Humphrey and Weidman explored the human body's responses to gravity. They studied how giving into gravity makes one fall and how balancing your body against gravity could create movement. The ideas of suspension (body's resistance to gravity) and succession (progressive unfolding of the body from joint to joint) were formulated. Best known for her large group dances, Humphrey was on the original faculties of both The Bennington School of Dance (1934) and The Juilliard School (1951). Both directed by Martha Hill. As a result, many of Humphrey's works were notated. Humphrey's choreography continues to be taught, studied and performed. Humphrey retired from performing in 1945 due to debilitating arthritis. She became the artistic director for the Jose Lemon Dance Company. The first time a company director and the artistic director were not the same person. Shortly after her death in 1958, Humphrey's book The Art of Making Dances (ISBN 0-87127-158-3), in which she shared her observations and theories on dance and composition, was posthumously published. This "how to" for choreography is still used in educational forums today.

Charles Edward Weidman, Jr. (1901- 1975) began his career as a Denishawn dancer. He started the Humphrey-Weidman Company with Doris Humphrey in 1927. In his company he trained famous choreographers such as Jose Limon and Bob Fosse. Charles Weidman wanted to create a uniquely American style of movement. His themes and ideas were designed to represent American culture, where man and woman dances as themselves in America. Weidman's unique movement style consisted of floor work, jumping and falls. His choreography brought a personal element to his dances. His choreography was very expressive and emotional. His range of emotion went from comedy to dramatic. His work is not well known as Doris Humphrey. It has been hard to reconstruct because very little of it is on tape or was notated. His former dancers have reconstructed most of his works from memory. His work inspired many and helped to create a whole genre of dance that is still evolving today.. "On My Mother's Side" is a series of dances made as tributes to the mother's side of his family. It featured a succession of dances based on different members of the family.

Margaret H'Doubler attended the University of Wisconsin as a major in biology and minor in philosophy. In 1910, she graduated and began working as an assistant instructor teaching basketball, baseball and swimming under the newly established Department of Physical Education for Women H'Doubler began teaching dance in the summer of 1917 University of Wisconsin. This was also the first university to develop dance courses. In 1926, the school established the first curriculum to establish dance as a major.

The development of Modern dance embraced the contributions of African American dance artists regardless of whether they made pure modern dance works or blended modern dance with African and Caribbean influences. Asadata Dafora also known as John Warner Dafora Horton or Austin Dafora Horton) was an opera singer, dancer, choreographer, writer, and one of the first musicians to introduce African drumming to the United States. Dafora is credited with the development of the dance-drama, a type of production that fully integrates narrative and song into dance performance. Furthermore, Dafora was the first to successfully stage African ritual in a Western style stage production. "Ostrich," one of the first modern dance compositions to fuse African movements with Western staging.

Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) was an anthropologist and dancer known for a movement vocabulary that drew from African American, Caribbean, West African culture, ballet and modern dance forms. Kathrine Dunham's interest in dance began at an early age. As a high school student, she opened a private dance school for young African American children. Dunham studied ballet under Mark Turbyfill, of Russian dancer Ludmilla Speranza, and Ruth Page. Dunham formed a group called Ballet Nègres, the first black ballet company in the USA when she was 21 years old. Completing Joliet Junior College, she attended University of Chicago. studing dance and anthropology. As a graduate student (1935-1936), she was awarded Travel Fellowships to conduct ethnographic study of the dance forms of the Caribbean. In 1939 she submitted her thesis - "Dances of Haiti, Their Social Organization, Classification, Form and Function". While in Haiti, she investigated Voodoo rituals and years later, after extensive studies and initiations, she became a mambo (priestess) in the Vaudon religion. As a result of her academic research, the field of dance anthropology was founded. Click on link to view an excerpt from Shango, one of many dances bases on her studies in Haiti. Major works of choreography include Run Lil Chillun, The Emperor Jones, Barrelhouse, Tropics, Le Hot Jazz, Rara-Tonga, Rites de Passage, Plantation Dances, Windy City; she later won acclaim for her ballet, Choros. In 1941, Dunham made her first movie performance in Carnival of Rhythm, the first Hollywood dance film in color. She also appeared in Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), the Abbott and Costello comedy Pardon My Sarong (1942), and the famous break-through Black musical, Stormy Weather (1943). Unlike other modern dancers that turned their back on social dance trends, Dunham embraced them and created social commentary around them. The Katherine Dunham Company toured throughout North America, Europe, North Africa, South America, Australia and the Far East. Ms. Dunham once refused to hold a performance after discovering the city's black residents had not been allowed to purchase tickets. In Hollywood, she refused to sign a lucrative studio contract when the producer told her to replace some of her darker-skinned company members. She and her company frequently had difficulties finding adequate accommodations while on tour. In 1963, Katherine Dunham became the first African-American to choreograph for the Metropolitan Opera with the production of Aida. In 1967 she retired from performing but continued tor choreography. One of her major works after retiring was directing Scott Joplin's opera Treemonisha in 1972. In 1992, the 82 year old, Dunham went on 47 day hunger strike to protest the discriminatory US foreign policy against Haitian boat-people. At that time Cubans landing in the U.S. would be given asylum, Haitians would be returned to Haiti. She ended her fast after exiled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Jesse Jackson came to personally request that she stop risking her life. Dunham died in her sleep in New York City from natural causes on May 21, 2006, aged 96.

Erick Hawkins, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor left Martha Graham's company to form their own companies. Jose` Limon studied under Doris Humphrey and Charley Weidman Tally Beaty studied under Kathryn Dunham

Saw dance as a potential agent of change. Modern Dance respected as an established technique Works combined techniques drawn from social dance, ballet, and modern dance. Modern became established in higher education Black artist recognized

José Limón was born in Culiacán, Sinaloa Mexico, the eldest of 12 children. He moved to New York City in 1928 where he studied under Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman. In 1946, Limón founded the José Limón Dance Company. His most famous dance is The Moor's Pavane (1949), based on Shakespeare's Othello. When the war ended, Limon founded the Jose Limon Dance Company in 1946 with Doris Humphrey as the first artistic director. The Limon Company was the first modern dance company to have distinct positions for founder and artistic director. The Limon Company was also the first company to survive its founder's death. It survives to this day with the expressed purpose of maintaining the Limon technique and repertory.

Paul Taylor attending Syracuse University on scholarships in painting and swimming, he began to study dance. Two years later he joined the Martha Graham Dance Company. While still with the Martha Graham Dance Company, he danced for a number of other great contemporary choreographers, including Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine. It was with his own dance company, founded in 1954, that Taylor made his greatest contribution to dance. Using gestures and stances from the street, Taylor's work reflects the beauty and tragedy of society. In a number of his early pieces, Taylor composed dances of everyday gestures, such as checking a watch or waiting for a bus. For Taylor, a dance is the first step in returning the viewer to the street more aware of the beauty in the simple movements he or she sees every day.

Alvin Ailey was born in Rogers, Texas. In the fall of 1941, Ailey's mother, like many African Americans, migrated to Los Angeles, California where she had heard there was work supporting the war effort. His school friend introduced him to Lester Horton in 1949. Horton would to be Ailey's major influence, and mentor. Horton's school taught a wide range of dance styles and techniques, including ballet, jazz, and Native American dance. Horton's school was the first multi-racial dance school in the United States. In 1951 he moved to San Francisco where he met Marguerite Johnson, who later changed her name to Maya Angelou. They occasionally performed a nightclub act called "Al and Rita." Ailey earned a living waiting tables and dancing at the New Orleans Champagne Supper Club. Eventually he returned to study dance with Horton in southern California. Horton's sudden death in November 1953 left the company without an artistic director. The company had outstanding contracts that required new works. When no one else stepped forward, Ailey assumed the role of artistic director. Upon completing Horton's contracts, he moved to New York. He observed the classes of Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Jose Limon. He felt Graham's dancing "finicky and strange" and disliked the techniques of both Doris Humphrey and José Limón. Ailey expressed disappointment in not being able to find a technique similar to Horton's. Not finding a company, he began creating works of his own Ailey formed his own group, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, in 1957. Ailey's choreography was dynamic and vibrant growing out of his training in ballet, modern dance, jazz, and African dance techniques. For his signature work, Revelations, Ailey drew upon his "blood memories" of Texas, the blues, spirituals, and gospel. Through Ailey created 79 works for his dancers, he maintained that his company was not merely a showcase for his own work. Today, the company continues Ailey's vision by performing important works from the past and commissioning new additions to the repertoire. In all, more than 200 works by over 70 choreographers have been performed by the company. Ailey was proud that his company was multi-racial. His company always employed artists based solely on artistic talent and integrity regardless of their race Cry (1971), was one of Ailey's greatest successes. He dedicated it to his mother and black women everywhere. It became a signature piece for Judith Jamison Ailey kept his life as a dancer a secret from his mother for the first two years. It was reported that when she came to his dressing room and saw him in stage makeup for the first time, she slapped him in the face. Alvin Ailey died of AIDS in 1989 at the age of 58. To spare his mother the social stigma of his death from AIDS, Ailey asked his doctor to announce that he had died of terminal blood dyscrasia.

Tally Beatty began studying dance at the age of fourteen with Katherine Dunham. He was a part of Dunham's company he also trained under Martha Graham. Beatty's describes his as a "mixture of Graham connective steps, Dunham technique, and a little ballet with Louisiana hot sauce on it". Southern Landscape, a three-part dance that explores an event in history that Beatty read about.. He learned about a community of white and black farmers who had happily formed a community together. The book describes how the community was literally slaughtered and destroyed by the Ku Klux Klan; after the slaughter, people went into the fields at night to retrieve the bodies of their loved ones. The most well-known and famous section of the dance, titled Mourner's Bench is about a person who is returning from recovering a body.

Dancers and choreographers during the 1960s were influenced by the new personal freedoms and revolutionary spirit of the times. The Civil Rights movement, women's movement, and the sexual revolution led to social freedoms.

Merce Cunningham began his professional career dancing for six years with Martha Graham Dance Company. He presented his first solo concert in New York in April 1944 with composer John Cage, who became his life partner and frequent collaborator until Cage's death in 1992 Cunningham choreographed more than 200 dances and over 800 "Events," which are site-specific choreographic work. His passion for exploration and innovation has made him a leader in applying new technologies to the arts. He began investigating dance on film in the 1970s, and since 1991 has choreographed using the computer program DanceForms. Cunningham had followed the problems Martha Graham's Company and studio faced after her death and made plans for the future of his dance works. The Legacy Plan (LLP) was announced in June 2009. The Plan provided a roadmap for the future of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, as envisioned by Cunningham. The first of its kind in the dance world, the plan represents Cunningham's vision for continuing his work in the upcoming years, transitioning his Company once he was no longer able to lead it, and preserving his compositions.

Pilobolus origins are traced to a 1971 Dartmouth College dance class taught by Alison Chase. Their performances have long been characterized by a strong element of physical interaction between the bodies of the performers, and exaggerations or contortions of the human form.

Twyla Tharp grew up in Rialto, California where her parents opened a drive-in movie theater. Tharp attended Pomona College in California, but transferred to Barnard College in New York City. It was in New York that she studied with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. She graduated from Barnard with a degree in art history in 1963 and joined the Paul Taylor Dance Company. From 1965 to 1970 she explored and developed her own ideas and in 1971 she formed her own company, called Twyla Tharp Dance. Tharp has created more than 135 dances, choreographed for five Hollywood movies, directed and choreographed three Broadway shows, and written two books. Tharp continues to create works and lecture around the world. She is currently teaching at Barnard College.

To follow tradition, to break with tradition, to reinvent, to borrow from other cultures that in modern dance today.