One of the great choreographers of the modern age, Twyla Tharp, brings her 50th Anniversary program to The Wallis in a historic debut presentation which includes the world premieres of "Preludes and Fugues," set to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and "Yowzie," set to a compilation of American jazz arranged by Henry Butler and Steve Bernstein. The Wallis, along with four other performing arts centers across the country, is a co-commissioner of the new work.
Also, as part of Twyla Tharp's 50th Anniversary Tour, a free performance of Tharp's "The One Hundreds," originally premiered in 1970, will be offered at The Wallis on Tuesday, September 29 at 6:00pm, and will launch The Wallis' 2015 - 2016 Season of performance programming. It will be performed by Tharp's company and 100 members of the Beverly Hills-Los Angeles community at The Wallis, followed by a reception.
Instead of creating the expected for her 50th Anniversary Tour - a retrospective of her greatest hits - Twyla Tharp's restless spirit demanded she choreograph two brand new works for her troupe of 13 dancers. This ten-week cross-country celebration, opens at the AT&T Performing Arts Center, presented by TITAS, in Dallas on September 18-19 and concludes at Lincoln Center's Koch Theater, November 17-22.
The five commissioners of "Preludes and Fugues" and "Yowzie" are The Joyce Theater (New York), The Kennedy Center (Washington), Auditorium Theatre & Ravinia Festival (Chicago), TITAS/AT&T Performing Arts Center (Dallas), and The Wallis. The Anniversary tour will also include stops in over 15 cities.
"We are honored to be a co-commissioner of two new Twyla Tharp works that she is creating for this momentous celebration of her art," said Patricia Wolff, Interim Artistic Director at The Wallis. "Although we are only in our third season, we are finding ourselves a part of supporting important artists and projects to finding larger audiences, whether it be our bringing Deaf West's Spring Awakening to our stage, which helped propel it to Broadway, or being a early presenter of Jessica Lang Dance, or giving pianist Igor Levit a venue for his Los Angeles debut."
"Preludes and Fugues" is set to excerpts from Bach's "The Well-Tempered Clavier" Volumes 1 & 2 and "Yowzie" to a selection of music from "Viper's Drag," a compilation of jazz arranged by Henry Butler and Steven Bernstein. Each dance is introduced by a fanfare, both composed by John Zorn. Santo Loquasto designed the costumes for all the dances, and James Ingalls, the lighting. In a program note describing the evening, Tharp says: "Simply put, 'Preludes and Fugues' is the world as it ought to be, 'Yowzie' as it is. The 'Fanfares' celebrate both."
In each premiere, Tharp turns her decades of experience - having choreographed Hollywood films, television specials, Broadway shows, figure-skating routines and full-length ballets- into living proof that time is her partner as she continues to deepen and expand the singular imagination which makes her one of the century's most treasured artists. By combining different forms of movement - such as jazz, ballet, boxing and inventions of her own making - Tharp's work expands the boundaries of ballet and modern dance.
The company is comprised of dancers who have long histories with Tharp, appearing in her Broadway shows, Movin' Out, The Times They Are A Changin' and Come Fly Away, as well as in her various dance troupes and in the ballet and contemporary dance companies for whom she has created new works. They are John Selya, Rika Okamoto, Matthew Dibble, and Ron Todorowski. Newer to Tharp are Daniel Baker, Amy Ruggiero, Ramona Kelley, Nicholas Coppula, Eva Trapp, Savannah Lowery, Reed Tankersley, Kaitlyn Gilliland, and Eric Otto.
Tickets range from $49.00 - $129.00 are available at
www.thewallis.org, by calling
310-746-4000, or in person at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts Ticket Services located at 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA 90210.
About "The One Hundreds"
As part of Twyla Tharp's 50th Anniversary Tour, at The Wallis there will be a performance of Twyla Tharp's "The One Hundreds," free to the public. The work, which premiered in 1970, remains an ongoing statement of Tharp's belief that anyone--and everyone--can dance. "The One Hundreds' is a hundred eleven-second segments that are performed by two dancers in unison separated by four seconds between each segment. The volunteer participants performing in it prove that idea at each performance.
Tharp in Ballet Review said, "Five people each do twenty different segments simultaneously so that the one hundred are represented one-fifth of the time and then one hundred each do one in eleven seconds, right? You follow me? Let's go through it again. Five people do twenty representing all the phrases in one fifth of the time. And then one hundred people each do one simultaneously. In eleven seconds."
Each of the one-hundred non-professional volunteers receives a 15-minute learning session for their phrase, by one of Tharp's company members earlier in the day, coming together as a unit to work out the spacing just an hour before show time. They are a hardy, brave and diverse bunch of adventurers.
Claudia Roth Pierpont said in The New Yorker, "'The One Hundreds,' an experimental work from 1970, a moment when ordinary people, doing ordinary moves, had transfixed the dance avant-garde. 'The One Hundreds' opens with two trained dancers performing a hundred rehearsed movement sequences of eleven seconds each ... followed by five dancers ... and, finally by an onrush of a hundred ordinary folk, each of whom performs one of the eleven-second phrases. It didn't matter that the woman in blue jeans collided with one of the real dancers, or that somebody else took a tumble. It looked as though the unmediated language of dance were taking over the world."
About Twyla Tharp
Since graduating from Barnard College in 1963, Twyla Tharp has choreographed more than one hundred sixty works: one hundred twenty-nine dances, twelve television specials, six Hollywood movies, four full-length ballets, four Broadway shows and two figure skating routines. She received one Tony Award, two Emmy Awards, nineteen honorary doctorates, the Vietnam Veterans of America President's Award, the 2004 National Medal of the Arts, the 2008 Jerome Robbins Prize, and a 2008 Kennedy Center Honor. Her many grants include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1992, Ms. Tharp published her autobiography Push Comes to Shove. She went on to write The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life followed by The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together. She is currently working on a fourth book.
Today, Ms. Tharp continues to create.
Photo by Ruven Afandor
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