Twyla Tharp has been choreographing dances for almost forty years,
and by this time she should be a mature artist, yet she is not.
If your subjects are aggression and apocalypse, how much can you
mature? The filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who made a career of cool
doomed odysseys, antic and antisocial destructions, what did he
end with? Eyes Wide Shut, a last film in which he saw and said
nothing, despite the fact that it was based on a story by the
Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler, seer into souls. In a film
about the subtleties of desire inside and outside of marriage,
Kubrick came up empty. But then, when you do
aggression-apocalypse you tend to get machismo-misogyny for free.
Has Norman Mailer ever written a mature novel? Sam Shepard a
mature play? In Kubrick women are dolly-girls or just not there;
in Mailer they’re bimbos and bitches. This sounds a lot like
Tharp. What begins as a dynamic fact of life—the might of
masculine energy, its will to power—becomes the only high worth
having, a groove on existential extremes. Why question the high?
It’s simpler, more aesthetically liberating, not to.
Twyla Tharp has a new work on Broadway called Movin’ Out, a
show about Vietnam set to old songs by Billy Joel. The cast
consists of three men who are teenage buddies, the two women who
