Maturation of an artist -- Mikhail, Twyla, & Andre

Baryshnikov


Baryshnikov & Tharp in "Once More, Frank"

Twyla Tharp is the choreographer who put dancers in sneakers and jeans, mixing classical and ragged everyday moves. It looked casual and precise, all at once.

I studied with one of Twyla's dancers, Sara Rudner, while I was in the Oberlin Dance Company.

Twyla and Baryshnikov were great collaborators. Twyla could think up stuff only Mikhail could dance -- and he, in turn, pushed her past anything she had invented before. Their most famous was Push Comes To Shove. They also did a piece about a hanged man. It began with him stepping off a table onto the top edge of a chair's back, then stepping down onto the seat of the chair -- which, by the way, had begun tipping over the moment he stepped onto it -- and then, controlling the chair's fall, he stepped onto the ground. It looked impossible.

Anyway. So here's Andre.

A few weeks ago I had dinner with Twyla Tharp in her kitchen, and we were talking about the problems of the artist, or for that matter the individual, maturing in our society.

Why do we have so few mature artists?

Tyring to answer this question, we began to speculate that your early years, say your twenties, should be all about learning -- learning how to do it, how to say it, learning to master the tools of your craft; having learned the techniques, then your next several years, say your thirties, should be all about telling the world with passion and conviction eveyrthing that you think you know about your life and your art.

Meanwhile, though, if you have any sense, you'll begin to realize that you just don't know very much -- you don't know enough. And so the next many, many years, we agreed, should be all about questions, only questions, and that if you can totally give up your life and your work to questioning, then perhaps somewhere in your mid-fifties you may find some very small answers to share with others in your work.

The problem is that our society (including the community of artists) doesn't have much patience with questions and questioning. We want answers and we want them fast.

-- Andre Gregory, "My Dinner With Andre"