Twyla's piece for actors, mine for 12 pianists

Andre Gregory


Twyla Tharp

Andre Gregory begins the preface to Wallace Shawn's My Dinner With Andre with a story about working with Twyla Tharp.

Six years ago, when I was still running my theatre group, The Manhattan Project, Twyla Tharp choreographed the group and me in a four-and-a-half-minute piece which we performed in concert at Town Hall.

The piece was absolutely impossible to do. There was no way that a group of non-dancers could do it. It was incredibly fast, and there must have been hundreds of steps in it. In order to get through it at all, you had to forget yourself, abandon yourself, completely.

In rehearsal, Twyla treated us as if we had all trained for years with the American Ballet Theater. "Do this," she'd say, and we would, and she'd laugh, and then, "Do this," and we would, and she'd laugh, and when we reached performance, twelve hundred people leapt to their feet and gave us a dozen curtain calls. There were tears of laughter on people's faces. We had danced one of Twyla's most complex creations with absolute precision, very, very badly.

-- Andre Gregory, Preface, "My Dinner With Andre," June, 1981

I LOVE that story. I love Twyla's vision, her route, her insistence, and the actors' transcendence.


When I was a senior in high-school, I was the pianist for everything, including our 11-person girl-group called The Good Day Singers. The Good Days performed two to three times a week my senior year, making us basically professionals. For our final concert, I said I would compose an original piece for us.

I asked each girl how well she could play the piano. Then I wrote a piece for twelve pianists on four pianos -- three girls per instrument. I was meticulous. The girls who could really play, got written music. The ones who could barely play, got simple patterns they could learn by rote. The ones who didn't play at all got one note -- "Look for any white key just before two blacks. Listen, then hit your key on the beat, until Susan does that big thumpy part."

When it came time for the piano piece -- halfway through our show, to break up the singing -- we rolled every piano the high-school had, out onto the stage. Two uprights, one spinet, and the grand. The audience started laughing. We stepped up imperiously, in our sleeveless slim-line dark-pink-with-white-stars full-length silk dresses, and gravely began. They roared. They didn't stop laughing the whole piece. It just came in bigger and bigger waves. At the end, we bowed, to an ovation.

I was offended they hadn't taken it seriously. But with perspective, I realized why they laughed -- it's the same reason they laughed at Twyla's.

Andre continues:

For some reason, the experience with Twyla brought to life the White Rabbit in me, and without thinking, in the heat of the moment, like Alice, I followed it down a rabbit hole and gave up my career as a theatre director.

I embarked on a series of adventures. I went to Asia. I went to North Africa. I stayed up till odd hours of the morning talking to Buddhists and physicists about ancient mysteries. Many of my friends and most of my colleagues thought I was at best ill-advised, and at worst mad. This went on for about three years, until I reached a moment when for some reason my adventures began to seem to me somehow less frightening, less adventurous.

-- Andre Gregory, Preface, "My Dinner With Andre"

Since I too quit work at 40 and followed the wind for four years, I understand.


Eugenio Barba

In three years a man can be born, die, and be born again. Sometimes three years is enough.

-- Eugenio Barba