Taiesha Abrams
Dance 132S
Instructor: Purnima Shah
Analysis of Twyla Tharp’s Eight Jelly Rolls
Twyla Tharp has influenced the field of American postmodern dance for over four decades. Her work and philosophy has had a continuing impact on the growth and development of dance by consistently delivering a unique approach, independent of the traditional techniques of modern and the antitechnical works of the avant-garde. She used the strong technique gained by ballet training to bring forth broken pirouettes and contorted bodies. She used rhythmic music to create movement that disagreed with the natural flow of the music. This paper surveys the creative process behind Twyla Tharp’s piece Eight Jelly Rolls. It explores some of the activities used to mentally and physically prepare Tharp dancers for her work. Most importantly, it aims to not only bring light to the significance and importance of the process, but to identify how the authenticity of a choreographer’s piece can be lost if the creative development of the piece is somehow altered or entirely disregarded. As her first piece choreographed and married to music, Eight Jelly Rolls is a masterpiece, full of energy, laughter, and excitement. This paper will bring some light on how these elements were brought to the stage.
A Brief Introduction To understand Tharp’s work, you must first understand her dance and musical background paired with her choreographic experience prior to the conception of Eight Jelly Rolls. Tharp pulls ideas from a plethora of places. She incorporates every experience she has had brings it to the stage. Without knowledge of these experiences, one can not view a Tharp original with the respect it truly deserves. Thus, I will provide a brief but thorough description of her work prior to 1971, which is when Eight Jelly Rolls first premiered. Twyla Tharp was born in Portland, Indiana. As a young child Tharp was granted exposure to a variety of dance styles and additional skills. Among them were piano, violin, viola, elocution, painting, baton twirling, and of course dance lessons (Siegel, 2006). The upshot of these experiences is a noteworthy, theoretical and practical knowledge of music (Mazo, 2000). Her experience with each of these skill sets proved to be an asset to her work, as she incorporates each of her experiences in her pieces throughout the years. Tharp studied every dance philosophy available to her. She had the opportunity to work with Martha Graham, Alwin Nikolais and Merce Cunningham. She studied ballet with Margaret Craske, Richard Thomas, Barbara Farris, Erick Hawkins and Igor Schwezoff. She also took classes in jazz technique. Her studies made her extremely well versed in the field of dance. After graduating from college in the early sixties she immediately began her career as a dancer in Paul Taylor’s dance company. She was given much responsibility within the company but soon concluded that her work with Taylor was in a sense stifling and too abstract for her taste (Siegel, 2006). She worked with Taylor for two solid years before realizing that she needed to explore dance on her own. Her exploration of dance was a slow and steady process. Her dance career truly began with her first piece titled, Tank Dive (1965). Tank Dive, first performed in 1965 at Hunter College in New York City, initiated her plunge into the realm of postmodern dance. In Tank Dive Tharp performs movements wearing high heeled bedroom slippers and then changes into wooden shoes with rigid, flipper-like extensions in front (Bremser, 1999). The wooden shoes kept her confined to one spot but allowed her upper body to move freely within the established limitations. She then removed the shoes and finished off the piece barefoot, finally ending the piece was a toss of her body to the floor, face downwards. She then exits the stage. Tank Dive was an abstract piece, leaving many questions and no answers. The viewers were left searching for meaning out of the piece she had presented. This was Tharp’s intention. Her avant-garde approach to the discipline was evident in her costume choice, lack of music, the special design of the stage and the abstract level at which she performed. Though Tharp was performing was taking a traditional avant-garde approach to dance in the footsteps of her predecessors, her efforts did not grant her fame and stardom. Her audiences were not impressed with her work leaving her to feel inadequate. Her work was missing something that the audience truly desired. Tharp would need to find a way to incorporate as much of her dance philosophies as possible while appealing to an audience or the success that she dreamed of would never come her way. Six years later, she found an answer. The answer laid in the piece Eight Jelly Rolls. As her first piece choreographed to music, Tharp discovered a clean cut method of appealing to her audience through the musical selection, the costumes and the theatrical twist that the piece has. Yet, her approach to crafting the choreography is unlike the traditional stylings of classical ballet and modern dance. She maintains an avant-garde approach while making her work more accessible to the uneducated viewer. She has been one of the most successful postmodern artists of her time because of it. The trajectory of Tharp’s work took a drastic change in 1971 with the conception of her piece Eight Jelly Rolls. Eight Jelly Rolls was created as a tribute to jazz dance and jazz music of the 1920s, accomplished with a witty, playful spin on the genre. It incorporates movements popular in the jazz dance community such as the Charleston, Suzie Q, shimmy, camel walk, Shorty George, and a dozen other steps. She fused these dances together using a variety of methods to create a style of her own. No longer did the aforementioned dances exist independently, but instead they were dissected and randomly combined to create a different type of movement, one never before seen. Prior to the creation of this piece, the audience viewed Tharp’s work as “untrackable or out of control.” Her work was too foreign for the likes of the average viewer who lacked a deeper understand of her fusion techniques. This is most evident in her two preceding pieces The Fugue and The One Hundreds where she fused everyday walks, turns, stamps, and slaps by manipulating the timing and structural virtuosity (Siegel, 2006). The feedback of the audience did not go unheard, as the changes made in Eight Jelly Rolls ameliorated many of the qualms voiced in newspapers and reviews. By not only introducing music into her work but also acknowledging the music through the movement, Tharp made the choreographic context of her work more accessible to the average viewer. Eight Jelly Rolls was more relatable in a sense that each of the core dancers projected to the audience as distinct personalities that viewers could understand. The first solo danced by Rudner portrayed a smooth, sensuous and quick witted individual. Tharp solos as a messy drunk, lacking the ability to grasp rhythm. Eight Jelly Rolls illustrated Tharp’s decision to now acknowledge the music, the dance and the audience as necessary and equal components of her work (Siegel, 2006). In order to fully grasp the intricacies of her work, time must be spent exploring her creative process. The next section of this paper examines her philosophy and approach to dance. I will use Eight Jelly Rolls as a means to exploring the creative process behind her work.
Processing her Dance Philosophy Tharp’s work has been described as contradictory. She mixes opposing moods, styles, genres, ideas, etc. to create a work that she can call her own. Oxymoronic concepts are meticulously thrown onto the stage, happy with sad, light with dark, yin with yang, scrappy with elegant, combative yet malleable and most importantly, ironic and romantic (Bremser, 1999). Contradictory ideas lay not only in the movements of the body but also in concepts behind the piece. For instance, “the continuing battles between classicism and romanticism, between high art and the vernacular, between ballet technique and modern-this last played out in a series of skirmishes pitting the uplifted and aerial against the grounded and pelvic (Dalva, 1996).” Tharp is one of the first choreographers to conjoin the techniques of classical ballet and postmodernism. She oftentimes used many dances taken from teenage dancing to enrich postmodern dance technique: limply held hands, raised shoulders, undulating hips, snapping fingers, eyes lowered in an ecstatic-seeming withdrawal from reality (Bremser, 1999). Tharp considers ballet technique instrumental to the creative process. Tharp values working with dancers that have a strong foundation, allowing her to utilize and manipulate these trained bodies in interesting ways. She says, “ballet technique is “rigorous,” not restricting; in her dances, technique is to be used not worshipped (Mazo, 2000).” Her respect for technique in a variety of dance genres, exclusive to ballet, while maneuvering the styles in fascinating ways is a key attribute of her approach to dance. Tharp’s work is unlike that of improvisational pieces in that the work is not being created as the dancer’s progress into each new movement. Instead, individual movement phrases are planned ahead of time and incorporated into the piece in a chance format. Tharp’s work has an air of spontaneity but at the core of each piece is a carefully orchestrated series of movements. The seemingly random movements are controlled in every way possible. Key to Tharp’s approach is a method of putting together phrases in no preconceived order. When fusing dance styles together and choreographing movement phrases, Tharp applies techniques of inversion, retrograde, sudden changes of timing and direction, miniaturization and expansion, to make her sources unrecognizable and to achieve a look of controlled spontaneity that is central to her work (Siegel, 2006). She further disguises the dance styles in its original form by removing the starts and stops within the movement so as to not allow emphasis to be placed on any particular position or transition. The result is a fast paced, seemingly interminable, fluid fusion of dance styles, never breaking in movement so as to distinguish varying origins. Chief to her work is a requirement that her dancers have an inner focus about the material. Much time was spent on understanding the purpose and meaning behind each individual movement so that when the movements were coalesced, the motivation behind each individual movement is preserved. There are so many little details being asked of a dancer performing Tharp’s choreography that without an intense level of concentration and alertness, the motivation behind the piece can become lost and the dancer themselves can become lost. Tharp also frequently experiments with weight and balance. Her contradictory style presents itself in her manipulation of torque and slither, abandon and control, balance and wobble all superimposed onto the same body (Dalva, 1996). For Tharp, these concepts do not exist independently but instead, she finds ways to allow them to exist simultaneously. In Tharp’s opinion, a body can balance while wobbling or spontaneously release one’s weight with the utmost level of control. She explores a variety of ways that a dancer can control and release ones’ weight in specific sections of the body, and in some cases, using the entire body. She investigates proper methods of entirely losing balance and allowing one’s weight to be at the discretion of gravity while preparing for a speedy recovery to a strong, solid stance. She redefines the concept of stability by demonstrating how control over unstable movements can still yield stability. Tharp’s approach to dance was made more concrete after attending numerous rehearsals with talented dancer and instructor, Katie Glasner. Katie Glasner is a former dancer with Twyla Tharp Dance and Eight Jelly Rolls was the first piece she performed with the company. Her commitment to the field of dance and ensuring that the legacy of dance is passed on in every way possible has brought her to Duke University to stage the piece Eight Jelly Rolls. One of the first activities that Katie Glasner prepared was to teach all of the dancers a movement phrase lasting for two counts of eight. After attaining a level of comfort with the movement, she asked the dancers to perform that same phrase in four counts of eight, followed by a truncation of the same phrase into one count of eight. The activity continued with a variation of the timing of the phrase with the space and rhythm also varying due to unplanned occurrences. The rhythm was varied by informing the dancers when they are allowed to initiate the next movement. For instance, one movement might start on the 1st count, followed by a movement on the 5th and 6th count, then seventh. The rhythmic phrases in Eight Jelly Rolls are unlike that which the common dancer is accustomed to. The goal here was to get the dancers familiar with the concept of manipulating the timing, space and rhythm of movement. Movement has the potential to exist independent of time, space and rhythm. Once this concept is grasped the dancer can then begin to manipulate and apply the timing of choice as it relates to spacing and rhythm. Another activity that they executed was a movement exercise that was governed by a few predetermined rules. For example, a dancer held a ball and was required to hit someone with the ball from the spot that they were in. When the person responsible for the ball had to retrieve the ball, the other dancers were allowed to run anywhere they wanted. Once the initial dancer obtained the ball, all movements were ceased. If a dancer was hit with the ball, they gained possession of it. The additional rules of the game aimed to generate new ideas for choreography during the first round and then assisted the dancer’s in remembering choreography from one of the sections. The first rule was that a dancer was not allowed to jump until they met the eyes of another dancer. A dancer would also be asked to continuously perform a preconceived arm gesture until hearing the sound of a foot stamping. The most important prompts were to perform random dance movements when “running” to anther spot. In another round, they had to end with one of the movements taken from section seven of Eight Jelly Rolls, called the dots. The intricacy of the creative process is left to the dancers mind and not seen by the audience. From the audience’s perspective, much of Tharp’s work is choreographed, with no room left for improvising. To the audience’s surprise, her work is more complex than they ever could have imagined. The next section of this paper will analyze Eight Jelly Rolls in performance. Much of the analysis will come from the viewers’ perspective.
Eight Jelly Rolls in Performance The piece is organized into eight sections with three selected soloists dancing in the first four sections. The piece opens with a solo danced by Anne Sandefur as Wright. The next section is a duet danced by Audrey Fenske as Twyla Tharp and lastly, Lauren Sowa takes the place of Sarah Rudner. The first two sections feature Anne, Audrey and Lauren. Each dancer was asked to merge fifty different movements using different transitional movements. Using Katie’s guidance, they were able to manipulate timing, space and rhythm. In part five of the piece, Tharp’s experiments with weight and balance are brought to the stage with Fenske’s (as Tharp) drunken solo. Fenske seems to lack knowledge of where she is and why she is there. The other dancers are in the background each performing a different one hundred-count movement phrase. As Tharp analyzes the material being performs by the dancers, she struggles with deciding which dancers she wants to emulate. She struggles with balance as she attempts to synchronize with the dancers, flopping forward or sideways, jerking up and down until she falls. She then struggles to collect herself never regaining a solid stance, barely hearing the music playing in the background, each sharp sound issuing a shock to her system. The rhythm becomes completely lost to her being. Her inability to carry her own weight and follow a distinct rhythm leaves her staggering towards the wings of the stage. Every unexpected spurt from the band causes her to rocket backwards. Her body is eventually defeated as she finally collapses on her face. The sixth section of the piece is another ensemble phrase in which each dancer is given a solo while the rest of the dancers are moving in the background. In this time they are allowed to showcase their personalities in however they see fit. The movements are of the same pedestrian nature. Hip undulations, shoulder rolls, genie movements, etc. The seventh section of the piece is called a dots phrase. Julie Argue has a solo to the side of the ensemble. She moves fluidly through 50 stated positions while the ensemble stands on the side and synchronizes with a predetermined set of poses. As she moves to a pose, the ensemble joins her and holds that pose until they are required to move again. Section eight of the piece is a tribute to 1920’s social dance. This section of the paper will provide a thorough comparison of the recreation of the Eight Jelly Rolls piece as prepared by two different dance groups. The first is taken from the work of a ballet company named Company C, located in California. After carefully watching the Eight Jelly Rolls piece in performance on a DVD, the ballet company replicated the movements in succession from beginning to end. The second recreation of Eight Jelly Rolls is taken from the work prepared and staged by Katie Glasner during her time at Barnard College. The comparison of the two different approaches to Twyla Tharp’s choreography aims to highlight how easily her philosophy and approach to dance is lost through the replication of her work without an in depth analysis of the individual movements. It furthermore demonstrates the importance of understanding the fundamental concepts behind each phrase and the subtle chance methods that she uses to fuse the material together. Important elements of Twyla Tharp’s work are lost, once her methods are not incorporated into the preparation of the piece. In sum, this section of the paper aims to illustrate that the process is just as important as the end product and should not go without acknowledgement. During an interview with Glasner on Thursday April 26,2009, she walked me through an in depth comparison of section three of Eight /jelly Rolls as performed by a dancer named Tamara Clark from Barnard College and the exact same section performed by a ballet dancer from Company C. I will provide minimal background to set the stage for the work that was done by the two dance groups. The two videos were provided by her. In order to bring Eight Jelly Rolls to the stage, the Company C ballet mistress contacted Twyla Tharp’s licensing agent and requested three performances to be sent to her. She received the performances that were staged in 1974, 1984 and 1987. Unfortunately, the ballet mistress had no prior Tharp experience nor was the coach (a Tharp colleague) who came to provide guidance given enough time or influence (two weeks) to transform the work into a Tharp original. On the contrary, Glasner has worked with the students from Barnard college for hundreds of hours to mentally and physically prepare the students for the piece. Additionally, she is an original Tharp dancer who has an immeasurable amount of experience with the process of Tharp’s work. Lacking the experience necessary to truly bring Tharp’s work to the stage, Company C’s performance lacked authenticity. Though it may have seemed that the two deliveries were the same due to corresponding costumes, music and a small collection of movements, Company C’s rendition of Twyla Tharp’s Eight Jelly Rolls fails to be considered a Tharp original. For part three of Twyla Tharp’s Eight Jelly Rolls, titles Mournful Serenade, the original dancer Sarah Rudner, as played by dancer Lauren , was given fifty distinct positions and required to string them together with transitional material. The fifty positions have very quirky names and are pulled from a variety of places- from pedestrian to ballet to modern. Some of the names are “push-push,” “toe wiggle,” “parallel lunge with hanging arm,” and “walk walk.” After creating and performing the entire fifty position movement phrase at the dancer’s chosen speed, the dancer is then allowed to pull any of the fifty movements in any order for about two additional minutes. She is allowed to vary the speed of the movement and the height of the movement but she is still required to remain within the framework of previously choreographed material. She is not allowed to perform any other position or transitional phrase other than that which was previously brought to the stage. The difference between the stated material and the improvised material is never once made apparent, as the dancer moves fluidly from one segment to the next. Essentially, there is no determined rhythm or dynamic, allowing the dancer to manipulate time and space and she sees fit. The dancer is stage center with a spotlight loosely establishing the space she is allowed to dance within. The spotlight does not entirely confine the dancer to a predetermined space, but rather sets the stage for the level of intimacy and introspection that is to come. Everywhere else on the stage is pitch black. Within the spotlight, the dancer performs her movements in a circle never once explicitly performing to the audience. By refraining from making the piece audience projected, the work is received as an intimate piece in which the audience members become voyeurs to her movements, thoughts and natural, sensuous being. The movements are smooth, fluid, sensuous in a subtle way, and most importantly, performed for herself and not the audience. The dancer is in her own world performing movements that come naturally to her body. Glasner describes the piece as in terms of the audience “going along for the ride” and she also says, “it doesn’t care but it’s not disdainful. In every way, Tamara accurately delivered Mournful Serenade with a subdued sensibility that left the audience curious, wanting more and captivated by her from a distance. Company C’s ballet dancer was not able to bring these same elements to the stage. After watching the performance of Mournful Serenade performed by the Company C dancer, I was grossly disappointed. Overall, the ballet dancers’ delivery of the piece was more technique driven. Though the ballet technique was of the highest quality, it seemed to restrict the body entirely. The body was rigid for many of the movements as opposed to having that fluid feel that is present in the correctly staged version of the piece. The movements were entirely audience projected, as opposed to being an introspective piece. In fact, the spotlight that was required for that piece was not included in the Company C version, thereby loosing the introspective nature of the piece. The intimacy that I saw in Tamara’s version was lost to the ballet dancer entirely performing for the audience. Never once did I get a sense that the piece was private and that I, as an onlooker, was being allowed to look into her life. Instead, she handed herself to her audience with ease. In terms of the dynamics of the piece, the correctly staged version of section three does not limit the directional movement in any way. Instead, the dancer is freed from the constricting constructs of traditional ballet and modern. This was seen as Tamara performed her soft diagonal body movement through space never once creating the impression of being restricted to a specific direction of movement. Her body appears to be entirely liberated, allowing her movements to have life. On the contrary, the Company C ballet dancers’ delivery had more verticality. Ballet calls for an upright spine and does not allow the body to venture into different directions of movement. This was evident in the ballet dancers’ delivery of the Tharp movements in that her body was never once seen on a diagonal. Her body was at all times in the correct body alignment of a ballet dancer which conflicts with Tharp’s approach to her work. Tharp used ballet to create very interesting movements but her dancers were never limited by ballet technique in such a manner. In terms of the execution of individual movements, the intention was a subdued sensuosity. This was seen in Tamara’s use of subtle slightly reserved movements. She did not give too much of herself away but she left the audience wanting more, desiring to know more about who she is. The ballet dancer was more vulgar than Tamara was. For hip undulations, she would perform them in a jerky, harder fashion, moving through the entire range of motion. Whereas, Tamara would only move a little while ensuring that the movements were distinguishable. The two approaches differed in many ways. For the last section of the piece, including Twyla’s recollections of 1920s social dances, the dancers are allowed to perform any social dances they want in any order. After a rhythm phrase and an ensemble phrase, each dancer leaves the stage in her own time. The last dancer left on stage is Twyla Tharp played by Audrey Fenske. The piece concludes with her performing about ten movements taken from the section four miming phrase. Most importantly, the final movements are not improvised. The final miming phrase is entirely choreographed. There is no room for alteration to the work. Tamara fully executes the miming phrase from beginning to end to the right side of the stage from the audiences perspective. The movements are titled, “hitching a ride,” “how do you do?” “Jewish something or other,” “Black bottom,” “cleaning a window,” “I kicked my foot,” “I don’t know where it is,” “where as it gone?” “where did it go?” “ok done.” These are the ten distinct movements that conclude the piece. They are choreographed and put in a specific order. I was appalled to see what the Company C ballet did with the ending. I am assuming the ballet mistress had no idea what the movements were so she created her own interpretation of the ending, which appeared to be improvised. The dancer who assumed the role of Twyla Tharp starts walking to the back of the stage towards the center in a slightly unstable fashion. She looks around as if she is trying to find people then performs a few random movements that she selects. She then falls to the ground to indicate that she is done. In no way, was the ending of the piece improvised. Furthermore, that ballet company’s interpretation of Tharp’s work was insulting. The difference was certainly apparent to an educated audience but easily overlooked in an uneducated one. Eight Jelly Rolls is one of Twyla Tharp’s most memorable pieces. In my experience interacting with Katie Glasner, I learned so much about the importance of the creative process in bringing a piece to the stage. Without the correct preparation of a piece, the viewer must question if what they are viewing is in fact an authentic piece. The reality is that it can not be original. It is not enough to have a clean, finished, quality end product if the process is somehow lost. In postmodern dance, as Tharp demonstrated with Eight Jelly Rolls, the creative process is what provides the piece with profound meaning. It should never be disregarded.
Bibliography
1. Banes, Sally. Terpsichore in Sneakers, 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, c1987. 2. Bremser, Martha. Fifty Contemporary Choreographers. London: Routledge, c1999. 3. Dalva, Nancy, et al. Tharp! New York, NY: Dance Ink Foundation, c1996. 4. Jackson, Naomi. Seven Postmodern Choreographers. Dance Research Journal. Vol. 24. No. 1 (Spring 1992), pp. 47-49. 5. 6. M.K. Post-Modern Dance Issue: An Introduction. The Drama Review: TDR. Vol 19, No. 1, Post-Modern Dance Issue (Mar. 1975), pp. 3-4. 7. Mazo, Joseph. Prime Movers. Princeton: Princeton Book, c2000. 8. Manning, Susan. Modernist Dogma and Post-Modern Rhetoric: A Response to Sally Banes’ “ Terpsichore in Sneakers.” TDR (1988-), Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1988), pp. 32-39. 9. Siegel, Marcia B. Howling Near Heaven: Twyla Tharp and the Reinvention of Modern Dance. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, c2006.
Videos
Eight Jelly Rolls. Barnard College, New York, NY.
Eight Jelly Rolls. Company C Ballet, California.
