Arts: Variations on a theme of Tharp

Twyla Tharp is back... and this time it's Beethoven (and David Byrne).

When Twyla Tharp, a hyperactive 22-year-old American dancer, choreographed her first evening way back in 1965, she had announcements printed and mailed and generally went about ensuring that her art did not go unnoticed. "I didn't promote myself as a star," she wrote in her autobiography, Push Comes to Shove. "I had always seen myself as a star; I wanted to be a galaxy."

Small and feisty, Twyla Tharp is so unstoppably driven that she would make Napoleon seem like a limp dilettante. She has conquered the world and, although her own group's last two British seasons in Edinburgh (1997) and London (1998) did not provoke the usual unanimous ecstasy, she has not yet met her Elba. Starting as a minimalist - her 1965 debut, Tank Dive, lasted only seven minutes, so any stragglers missed the whole thing - she soon altered her course.

At best she creates rigorously analytical pieces that make transparent music and movement structures, but avoid dryness through a sensuous physicality or blazing energy or throw-away wit. She has a magpie's appetite, inciting her to break down stylistic boundaries and take from everywhere: social- dance postures segue into contemporary-dance semaphores; a ballet glissade liquefies into a jazzy slouch. And she adjusts the mixture according to which company is dancing, and to whether she is using Bach or Bix Beiderbecke. But she always remains Tharp, the way a chameleon changes its colour but not its shape.

Everybody wants her - classical companies, non-classical companies, audiences. She is, programmers know, box office with class. Yet between 1983 and 1994 she didn't figure much on the British landscape.

In 1989 her company was absorbed into American Ballet Theatre thanks to the US's frugal approach to public subsidy. Our own ballet companies were either too staid or too impoverished to copy companies abroad in receiving her work.

But the tide has now turned. Various incarnations of a Tharp company, existing on a project by project basis, have visited the UK. The Royal Ballet has acquired two pieces by her and Birmingham Royal Ballet presented its production of In the Upper Room. On Thursday, Rambert Dance Company joins in with its premiere of "The Golden Section"; in June another short- term Tharp group comes to the Barbican Hall, with Diabelli.

The word is that Tharp has lowered her fees, but even so Rambert can afford "The Golden Section" for only one year rather than the normal three. The final section of The Catherine Wheel, a 1981 piece loosely based on the trials of St Catherine, "The Golden Section" is a 15-minute apotheosis in which gold-clad dancers fizz and fly like an explosion of fireworks. Performed at Sadler's Wells in 1982 by Tharp's now defunct company, it marked a harder, driving edge in her evolution.

Pressed against the wall as rehearsing bodies zoom past, I wouldn't argue with that. Matthew Hart catches Marie-Laure Agrapart in a headlong leap which has her gasping with the impact as they connect; Ana Maria Lujn Sanchez is thrown from one man to another; Patricia Hines is carried, revolved and shuttled along by a tangle of men.

Shelley Washington, a former Tharp dancer, who is mounting the piece, tells me that it's tricky enough to partner one on one, but with group partnering you need even stricter synchronisation. She calls the piece "the wing ballet" because the off-stage manoeuvres also have to be choreographed.

"Everything is going so fast. You're throwing dancers off stage to be caught in the wings and other dancers are charging from the wings on to the stage." You wouldn't think that Rambert's artistic director Christopher Bruce chose the particular piece as an accessible introduction for his dancers to the Tharp manner. But he agrees about its excitement quotient. "It certainly knocks an audience out."

And what does Tharp have to say? She doesn't. She is in New York. She will only respond to faxed questions via her son Jesse. However, she does agree to talk on the phone about the Barbican's Diabelli, a 60-minute piece that takes its title from Beethoven's accompanying Diabelli Variations. Its juxtaposition with David Byrne's commissioned rock score for "The Golden Section" illustrates Tharp's signature eclecticism. How did she decide on the Beethoven? "Because Alfred Brendel told me Beethoven showed a huge sense of humour when he wrote this edifice of Western cultural magnificence."

"And so I said, oh, I like humour, so we'll see what this is about. Much of the choreography stems from my feeling about the music and it approaches Beethoven as a human being, not just as a monumental contrapuntalist. I think that the music's encyclopaedic nature makes it a very theatrical work."

Five male and five female dancers will share the stage of the Barbican Hall with the pianist Nikolai Demidenko. Diabelli has been performed previously in Sicily with another pianist, and this will be Demidenko's debut not only with Tharp but the music. The Barbican's Robert van Leer was keen to have a soloist of Demidenko's stature as a way of bridging the divide between live music and contemporary dance.

"With Nikolai Demidenko and Twyla Tharp you have a true meeting of two equally strong, equally respected personalities and interpreters who share their new interpretation of this great music," he says.

"And this is music for a mature player only, who can understand Beethoven in a profound way. That individual has to be sure to bring the life and understanding and interpretation which warrants actually playing these variations on a theme, because there are 33 of them." He also sees the occasion as an opportunity to shift received notions about the potential of a concert hall.

"Almost all theatrical spaces have broadened their uses and their audiences. But the concert hall has stayed stuck in aspic."

Tharp's Diabelli was not conceived for a proscenium stage. "So it wasn't a case of shoehorning it in. And she wants white concert lighting, she wants to exploit the parameters of the concert hall, not deny them."

Tharp confirms this: "It's being done in concert halls because it presents the bones of the dance, in the same way that Beethoven and great music present the bones of the music." She does not suffer from false modesty, nor does she suffer fools. When I have to confess that the Diabelli Variations are one of my lacunae, she sighs contemptuously. She has the super-fast, flat voice and show-off intellectual tone favoured by some Americans. When I ask if she can tell me about her present projects, she answers no. "Because I do things and then talk about them as opposed to vice versa."

Later, though, she softens to explain that she doesn't mean to be abrupt, she just finds phone interviews unrewarding. And beneath, you detect a rather alluring and mysterious person, not so much a monster as an over- achiever. When she finishes with "I hope that was helpful and you will come to see the work," she sounds as though she really means it.

`The Golden Section' is at the Towngate Theatre, Northampton (01604 624811) Thurs-Sat and then tours; `Diabelli' is at The Barbican (0171-638 8891) 18-19 June