Clip: Episode 7 | 1m 41s | Video has closed captioning.
Dance icon Twyla Tharp discusses the moment she knows when she wants to work with a dancer with American Ballet Theatre ballerina Misty Copeland.
Aired: 07/19/23
You've always had like such a wide variety of dancers that you choose to work with.
Why?
Why, what attracts you to that?
Why not this, you know, this typical ballet, you know, what we think of as this "perfect ballet body"?
You're drawn to human beings.
-I like people who have a feeling for what they want to do, who haven't had that washed out of them by the training and sort of made fungible.
I'm not interested in interchangeable.
So, people always want to know how do I choose dancers?
And I say, dancers walk in through the door.
I'm watching peripherally so they don't know I'm seeing them and I know, by the way they walk in and how they put their bag down whether I want to work with them or not.
-Okay.
-Because they enter the room with an excitement, not a fear.
They're very different.
They're both heightened conditions, but excitement means they're ready for an adventure and fear means they're afraid of an adventure.
And a lot of training -- of all sorts, in all disciplines -- has to do with creating that kind of fear and that's not helpful.
Not if you're working in material where you're trying to evolve something the audience hasn't seen before.
If they've seen it before, great, fine, then everybody is trying to go for "perfect," you know, they're being graded to a 10.
I'm not interested in those scales.
We've done that.
We're there.
We know we do that.
Now, it's, "What do we do?"
