Making Waves

Twyla Tharp is 61. She has choreographed for classical ballet companies — the prestigious American Ballet Theatre in particular, where she collaborated with Mikhail Baryshnikov — but she’s also ventured outside the classical dance world, working on movies like Hair and Ragtime in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Later, she created a landmark piece for the BBC in which her dancers worked with the editing possibilities of video in mind; the story concluded with all the performers being blown up by a grenade. Recently, she choreographed a Broadway musical set entirely to Billy Joel songs — and in a rare triumph over the natural course of critical acclaim, turned the terrible reviews that followed the show’s Chicago premiere into superlatives after the New York debut just months later.

Now, for the second time in her four-decade career, Tharp is the head of her own company. Of the three pieces the troupe has been performing, the one that’s inspired the most discussion is Surfer at the River Styx, in which 23-year-old Charlie Hodges travels to and across the river of hell clad in beach shorts and a loose T-shirt. A corps of dancers depicts the river itself, and — with women wearing black bras and men left bare-chested — they appear to tear Hodges limb from limb in a furious but mechanical torrent.

When Hodges spoke with the Pitch from a tour stop in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he was waiting for a shuttle back from the public park where he had been practicing his steps, trying to get a firmer grasp on what he had done on the nights when he’d performed the best. It was only 8 a.m.

Acting like you’re being torn limb from limb, he tells us, is easier when you’re freaking exhausted, which Hodges usually is by the time he performs Surfer at the River Styx — the third piece in the show. “The first two pieces get me pretty tired,” he explains. “So by the third piece, I just relax and let myself be taken. You can’t act tired if you’re really, really tired.”

Still, it is a skill to be able to relax into other people’s manipulations with such trust that critics leave the theater awestruck; the San Jose Mercury News noted that “[the dancers] seem to crack every bone in Charlie Hodges’ body.” That kind of suspended disbelief is not easy to inspire, especially when it requires absolutely no visible anticipation of movements that have been repeated, in all likelihood, hundreds of times in rehearsal. “The more you try to position yourself, the less it looks real,” Hodges agrees.

This is a mature observation coming from a 23-year-old dancer. But just as the dancers’ physical youth is an asset to Tharp (who still dances herself, even while accepting that there are certain things she can no longer do), her wisdom is invaluable to this company, in which the average age is 27.

“Because of the youth in the group, the discussion with Twyla gives us the ability to grasp the maturity behind what it is we’re doing,” Hodges says. “There are some things you just can’t know until you’re fifty.”