The star of Twyla Tharp’s first work for American Ballet Theater was the most famous dancer in the world. His dramatic defection to the West had made headlines. His technique, his athleticism and his theatricality were superlative.
But Mikhail Baryshnikov wasn’t in the mood to play a prince.
“He came to be challenged and that was my mandate,” Tharp said in an interview. “Make movement that he’d never done and perhaps nobody had ever done, and let’s see if it’s doable.”
In “Push Comes to Shove,” Tharp’s 1976 ballet set to Joseph Lamb’s “Bohemia Rag” and Haydn’s Symphony No. 82 in C Major, Baryshnikov played a sly master of ceremonies whose body is first set in motion to a rag, hips softly swiveling below an ever-fluid spine. He tosses a bowler hat in the air.
“We have the prince, the king,” Tharp said. “We must have the crown — it just happens to look like a vaudeville bowler.”
The sparkling, playful “Push,” a masterpiece revived as part of Ballet Theater’s fall season at Lincoln Center, is saved for last in the program: “Twyla@60: A Tharp Celebration,” which debuts on Wednesday and includes the company premiere of “Sextet” (1992), a rarely seen work for three couples, and “Bach Partita” (1983), a glorious large-scale ballet.
Tharp has created 16 ballets for American Ballet Theater — more than any other choreographer. The company’s artistic director, Susan Jaffe, who as a dancer performed in each of the works on the “Twyla@60” program, said that Tharp has been an indelible influence on her.
“After really understanding Twyla’s work and understanding how to approach it, I became a much better dancer,” Jaffe said. “A much better swan queen.”
Jaffe wants her dancers to be immersed in Tharp’s choreography, which marries precise, clean ballet technique with a jazzy looseness and the weight of modern dance. “A lot of the contemporary work, yes requires plié, yes requires a lot of upper body articulation,” Jaffe said. “But with Twyla, it’s in the ankles, the knees, the hips, and also how the body negotiates the different transference of weight.”
Sascha Radetsky, a former soloist who is now the artistic director of ABT Studio Company, brings in as much Tharp repertoire as he can for his young dancers. They are now learning “Cornbread,” a bubbly, virtuosic pas de deux from 2021, memorably performed by Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia of New York City Ballet.
Tharp’s complex ballets teach dancers “how to pace themselves,” Radetsky said, “to find places to vary the attack and to breathe and to not let the effort show. To be so grounded and natural while still achieving the precision and refinement that she requires. But doing it as if it’s a walk in the park.”
A Tharp work offers a dancer more than steps, but there are those, too. Because of Ballet Theater’s emphasis on story ballets, weighty roles can be hard to come by, which is frustrating with a company so rich with talent. But in Tharp’s ballets — as in those by George Balanchine — everyone dances. The steps have substance, not because they are tricky but because of their emphasis on crystalline technique.
Isaac Hernández, a principal of simmering power and theatrical depth, said that Tharp keeps reminding him to use his technique — to improve it, to be exacting with it. “At the beginning, I was like, ‘But I have technique,’” he said. “And she was like, ‘No, you’re cheating. You are finding the easiest ways to do this. Just do it right.’”
Hernández is one of two dancers cast as the male lead in “Push.” The other is the soloist Jake Roxander, whose youthful charm matches his dazzling, natural line. The two men are completely different, but both completely right. One exudes a hint of danger, the other is a quicksilver sprite. But the most important quality they can bring to the role is themselves.
Tharp, Hernández said, has been clear that her goal is not for him to recreate what Baryshnikov did but to put himself in the choreography. Recently he had a breakthrough after he arrived at rehearsal in a dark mood. “‘I know you’re probably having a hard time right now,’” he recalled Tharp telling him. “‘I want to hear nothing about it, just dance.’”
He gave her just what she wanted, but the next day — he was in a calmer state — his performance was more precise than daring. Hernández said that on that occasion Tharp told him, “‘You have to tame the lion, but you have to show me the lion, too.’”
The role is not about effortlessness and ease, but an underlying tension — a push and a pull. “It’s been really interesting to work with someone that is so perceptive about feeling and intention and also so committed to making it something remarkable,” Hernández said. “Because she keeps telling me, ‘I know it’s good. You’re good. It’s not a bad show. You could do it like that sometimes, but it’s not extraordinary.’ She was like, ‘I want this to be extraordinary.’ That’s inspiring.”
When she was choreographing “Push,” Tharp said that Baryshnikov didn’t speak much English yet. His attention span was short. But she marveled at how he didn’t fixate on what he looked like. “For a dancer of that caliber and reputation to not be concerned that he’s going to look like a fool is very unusual,” she said. “But he had the curiosity, and he also had the physical stuff to take it on.”
Baryshnikov was, she added, way overqualified for the job. “He had the proportions, he had the power, he had the charm, he was a good actor,” she said. “He had a zest for a moment.”
But there were gaps in his skills, however tremendous. As a ballet dancer who had spent years turning his feet out, he didn’t have much experience working with his feet in parallel. He needed to learn how to initiate movement from the torso instead of driving it from the legs. There was frustration that led to gestures she used in the ballet, like running his fingers through his sweaty hair with exhaustion.
“I mean, the guy was lost, right?” Tharp said. “He doesn’t speak English. He has no family here. He doesn’t know where he’s living. And so, yeah the classic one is walking up to the mirror and putting his hair back like looking, Who am I? What am I doing here?”
But Baryshnikov, despite his struggle with the movement, forged ahead using his comic flair and his way of mixing a deadpan gaze with feats of virtuosic brilliance. Tharp, as her title proclaims, pushed him in every aspect, and he soaked it up.
“The big ace in the hole was that everybody is being so serious and so reverential about this amazing great classical artist,” Tharp said. “It’s like, Oh, yay, good! Let’s be a clown. Let’s show them what’s really hard. Or push that envelope so far that it just becomes a totally different creature. So that was the goal.”
Who anticipated Baryshnikov would appear on a stage tossing a hat? “When the expectation was torqued to that degree, people were just set back on the heel,” Tharp said. “And then immediately you loved the guy. He’s doing something that appears so easy and so simple, but as you watch it, you see this extraordinary accomplishment underneath it all.”
The ballet, in four movements, has a large cast with the male lead ricocheting between two forces, a pair of female dancers — one tall and the other tiny (originally Martine van Hamel and Marianna Tcherkassky). For its new male stars, the pressure to dance a role created for Baryshnikov adds another layer to an already daunting challenge.
Roxander, long enamored of Baryshnikov, was so young when he first saw him in the video for “Don Quixote” that he thought his name was Don Quixote. “It’s a little nerve wracking, but I welcome that with open arms,” he said. “You have to try to be yourself.”
Lately, Tharp has spoken to Roxander about the mix of charisma and arrogance in the role — what is behind its mystery? “How do I let the character shine through?” Roxander said. “Why did Misha make those choices, why did he do the steps this way? How much of it was just him not being able to help being him and how much of that was the character? And that’s why it’s such a blessing to work with the choreographer of the ballet one-on-one.”
During the rehearsal process, Tharp asked Hernández and Roxander to look at the original studio tapes, which were recorded when the material was first being made.
“If you take his solutions to the problem, it is always going to be his,” she said, referring to Baryshnikov. “But if you get told, ‘OK, this is what you’re trying to do, you’re trying to go forward and backward at the same time,’ they’re going to resolve it in a way that is not going to look like someone else. It’s going to look like themselves.”
Gia Kourlas is the dance critic for The Times. She writes reviews, essays and feature articles and works on a range of stories.
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