“God gives you one gift: You get to be born,” choreographer Twyla Tharp said. “Thereafter, you’ve got to take care of it yourself.”
Her new book, “Keep It Moving: Lessons for the Rest of Your Life,” doesn’t have anything to do with chasing youth. No, no, no — to Tharp, 78, that is a losing proposition. But it’s not over until it’s over. “The figures are still shocking in terms of people who don’t exercise or who are not aware of the reality that diet is actually extremely important,” she said. “If you want to have a future, you’ve got to provide for that now.”
And Tharp, a dance pioneer and Tony-Award-winning choreographer, is ready to assist. She has already written two books about how to better yourself using the tools of an artist: “The Creative Habit” (2003), a bestseller, and “The Collaborative Habit” (2009). “Keep It Moving,” a follow-up, applies those tools to finding purpose and growth as you age, no matter what age you are.
Tharp, armed with a no-nonsense approach to life, is fine with the phrase “self-help.” “What’s the matter with helping yourself?” she said. “I don’t have any problem with that category.”
Not that “Keep It Moving,” to be published by Simon & Schuster on Tuesday, is a self-help book exactly, though it’s full of bits of wisdom: “After we terrorize ourselves with self-doubt, our only relief is to get moving again.” And there is practical advice, too. Never, for instance, fight a fall.
Above all, Tharp is a motivator. The text is illustrated not with pictures, but with descriptions of simple exercises: Each chapter features one, ranging from “Squirm,” a wriggling sequence of motions that she recommends trying out in bed, to “Take Up Space,” which is both a physical and mental act. Here, she connects the reader to a dancer’s intuitive way of moving bigger, with amplitude. “You can think the same way in your everyday movements,” she writes. “When you walk, think of yourself striding, not just taking mingy steps.”
The brain is one thing; the body is quicker. “We all think the mind is smarter, and excuse me!” she said in her galvanizing way. The body’s reflexes, she continued, are “much faster than the brain can process and come up with a concept.”
“That’s all I’m saying here,” she explained. “Everybody get connected to your body.”
But how does she do that?
“Would you care to walk with me for a moment?” she asked. I would. “Good girl,” she replied.
During our promenade around her studio — a pristine, wide-open space in the center of her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — she focused on the task at hand, all the while making odd, little animallike noises.
She instructed herself in real time: “Walk straight ahead. It really has to be down the middle of the metatarsal so the whole leg is rotated in. The back has to be really strong. Sternum up. You do this for quite a long time depending on how bad the feet are.” (Hers are bad.)
She moved onto a mat and quickly zipped through her routine, some of it on a large exercise ball, which she loves, “especially first thing in the morning, if you’re not feeling so very up to it,” she said, “because you can’t help but bounce, and bouncing is good for the knees and the thighs.”
Her workout, or, as she put it “the whole mishegoss,” involves isometric exercises, crunches (300) and obliques (100 each side), as well as at least 20 minutes on a stationary bike. With the comic timing of a vaudeville performer — Tharp, deep down, is something of a clown — she flipped her body to arch over the ball and stretched out her back. “You have to take your temperature at every part of your body,” she continued. “And you see how much space it takes: not much.” All that’s required, she added, is “a space patch and no fancy clothes.”
In other words, you can do it at home. In your own way, at your own level: Start with 30 crunches. In the book, her philosophy is guided by the body’s need and ability — in small or large ways — to move.
She should know. Not only has she danced much of her life, but she is also committed to her own movement practice, which begins with walking and lasts from 45 to 90 minutes a day, depending on her schedule. For the past few weeks, it was closer to 45; she had a heavy rehearsal load while making her latest work, an otherworldly beauty for American Ballet Theater called “A Gathering of Ghosts,” which was unveiled during the company’s fall season.
She taught the dancers all of the material. (How many 78-year-old women can demonstrate steps?) “I’m certainly not promoting myself as the ultimate exemplar of this movement,” she said. “But I do still have right and left, and I prefer in rehearsals to stay on my feet.”
Those feet are why she sticks to a 1,200-calorie-a-day diet. “It’s a little crazy,” she said. “But it helps me keep myself on the bone, which is important, because the less weight I put onto feet, the better off we are.”
Tharp has worked hard over the years to maintain her health and physical well-being. But her body has taken some knocks. Still, until she was 65, she said, she could do almost anything. Then, physically, everything began to decline.
“I got nothing for free anymore,” she said. “I had to work hard for every little thing, and that could be discouraging, to say the least. So how to maximize that? How do we learn from some of these newer moves that the body comes up with just to survive?”
And how does Tharp learn from her own injuries? Recently, she underwent hip surgery; she was determined to come back better than before — and with a goal: to improve her balance, which, she said, “has always sucked.”
Just before our walk, she kneaded the top of a well-worn foot to break up its calcium deposits. All of her metatarsals have been broken, she said, at one point or another. “I am working now to open the feet,” she said.
The self-massage and walking regimen have done wonders for both her balance and her feet. But things happen. A few weeks ago, she thought she had broken her left foot during a rehearsal at Ballet Theater. (Mercifully, it wasn’t a break, but it hurt.) “I was showing everybody how to do relevé,” she said, the ballet term for rising on the toes. “I was exhausted and I also had on a pair of jazz shoes, which are much lighter than sneakers.”
Even Tharp can make mistakes. “You have to prepare for everything, and I hadn’t prepared for the jazz shoes,” she said. “I just put them on. I haven’t used them for five years! Hello? Right.”
Clearly, Tharp puts in the time to improve herself. But why would a world-class choreographer want to pass on her knowledge to the general population?
When she first began creating dances in 1965, she said, she was curious about how movement fit inside of the avant-garde dance world. “Now,” she added, “I’m curious about how movement sets in every single human being who walks.”
Tharp has always thought of what she does as partly scientific: What is the body capable of? And she has been fortunate, she said, with her own instructors, including boxing trainer Teddy Atlas. “If you understand something you believe in, you have an obligation to share it,” she said. “Why hoard it?”
It took her about three years — or maybe four — to reconcile herself to writing a book about being older. In the dance world, age is not freely acknowledged; Martha Graham lied about hers for years. “You don’t do this,” she said of her decision to go for it in her book. “Some people are going to laugh. OK. That’s their prerogative.”
And with “Keep It Moving,” Tharp has a clear mission. “I really tried to write it for the person who is completely not familiar with their body,” she said, “and I tried very hard to open up the community of dance, which can seem to the public as elitist — it actually is not.”
As time passes, Tharp works to stay open-minded and to challenge herself, too. For her, the book and “A Gathering of Ghosts” are related. In the dance, created as a showpiece for Herman Cornejo, a principal celebrating his 20th anniversary with Ballet Theater, Tharp is looking at her own career and the ghosts in it, or the larger-than-life choreographers who came before her. She knew them all: Graham, George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham.
In “Gathering,” the ghosts start in front of Cornejo; by the fourth and final movement, he has moved in front of them. You can always, Tharp seems to be saying, push beyond yourself in big and small ways.
“We all have our ghosts,” she said. “You can either leave them out in front or say: ‘Thank you very much — I’m stepping forward. I’m representing.’ You don’t disappear.”
This article originally appeared in
.