Lois Greenfield and Twyla Tharp_Salina Gatto
Throughout my entire life all I ever wanted to become was a dancer. Becoming an graphic designer and or illustrator was in the back of my mind when the music was turned on in my dance class. It was all i ever wanted to do and the role model that I looked to the most was Martha Graham and Twyla Tharp among many others. They were special to me due to their unique style and eccentric ways of thinking through the movement of the body. Twyla’s accomplishments gave me motivation to be like her someday or just to think like her would be perfectly fine for me.
The beginning of Twyla’s life was like many other families, other than her parents owning a drive in movie theater, but that is beside the point. She was born in Portland, Oregon but her family moved when she was still a child to Southern California. Her mother was a piano teacher who started lessons with Twyla at the age of two and dance lessons at the age of four. Soon after, she started studying every sort of dance style available including; ballet, tap, jazz, and modern. Wanting her to be accomplished in many different artistic things, her mother put her in viola and violin lessons, drum lessons, baton lessons, painting classes, and German and French classes as well.
She left home to attend Pomona College, but after three semesters, she left to attend Barnard College, in New York City to major in art history. However, even though she majored in art history, her true passion was dancing in the dance classes she took off campus. After getting her college degree in art history, she was able to study dance at the American Ballet Theater in New York City where most of the famous modern dancers studied such as, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and Erick Hawkins. She then joined the Paul Taylor Dance Company but left after two short years to create her own dance company called Twyla Tharp Dance which consisted of five woman and two men, added later in 1969, who performed together for five years earning little to no money.
Her style was humorous and edgy with a fantastic musical score and always left the audience with something to think about. Her dancing combined traditional ballet technique with avant-garde iconoclasm with natural bodily movements like running. In 1971, her piece The Fugue, gave critics something to think about and her group was asked to perform in major dance festivals with pieces such as Eight Jelly Rolls and The Bix Pieces.
Twyla Tharp and many of her dancers were now invited to collaborate and perform with major ballet companies. The Joffrey Ballet premiered her Deuce Coupe (set to music by the Beach Boys), As Time Goes By and Sue’s Leg . At American Ballet Theater, Mikhail Baryshnikov danced the lead role in Tharp’s Push Comes to Shove, which juxtaposed variations by Mozart with rags by Scott Joplin. The Russian ballet star and the young American iconoclast were a powerful combination, and collaborated frequently in the following decades.
In 1979, she choreographed the film version of Hair. She also had pieces on Broadway including a full-length show called When We Were Very Young, in 1980. She also staged dances for shows called The Catherine Wheel. Film wise she staged dances for Ragtime, Amadeus, and White Nights staring Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines. In 1987, Baryshnikov by Tharp, won three Emmy Awards, as well as a Director’s Guild of America Award for her direction of the special. The following year, she directed and choreographed a stage production of the classic film musical Singin’ In the Rain. The show enjoyed a solid run on Broadway and a highly successful national tour.
In 1992, her autobiography was published called Push Comes to Shove and in the same year she received the MacArthur Fellowship, one of the so-called “genius grants.” At the time of her 1993 interview with the Academy of Achievement, she was preparing dances for the motion picture I’ll Do Anything, directed by James L. Brooks.
In 2002 she came back to the dance world and created the original Broadway show called Movin’ Out, with all of Billy Joel’s music. It became Tharp’s most popular show and ran for three straight years on Broadway. In 2003, she published her second book called The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life in which she shares her creative process and how she learned how to be artistic. This book has helped me in my own creative process and has taught me to think like an artist. It is truly an amazing and captivating book and I recommend it to everyone, even those who have not been given the creative gift, in hopes of them reading the book and becoming inspired to become creative. The following year, her lifetime contribution to her country’s culture was recognized with the National Medal of Arts, presented by President George W. Bush in a ceremony at the White House. In 2006, Tharp brought a second “jukebox musical” to Broadway, The Times They Are a Changin’, based on the songs of Bob Dylan. The show was less well received than Movin’ Out, but Twyla Tharp’s prodigious creative energies are far from exhausted. As of this writing, she has choregraphed over 130 dances, apart from her work for Broadway, film and television.
I did not become inspired by Lois Greenfield early in life like Twyla, however, her work connects to my dance life as well as my life as an artist which gives me the best of both worlds. Lois Greenfield is famous for the ability to capture the movement of dance through the body with photography. She has been compared to Eadweard Muybridge because of his human locomotive and Henri-Cartier Bresson for capturing elusive movement. She has no degree in photography and only started as a freelance photographer after college. She has become very famous only due to an accident and no formal training. Her work as been published in the New York Times, Dance Magazine, and the Village Voice, as well as Sports Illustrated.
These two female artists have inspired me today to become the best dancer I can be as well as the best artist I can be even though Twyla says pick one and have that be your best. I can create both types of art and be equally as good in my opinion. 
