Redesigning the ’60s Twyla Tharp’s The One Hundreds in Lower Manhattan BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

NEW YORK — It’s a beautiful early-fall afternoon in Lower Manhattan, two days before the anniversary of September 11. The Statue of Liberty stands guard over the harbor as usual. Ferries and sailboats slide by on the breeze. In Battery Park, with the city’s smoke and screech for a backdrop, clumps of tourists listen to multi-lingual guides. Vendors hawk food and furbelows, breakdancers spin on their heads, an Asian man plays Baroque music on a guitar, and a copper-green figure imitating the Statue of Liberty stands next to a fence, her head swiveling to survey the scene.

Scattered around a lawn inside a chain-link fence, clusters of people are imitating other people doing odd, semi-calisthenic moves. Workers are checking lists, setting up equipment on a big stage, and following other, more important-looking people with microphones and cameras. Rehearsals are beginning for another installment of Twyla Tharp’s The One Hundreds.

One of the most wildly imaginative products of the counterculture, The One Hundreds has been described by Tharp at various times as an intersection of Art and Life, as a fun-filled event, and as representing the entire universe. In its original form it consisted of 100 unrelated 11-count movement phrases. The phrases were performed first by two dancers in unison; then by five dancers, each of whom did 20 of the phrases simultaneously; then by 100 persons, each of whom had learned one of the phrases, in a single 11-count explosion.

The skeletal version — I probably saw its first New York performance, also outdoors, in 1970 at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater — was conceptual, boring, fascinating, spectacular. Tharp and her company took it on tour, always recruiting local students, laypeople, and celebrities for the stupendous 11-second finale. In recent years, she’s fattened it into a pageant of ’60s mythology, with costumes, video, and audience participation, and herself as star MC, teacher, stand-up comedian, team coach, and creator of serious art. I’ve watched The One Hundreds wax and wane over the years. By now, it’s a research project for me, feeding into my book-in-progress about Tharp’s choreography.

For most of the three-hour rehearsal period, I hang out, watching Tharp’s dancers teach the phrases to the volunteers. Well organized by the staff of the sponsoring Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, they report in half-hour waves for their 10-minute personal-instruction sessions. Then they go off by themselves and practice their Hundred, or they put on their shoes and go back to work.

Tharp, partnered by the video crew, moves around the lawn, watching the sessions, kibitzing. "Let’s have a little more passion!" she tells a man who’s trying to do a sequence that requires him to grab-throw-cross-open-cross and roar at the same time. She demands drama, commitment, in those 11 seconds. "Vulnerable!" she yells at a woman whose phrase ends with both palms out and down. "Now fix the details."

The 100 choreographed units have survived and are meant to be legible after all these years, but they’re beginning to melt. The movements get adapted to what each individual can do. I see Charlie Neshyba Hodges teaching two women a complicated segment that has a lot of rolling on the ground and twisting of the body, evenly counted. A minute later, I see him demonstrating it as if it all happened in a flash on the last two counts. I ask one of the women about this — were they allowed to choose either version? "We could take any timing we wanted as long as we ended exactly on the 11th count."

To round up the participants, LMCC people sent out a call on e-mail, and responses came from artists, arts presenters, bankers, medical professionals, publishers, lawyers. A few dancers. No famous politicians or movie stars. Liz Thompson, executive director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, a former dancer and former head of Jacob’s Pillow, is the evening’s hosting dignitary. She gallantly led the LMCC’s recovery after its offices in the World Trade Center were destroyed.

Thompson will introduce Tharp and learn the first Hundred from her on stage. I call this the Dick Cavett variation. He and Tharp taped it in a studio in 1979. "Is it hard?" Liz asks me. I don’t tell her Cavett had trouble with it.

I’m just about to learn my own Hundred. This time, instead of a spectator, I’ve decided to be a participant. Only another nondancer could understand why it took me 30 years to get up the nerve. Charlie shows me the phrase, an accumulation. Good, I know my postmodern dance. Accumulation is a device people used for structuring movement when they wanted to be objective and not do the most familiar thing. Mine goes: throw your hands out in front of you — throw, push your left shoulder with your right hand — throw, push left, push your right shoulder with your left hand — throw, push left, push right, golf swing. I think it’s number 73.

I ask Charlie whether he learned it with counts, since it seems much easier for me without them. He says don’t worry about the counts but make it personal. Oh, and if I can’t get my knees to keep knocking together the whole time, I can pedal them up and down. Any way you want, he says, but lots of wiggle.

Charlie will do the whole Hundreds with Whitney Simler. This is the first time they’ve performed it since they joined Tharp’s company. When I ask Whitney how they remember the order, she says that sometimes they connect the phrases mentally, make up stories. Tharp’s long-ago dancers doggedly memorized them, like Latin declensions, but soon they invented descriptive labels — Cagney, the Pregnant Lady, the Sylphide, Sunburst. Whitney’s example: Heidi goes to Scotland on an Airplane.

By the time we get to the performance, I’ve already forgotten whether I come back to center between the parts of the accumulation. And I realize I can’t quite relate my phrase to the 11 counts. I will get in the back.

We’re supposed to come in ’60s costume. Trying to stay inconspicuous, I put on a headband, vest, and the same beads I’m wearing in the jacket photograph of my first book, in 1972. Pretty authentic. Most of the participants are too young; their idea of the ’60s comes from the movie of Hair, which Tharp choreographed in the late ’70s. But then, we’ve all mythologized the ’60s in our own ways.

During the performance, Tharp wears the same jeans she’s had on all day, with an off-the-shoulder sweater and very white sneakers. She runs a contest for the Most Visible and the Most Authentic costumes. The winners all look overdressed compared to the bedraggled jeans and shirts in a 1974 performance I have on tape.

We Hundred sit at the sides of the big open stage. The audience takes over our rehearsal lawn. Charlie begins the long sequence sitting in a chair. This is so the audience can do the phrases with him. Tharp keeps peering out into the dark to see whether they’re dancing along. "Come on, audience! You’re not doing it!" she barks.

Holding up posters, she shamelessly plugs her new book, The Creative Habit (or, How To Work Harder), her Broadway show, Movin’ Out, and the company’s fall US tour. She shows an edited tape she made during the afternoon, asking volunteers how they feel about the ’60s and whether they feel more or less optimistic now. Probably she feels more.

Like a sportscaster, she calls the plays as Charlie continues, joined by Whitney and later the other dancers, Lynda Sing, Dario Vaccaro, and Jason McDole. They wear quasi-Mod outfits, and one of them seems to be talking into a cell phone. I look for Number 73 to brush up on my phrase, but I almost miss it. Whitney is doing it twice as fast as I learned it. Tharp shows blurry vintage videotape of herself and Rose Marie Wright doing the Hundreds in the ’70s. They look more relaxed and move less decoratively than the dancers on stage.

In the script of her 1982 Scrapbook videotape, Tharp said: "The One Hundreds shows deterioration almost as a scientific matter. First, the highly trained, disciplined and rehearsed dancer performs a series of movements approaching an absolute in clarity. Passed down to dancers less well-rehearsed, the movement declines until when executed by completely untrained bodies, the same movement is seen with no detail and little definition. The One Hundreds as mere shadows of themselves. Thus, the original One Hundreds was an investigation of physical rigor and its deterioration."

It’s time for our part. Tharp forgets to give us the four counts that are supposed to take us onto the stage and set the tempo. Trying not get trampled, I fall behind. They’re already two counts into their Hundreds, and people are crowding me on all sides. I forget my moves. I wave my arms and wiggle. Eleven! I’ve hardly moved at all. I figure my real contribution has been sitting on stage during the show and playing the part of a spectator.