STARFIRE

December 2007

December 2007 - New York.
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December 2007 - TWYLA THARP, Portland, Indiana.
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TWYLA THARP, DANCER

I live in the land of flamenco. When you think of great dancers and New Mexico, the torch for the dance is in the hands and feet of Maria Benitez, a Taos native who started with ballet, moved on to flamenco and has performed brilliantly for decades in Spain and New Mexico.

Maria is the dancer who inspires me to my own creative work. Explore her website at www.mariabenitez.com and, if you are both creative and seeing changes in your work brought about by aging, ponder her interview at http://www.mariabenitez.com/index.asp?ID=5
Twyla Tharp was a surprise. Like Maria, she was a brilliant dancer, a ballerina who wasn’t afraid to explore other venues. Like Maria, she became a brilliant choreographer with the generous spirit and dedication to dance that nurtures young dancers and honors both tradition and innovation. I found Twyla Tharp on the pages of her book THE CREATIVE HABIT.

Dancers writing about discipline. Now that’s a book to scare writers, who tend to hibernate at our computers and only drag ourselves out for exercise when the muse demands movement. And Tharp is all about discipline. But she’s about the kinds of discipline that open the mind, explore new ways to explore the world.

Twyla Tharp plays with her body’s movements the way I play with words. She’s spent a lifetime learning how to use her body, how to schedule her life, how to live as a dancer and still have a life that is just rich enough for her. The book is filled with exercises for your own adventures...and it deserves a slow, thoughtful reading. Or two. Maybe three.

Next I found her birth data in Lois Rodden’s ASTRO-DATA IV, a book of charts and birth data for writers, artists, poets, musicians, architects, singers, dancers, and artists. The chart for Twyla Tharp set in Portland, Indiana, is her birth chart. With Pluto, the planet of irreversible change, in her 10th house of vocation, Tharp has a powerful chart and a destiny who changed her world. But on what scale? And in what manner?

Charts don’t answer all of those questions. Free will fills in the blanks. The potential was there, however, for her to make changes in the world around her and in other people through her unrelenting dedication to her profession. We find another clue in Mars, sitting in her 5th house of creativity on the cusp of the 6th house of daily routine. Tharp pushes herself, persuades her body into new movements, and her work is demanding and athletic.

Her greatest work is her choreography even though her first acclaim was as a dancer. The birth chart hints at the potential for choreography, too. Saturn in the 7th suggests a limited audience–and a choreographer is better known within the profession than in the world at large; ballet and dance are, in fact, arts known best to the devotees (as opposed to genre fiction that is widely read). Saturn conjunct Uranus predicts focused creativity–but also the risk that the creative drive could have been stifled and damped down to private performances. And what a waste that would have been!

What sets Tharp aside is the strength of her mind. With three planets in her natal 9th house, she is a searcher and researcher. If she hadn’t delved deeply into the potentials of dance, she would have found something to explore.

While I was reading Tharp’s book, I was also working on a creative project of my own that involved changing the setting for a story. There is a principle that says each story can only be told in one setting. Hurricane Katrina took care of my setting, but the story didn’t die with the storm. Slowly and painstakingly, I have been learning about location and story structure, finding my inner bridges for moving the story. So of course I was interested in what New York contributed to Tharp’s career.

New York didn’t provide the talent. The talent is inherent in Tharp’s natal chart.

But New York changed the arena. Pluto moves out of her 10th house and into the 9th house of the exploring mind. With four planets (40% of her total energy), including three of the five personal planets, in this area of knowledge that changes paradigms, it’s not surprising that Tharp’s mind changed dance forever.

Make no mistake. Tharp’s mind is a dancer as much as her body is. Over the course of her career, the mind directing the body made all the difference. She starts with a theme. She takes a box and begins putting all the research materials–videos, music, pictures, anything–related to that dance them into the box. She works for her narrative in ways writers dig for story. Then she builds for her dancers as precisely as an architect constructs a plan for a building.

And now the audiences come. New York loves Twyla Tharp. New York loved her as a dancer. New York loved her as a choreographer. Jupiter moves into the 7th house (the connection with public and also with creative partners) when Tharp moves to New York. Jupiter fills her theatres; Jupiter brings generous and supportive partners; Jupiter brings audiences who understand her best work.

What would her story have been in Indiana? She might have been the dance teacher who taught and inspired future generations. Or the performer who brought vivid work to the local stage.

But what did Indiana contribute? Maybe a place for early mistakes. Tharp’s chart has great strength–but she doesn’t recover easily from failure. The Moon’s latitude needs to be above 4 degrees for easy recovery, and hers is less than 1 degree. She would learn from every mistake, but never forget them. So perhaps her talent needed to ripen in a less fiercely competitive arena. Maybe Indiana taught her how to care for herself as a dancer before she faced strong competition and the inevitable failure–the fact that there’s never a perfect performance. (Maria Benitez has some fine comments on performance in her interview at http://www.mariabenitez.com/index.asp?ID=5.)

Relocation astrology is an ongoing, fascinating look at nature vs. nurture. The talents show up where we are born, and the birth chart remains the dominant chart no matter how often we move or change our names. But if all the world’s a stage, the stage on which we play is in the relocated chart.

Mary O’Gara, Ph.D.