The One Hundreds

Choreographed by Twyla Tharp the One Hundreds premiered in 1970 and featured Twyla Tharp, Rose Marie Wright and Sara Rudner (Director of Dance at Sarah Lawrence College).  From the early Tharp repertory “The One Hundreds,” an audience-participation event, maintains the rigors of her trio masterpiece “The Fugue” and her choreographic vision.   Along with putting the audience onstage it is also an exercise in aesthetic and physical deterioration.  The movements, based on activities anyone, including non-trained dancers, could do (skip, hop, shiver and shake), don’t require virtuosos.  The first of three sections has two well-versed and skilled dancers executing 100 eleven second movement phrases separated by four second pauses; section two has five dancers each doing 20 different phrases simultaneously, and the third section features one hundred audience members executing one phrase each in eleven seconds.