Sinatra on Stage: Come Fly With Twyla Tharp

Tharp confesses she's never seen either show--she hasn't got a TV set, she says, and doesn't "know squat about ballroom dancing"--but cheers the trend. "It's great. I'm all in favor of it." And why not? Tharp has spent most of her career striving to expand dance's vocabulary and audience. "People often say to me, 'I don't know anything about dance.' I say, 'Stop. You got up this morning, and you're walking. You are an expert.' I'm very, very interested in how people who come to my shows with a kind of innocence respond."

Tharp, 68, is talking in her penthouse apartment overlooking New York City's Central Park. It's an airy, loftlike space with blond wood floors where, if you're lucky, she'll show off a step or two to illustrate a point. Pixieish and intense, she talks fast, stares hard, answers questions with more questions. It's not hard to understand her reputation as a prickly taskmaster.

"Are you tough to work with?"

"Does it sound like I'd be?"

"Well, yes."

"I try hard to be responsible," she explains. "To have done my homework. So when I come [to a rehearsal] I have a fairly clear path to suggest we go on. But I do believe that I respect the people I work with."

After moving to New York and graduating from Barnard College, she studied with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham before beginning to create dances for her own troupe. Many were spare, experimental works (including The One Hundreds, which begins with two dancers performing 100 different moves of precisely 11 seconds each and ends with 100 people doing all of them at the same time). But she also choreographed pieces to the music of Bix Beiderbecke, Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton. When she was working on Deuce Coupe for the Joffrey Ballet, some company members refused to perform it. "They were classical artists and had their own definitions about what art needed to be," she says.

Tharp hasn't shied away from stretching her own conception of what art is. She has worked on Hollywood films (Hair and Ragtime, among others) and directed the 1985 Broadway revival of Singin' in the Rain, which got a critical drubbing that humiliated her. ("A catastrophe," she called it later.) Even after the success of Movin' Out, she had another misfire with The Times They Are A-Changin', in which she used a circus motif to illustrate the music of Bob Dylan--a conceit that no one much liked.

But that experience helped drive her back to Sinatra. Originally she had wanted to do Dylan's love songs, she says, but was dissuaded for commercial reasons. Now she's returned to the basics: romance and movement--and winning over the audience. "It's called 'Make the folks feel a little better for an evening, and leave on a high,'" Tharp says. And if you miss the Balzac references, she'll probably forgive you.

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