STEVEN BROWN
 When dance trailblazer Twyla Tharp choreographed her "Nine Sinatra Songs," she thought she was harking back to a bygone time by paying homage to ballroom dance.
Twenty-five years later, surprise! Her nostalgia looks more like foresight.
Ballroom dance is having a renaissance. On television, it draws viewers by the millions. Touring shows spun off from TV sell out in no time. N.C. Dance Theatre will take a spin through the world of gowns, high heels and tuxedos starting Thursday, when Tharp's "Sinatra Songs" helps open its season.
As the blue-eyed legend serenades, Tharp ushers seven couples into the ballroom and beyond it. Hints of the waltz and cha-cha mingle with ballet's lyricism and modern dance's boldness. Tharp's dancers might be saying to their TV counterparts: So you think you can dance?
Tharp isn't staging a contest, though. She uses the same strategy that served her 20 years later in "Movin' Out," her Tony-winning musical based on hits by Billy Joel. The songs, as recorded by Sinatra, are her cues for telling a story through dance.
In her book "The Creative Habit," Tharp lays out the theme: "the life of a married couple from beginning ... to end." The finale, she writes, represents "continuing acceptance." (Real-life couples should do so well.)
The songs' word hint at the situations. "Strangers in the Night" is a first meeting. In "Somethin' Stupid," a song about the riskiness of declaring love too soon, romance is budding. "That's Life" -- with its refrain of "I've been up and down and over and out" -- represents a near-breakup. The finale's happy ending unfolds to "My Way."
A different view
Of course, dancing can be looked at in more than one way. Elaine Kudo, a former member of Tharp's troupe who's staging the "Songs" here, said she thinks of the dancers as seven couples out on the town, converging in "a random ballroom somewhere." (By the way, Kudo performed Tharp's related "Sinatra Suite" with a celebrated partner in a video filmed in the 1980s, "Baryshnikov Dances Sinatra." So she has earned her right to a different view.)
Either way, the work celebrates the glamour of ballroom dancing. Tharp, who created the work after evoking the ballroom style of an earlier era in the movie "Ragtime," has said she was thinking of the 1950s, when marriages were more lasting. Tharp told her dancers, Kudo said, that Sinatra's famous phrasing was another spur. She wanted the dancers to take their lead from him.
An extra dash of glamour
Whether it's suggesting one couple's story or seven, "Songs" represents a swanky occasion. Oscar de la Renta designed the dancers' formalwear for Tharp.
Besides creating the ballroom glamour, Kudo said, the costumes help personify the characters -- especially the women. The fiery woman in "That's Life" wears a slinky dress slit along one leg. The woman who swirls through "Domani" sports a froufrou pink number.
"Domani" is the one section in which Tharp wants the performers to carry on with dance-contest flashiness, Kudo said. Otherwise, the couples should look like they're oblivious to everything but themselves. Their dancing is about love, not showing off.
This is NCDT's first time to perform Tharp. Kudo thinks the "Sinatra Songs," with its humor and humanity, gives an audience that's new to her "a good sense of who she is as a person."
But any one work can only give a partial view of a choreographer who has been busy since the 1960s. Considering that the "Sinatra Songs" tells part of its story through costuming, it's fitting that Kudo described Tharp's four decades of work this way:
"She goes from ballet slippers to jazz shoes to sneakers to high heels to pointe shoes," Kudo said. "She has done it all."
PREVIEW
N.C. Dance Theatre
"Nine Sinatra Songs," created by Twyla Tharp. Also on the bill: Alvin Ailey's "Night Creature," choreographed to a jazz score by Duke Ellington, evokes the rituals of big-city night life. Dwight Rhoden's "Artifice" puts a circus-like ringmaster at center stage, manipulating an array of colorful characters.
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
WHERE: Belk Theater, Blumenthal Performing Arts Center, 130 N. Tryon St.
TICKETS: $27-$69.
DETAILS: 704-372-1000; www.ncdance.org
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