E-Mail This Article to a Friend Super Bowl dancing Twyla Tharp takes Movin’ Out on the road BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Last time Twyla Tharp was sighted in Boston, she was attacking a weight machine on the newly named WGBH series Art Close Up. What’s two hours a day of muscle building got to do with a lifetime of making innovative ballets, dances, and high-concept entertainments? As Tharp argues in her new book, The Creative Habit, we all need discipline and hard work to push our talents into the light of day. For her, extreme is good too.

During the last several months, Tharp has channeled her formidable energies into preparing the touring company of her hit Broadway show Movin’ Out, which opens a six-week run at the Colonial Theatre this Tuesday. Installed in a posh suite at the new Ritz Carlton to give interviews earlier this month, she was still thinking about sweat.

Movin’ Out is an all-dance show in Tharp’s dynamic and demanding style. She believes there aren’t any precedents for it, in part because the story she stitched together from the songs of Billy Joel is told entirely through dancing. If there’s such a thing as an auteurist musical, Movin’ Out is it. Not only did Tharp conceive the show, she directed and choreographed it. "Nobody has ever danced what’s essentially a repertory piece in this kind of ongoing, featured way. This is like the Super Bowl every day."

The road company is made up of young, tough dancers she figures are up to the challenge. What they do in Movin’ Out is not your generic Broadway jazz. Both the original cast and several members of the road company have danced in Tharp’s concert repertory, and they’re experts in her highly evolved blend of ballet, modern dance, personal gesture, marathon stamina, and whatever dances people have been doing in clubs and discos for three decades.

But it’s the aggressive energy underneath the movement that makes the show, which I saw in New York in 2002, so electrifying. Tharp’s attraction to the jock sensibility goes way back. Soon after she completed work on the 1970s movie Hair, where she choreographed the boot-camp sequences on a real Army base, she made up some heavy calisthenic exercises for her dance company. She’s choreographed for football players and drill teams. She started intensive gym workouts herself, including boxing, in the early 1980s, as a way to stave off the aging process.

I don’t know whether Tharp has ever gone to the Super Bowl, but she does have a terrific instinct for mass culture. Movin’ Out follows five high-school chums through the troubled Vietnam years and their aftermath. The characters experience love, loss, and post-war malaise and finally emerge as grown-up citizens. The show rests on perennial Tharpian themes: rock and roll, forms of combat from sex to sports to war, and the redeeming power of friendship. The Billy Joel songs, driven by the restlessness of the ’60s and ’70s, are performed live, in Stuart Malina’s supercharged arrangements. Tharp brought all this together in 2002, when strong feelings about Vietnam were smoldering below the surface of American politics.

The most interesting thing about the show for her now, she says, is that she’s made a successful narrative. Although it may sound like retrenchment, storytelling is a challenge she’s pursued for a long time, with the same stubborn inventiveness that’s fueled her career. There was The Catherine Wheel, the big dance production she made with David Byrne in 1981 about a cartoonish but frightening extended family and a corps of sinister intruders who all joined together at the end in a supercharged utopia of dancing. She thought of it as a Broadway show.

Now, with Movin’ Out a hit and a 2003 Tony for choreography in hand, Tharp faces a new challenge: the responsibility of maintenance. A stubborn foe of repertory, she’s closed down her company more than once to avoid becoming stuck in the familiar. But she looks in on the original cast that continues on Broadway, auditions replacements, and checks on the touring company. She’s proud that the show can still be legible, powerful, and meaningful with a new generation of dancers. She asks me rhetorically: "That’s a test of what we like to think of as a classic, isn’t it?"

Movin’ Out is at the Colonial Theatre, 106 Boylston Street in the Theatre District, March 2 through April 10. Tickets are $30 to $87; call (617) 931-2787.