Nine Sinatra Songs by The Miami City Ballet

Tharp handled the heroics of exhibition ballroom dancing and period nostalgia with refined wit, bearing no trace of pop satire or camp.
--Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick, No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 2003).

Nine Sinatra Songs, streamed this week,  was danced beautifully by Miami City Ballet, with no attempt to update this 1982 dance by Twyla Tharp.  Each song -- from Strangers in the Night to My Way -- was danced by one couple with all couples dancing separately on the stage together for the finale.  This dance is a period piece, with Oscar de la Renta costumes and an overhead revolving globe.  The movements were both balletic and modern, as is often true of Tharp's choreography, and suggested narratives in the lyrics of the songs as well as movements that were implicit in the music. Each short dance suggested the entire history of a relationship, from meeting to romance to separation, from ecstasy to melancholy.  My particular favorite movement of beautiful timing was when, during That's Life, the man takes off his jacket just before his partner leaps into his arms.