Pacific Northwest Ballet included Twila Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs as part of their Director’s Choice performance this year. I’m not in any way qualified to review a Ballet performance, but I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed it and had a great time playing with the Ballroom-inspired aspects of the dancing as I watched the show unfold. For me, the idea that the dancing was inspired by ballroom rather than in any way attempting to choreograph actual ballroom dance steps on ballet dancers is what made it work (this is the issue I sometimes have with partner dance in Broadway musicals). It was obvious in several of the nine pieces that  Ballroom dance inspired the piece, and the upper body shaping and movements felt quite ballroomesque throughout the performance.

On returning home, I hoped to find a resource that listed the dances that Tharp drew from for each of the first eight pieces (the ninth is a reprise group number), but I failed. The notes from some of the performances mention the roots of one or two dances, but it seems like, for the most part, they name the same couple of songs. So, my guess is that even a thorough search of those through the years wouldn’t yield a complete list. As an aside, it was fun to jump down the rabbit hole of the French Apache Dance that Tharp drew from for the choreography for That’s Life. If someone has such a reference, please let me know.

In the meantime, I will take this as inspiration to play a little with the possibilities of music and dance. Sinatra is already well represented in the music4dance catalog, with 166 songs listed before I started filling out the few missing entries from the ballet. But I’ve always thought of dancing Foxtrot to Sinatra or maybe Swing. In the ballet, Tango, Rumba, and Samba were definitely represented. So, I took a few minutes to see what the music4dance community has to say about dancing to this music.

If you go to the Frank Sinatra artist page, you’ll see Slow Foxtrot, Lindy Hop, Rumba, Castle Foxtrot, East Coast Swing, Jive, Quickstep, Peabody, West Coast Swing, Single Swing, Slow Waltz, Balboa, Bolero, Bossa Nova, Viennese Waltz, and Blues all represented.

And here’s a custom music4dance playlist that includes all eight songs (although one song is the Perry Como version since the Sinatra version isn’t available on Spotify or iTunes).

Are there other partner dances that Tharp drew from in this work that we should represent in music4dance? Are there other Ballroom-inspired ballets out there worth viewing? Do they use different music that you’d like to add to the catalog? Are there other playlists that you’d like to overlay the music4dance information on, like I did with this one? If you have ideas about this post or the site, please comment below or use other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.