Twyla Tharp lives to work. The All Tharp program at Pacific Northwest Ballet brings her to town to stage two world premieres, witness a staging of her Nine Sinatra Songs, and host a lecture demonstration. “My goal,” she said during a recent phone interview, “has always been to expand my horizons to the degree that I’m given the possibilities.” Since the 1960s her breathtaking form of ballet—filled with twists and drops and runs—has surged to every kind of music. In 1976, she got Baryshnikov moving to Haydn and early jazz in Push Comes to Shove. She set mounted policemen’s horses prancing to hippie pop for the 1979 movie Hair. She’s made dances for the edgy rock rhythms of David Byrne and recently, to the blue-collar, Top 40 songbook of Billy Joel for the stage musical Movin’ Out. When even a mellow standard like “Just the Way You Are” inspires a Broadway pas de deux, how can she possibly relax? “Ha. Ha. Ha,” Tharp responded. “It is not a concept that’s of much interest to me—relaxing. I’m just not wired that way.”

She accepted the PNB commission because artistic director Peter Boal’s talent and, yes, work ethic in his days as a dancer at New York City Ballet left a lasting impression on her. “His performance load was what most of the principal dancers did—then they went home,” she said. “They weren’t teaching the next generation. And Peter was, while he was still at the height of his own performing career. I can’t tell you how much respect I have for that. So his coming to Pacific Northwest Ballet and setting about moving the company in a direction that made sense to him is something that I’m totally in support of.”

Tharp doesn’t discuss pieces-in-progress, but the music—by Brahms and postmodernist Vladimir Martynov—provides hints of what we’ll see. “The Brahms is a monument of nineteenth—century, classical, romantic composition,” she said. It’ll be followed by Martynov’s “minimalistic music that’s brutal and ends up rather more bereft than where it started out.” Together, the two should form a kind of commentary on what’s missing from modern composition, “because you can only go so far in removing items before you’re left with something that’s approaching a vacuum.”

While engaging young people who’ve seen more choreography and had access to more information than Tharp did at the beginning of her career might be a challenge for some dancemakers, Tharp is undeterred. “What they haven’t seen is my archive,” she said, “and what they don’t know is that while I stopped performing quite a long time ago, I’ve continued working every day.” And it’s all on videotape dating back to 1969 for what she dryly refers to as a “sperm bank” of movement vocabulary; in her upcoming Brahms piece she’s using a few phrases that she recorded in 1996.

But can any dancer possibly live up to the standards of a woman for whom rest is a nagging necessity? “Listen—they wouldn’t be in the room with me if there was that attitude,” said Tharp. “I only work with people who are highly motivated and, frankly, who are highly talented. They, too, want to maximize their potential. And when you put everybody in a room where everybody is doing their very best, it’s a wonderful thing.”