On broadway: story time: spring awakening took Bill T. Jones in a fresh direction as choreographer--and collaborator.

Everything about Spring Awakening seems unlikely. It's a rock musical based on a once-scalding, now outdated 1891 play by the German writer Frank Wedekind. The subject is teenage lust and shame in a puritanical provincial town--sort of a Slow Times at Ridgemont High, with characters so totally in the dark they don't know what their genitals are for.

But musical theater is often at its best when the unlikely works. And this strange little show, with music by the alternative popster Duncan Sheik, book and lyrics by the playwright Steven Sater, direction by Michael Mayer, and choreography by Bill T. Jones, worked so well at the off-Broadway Atlantic Theater back in June that performances begin on Broadway this month.

The most unlikely thing about the whole project could well be the presence of Bill T. Jones. He's not the first contemporary choreographer to stage a few dance sequences for a musical. The ones who are honest will always tell you that money is part of the reason--the economics of Broadway guarantee that even if a show flops, the choreographer takes home a nice piece of change. But Jones' company is an uncommonly successful one. And the economics of off-Broadway are not nearly as enticing as those of Broadway. So why go there?

Jones, on the phone a few hours before a performance at the Sao Paulo Opera House last summer, conceded that commerce did enter into the equation. Still, he said, "crassness aside," he took the job to work with Mayer. He calls Mayer and Jo Bonney, with whom he collaborated on another off-Broadway show, The Seven, "wonderful, inspired professionals." And, he said, "That level of craft and know-how makes me interested in being part of what they do."

On the surface, what they do wouldn't seem that far removed from what he does: He has more than once combined text, movement, and music onstage. He's even used nondancers in his work. But he sees a world of difference. "Every time I make a piece," he said, "I'm trying to reexamine what form will be appropriate for the ideas I'm working with. I don't try to calculate what the effect will be on the public. In the theater, whether it's off-Broadway or on Broadway, they're making entertainment. I mean that in no patronizing way. In theater it's 'We need this, we need that.' The abstract must be kept at a minimum. The dissonance must be kept at a minimum. The multiple points of view must be kept at a minimum--all the things I have relied on in my work." It is, he said, "a rather exotic sideline I'm indulging in."

Exotic, and sometimes baffling. "One of the things I've learned from contemporary dance, which is always underfunded and on-the-fly, is that we have to solve problems," he said. On Spring Awakening, the first challenge was to move a cast of actor-singers--"who let me know regularly that they weren't dancers." The second was the size of the stage, which was too small to allow expansive movement. Jones solved both in the same way, by thinking vertically rather than horizontally and by accenting stillness.

In Latin class, six boys burst from their chairs stomping their feet and jumping up and down on them. In her bedroom, a girl looks in a mirror and skims her body with her hands. Arms move a lot; feet move only a little. And yet there are numbers in which the stage appears to explode in movement.

When Mayer first used the word "numbers," Jones recalled, he bridled. "I said, 'I don't do numbers.' After a while, though, I relaxed. There are numbers, because that's the way shows are made."

Agreeing on the lingo didn't necessarily mean agreeing on the choreography. And, Jones found, it wasn't only Mayer who had an opinion. "You've also got a bunch of producers sitting in the back with opinions." And sometimes the consensus was that the movement was getting in the way of the lyrics. Or the acting. Or something. "Storytelling is supreme," he said, "It's not about text and music and movement. It's all about the story. It just so happens it's a good story, so it wasn't hard to give myself to it." But there's no denying how strange it felt to him: "Narrative is a dirty word in the world I come from."

A lot of his collaborators on Spring Awakening didn't know that, he said. "They don't really know the values of the contemporary dance world, that gesture doesn't have to correspond to a meaning or a character or music. They don't know that specific gestures accrue meaning over time and in context." It was plain to him, he said, that his normal way of working would not cut it.

"In rehearsal with my company," he said, "we can spend two hours on 30 seconds of movement. Here yon have musicians, actors learning their stuff--everything is gonna stop while Bill figures out how these three people will manage the next five seconds? That's too expensive."

If Mayer thought one of his dance ideas wasn't working, Jones let it go. The mental adjustment went like this: "Here is a chance to work with a text and music that has been lovingly and vigorously worked over six or seven years. Do you want to be a part of it? If so, this is what it is asking of you." Ultimately, he said, "It's about collaboration. There are many who might say, 'I know what I like, and I know what I do, and I'm not really interested in exploring anybody else's terrain.' But I'm not there right now."

When we spoke, the collaboration was about to begin anew, because the problems that had been solved for the off-Broadway Atlantic Theater production were now moot. The show would have to be restaged in the larger space of Studio 54, with even more producers sitting in the back with opinions. "It's humbling," said Jones. "And that's good--we should always be more humble." And for now, he said, theater is "an interesting room to walk into"--even if he isn't going to stay.

Sylviane Gold has written on theater for Newsday and The New York Times.