She has just won two Tony Awards for the Broadway hit, Movin’ Out, set to music by Billy Joel – and she’s looking forward to performing at Sadler’s Wells with her newly reformed troupe, Twyla Tharp Dance. But it’s about more than proving herself to British critics: “I like to reconnect with London I’m a great traditionalist. That’s why it’s important to me.”In keeping with tradition, the programme will include The Fugue, a 1970 work that has no music, but instead uses the sounds of the dancers’ feet to create a rhythm “There’s a lot of history in that piece,” says Tharp. “It feels good to be peforming a major early work again – along with pieces that are new to London.”First among the latter is Surfer at the River Styx, loosely based on Euripedes’ The Bacchae and put together in collaboration with the percussionist and composer Donald Knaack “I call it a collaboration by FedEx,” says Tharp.

The two were working in separate locations, with Knaack adjusting his soundtrack of recycled pots and pans as the choreography altered. Tharp admits that working like this is “chancy”, but she and Knaack seem to mesh well together – another piece in the Sadler’s Wells repertoire is Known by Heart Duet, a series of excerpts from earlier work that has been set to Knaack’s Junk Music.Westerly Round, meanwhile, shows off Tharp’s sense of fun. Choreographed as an abstract square dance, it is a cowboy romance charged with flirtatious energy, and melds elegant classical ballet with the spirit of American folk dance.Tharp is now on her fourth generation of dancers. (It’s a prestigious apprenticeship – the last group, for example, is now on Broadway.) She says of the latest batch – Emily Coates, Lynda Sing, Charlie Hodges, Dario Vaccaro, Matthew Dibble and Jason McDole – that “I offer a harbour to them; I can only wait and see if a seedling takes bud, and grows.”Tharp certainly sets a good example: she’s in the gym at sunrise, and practises yoga regularly. She believes in dance as a spiritual pursuit, and expects only the very best from herself and her troupe.But she doesn’t believe that her approach – or her work – should necessarily be characterised as “avant-garde”: “It’s the process – fresh, new, spontaneous – this is valid to me,” she says.And where will Tharp be during the show? “I’m hoping it will be packed out, and there won’t be any space for me.” By Twyla Tharp Dance, Sadler’s Wells, Rosebery Avenue, London EC1 (020-7863 8000; ) tomorrow to Sat. At the Barbican currently, you can see The Elephant Vanishes, a brilliant multi-media show about the surreal stresses of living in the hyper-modernity of contemporary Japan. By a neat coincidence, the Donmar Warehouse now unveils a revival of Pacific Overtures, the 1976 Stephen Sondheim musical that dramatises the ironic origins of Japan’s hi-tech capitalist frenzy.

In 1853, American gunboats, under the command of Commodore Perry, forced an end to Japan’s 250 years of inward-looking isolation. Unlike Hal Prince’s lavish Broadway premiere (which lost its entire investment) or the overblown full operatic treatment it received at ENO, this version of Pacific Overtures is characterised by its expressive minimalism. The show is performed on a bare rectangular wooden stage, with the audience seated on all four sides. The multi-ethnic cast play multiple roles, with identifying details – the belt of a kimono; a sprig of blossom – added to near-identical outfits of basic black. This tactic throws great weight on the actors’ gestures which are stylised to a sometimes deliberately parodic degree.The production’s stripped-back clarity heightens one’s sense of just how peculiar and complicated a piece this is. Sondheim is not offering a straightforward account of the way Japan was opened up to foreign influence. Instead, he gives us a Western composer’s idea of how it might be dramatised from the Japanese point of view.