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Twyla Tharp makes a piece for the Spring season of the City Center Joffrey Ballet, and the dance world is astonished. The idea of one of the most important and obstreperously radical young dancer-choreographers hooking up with a ballet company is unusual, but then, both Tharp and the Joffrey like to be first at things.

If you ask Tharp why she decided on this venture, you get a lot of answers, all interesting and none -not even: "Didn't you know I've always wanted to write a classical baller? " -implausible. For one thing, Tharp wants to work with a lot of bodies, claiming, for instance, that to make three-part counterpoint clear she has to double or triple each part; otherwise the audience will think one part is being improvised.

Tharp, who as a child studied music energetically, in addition to downing large mother-organized doses of ballettoetapacrobaticbaton, forms her choreographic structures meticulously. She does occasionally give dancers leeway with the shape, timing, or spatial dimensions of her movement, but they always know where they're heading.

If the dances look improvised at times, it's because the movement -which is what Tharp's dances are all about- looks so complex, so spontaneous that you can hardly believe that someone taught it to someone else. Her phrases are composed of many small, rapid, fluent motions. At any given moment, a dancer may be sustaining one kind of rhythm and dynamic in the feet, another in the head, another in the torso or arms. And nothing is end-stopped; there are no poses for the spectator's eye to rest on. Sometimes you feel as if the dancing were a palpable thing, like a garment that the dancers are twisting, sliding into or shrugging delicately out of.

The changes in speed, energy, direction can be dazzling, but for all the loose-jointedness and slammed-into passages, the dancing has a kind of elegant ambiguity and restraint. Part of this may be due to the company's performing style. Tharp herself, Sara Rudner, Rose Marie Wright, Kenneth Rinker, Isabel Garcia-Lorca, Nina Wiener -all handle their dancing with superb ease and skill, but they don't impose attitudes on it. Instead, they allow what they're doing to absorb, amuse, exasperate them.

They have a lot of concentrating to do. Sometimes, the dancers are all doing something different; the next instant they're in unison; then they slide apart into canon. Material from one dancer's solo may reappear embedded in a later section, subtly altered. Space is used unconventionally, dangerously. Neat formations tend to splatter off, clump up, dive through other formations. Dancers often look as if they're trying to invade each others' territories, even trip each other up.

Audiences of many kinds love the Tharp dancers these days. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the latest works, "Eight jelly Rolls", "The Bix Pieces," "The Raggedy Dances", have used pop (or once-pop) music and hinted superbly at pop dance styles. Perhaps it's the engaging combination of offhand performing and terrific dancing. Perhaps Twyla Tharp, still in her early thirties, is getting better and better at what she wants to do.

But still, right from the start, when she left Paul Taylor's company in 1965 and began to work on her own, she's always made interesting dances, and she's always found audiences that liked them, although she didn't make it easy for her public in the early days. Some of her pieces were highly conceptual. In the maddeningly brilliant "Re-Moves" (1966), three dancers made a journey of slow, flat, precise dancing around a huge square wall placed in the middle of the Judson Church. The audience sat on three sides, which meant that no one could see the performers all the time and, consequently, few saw the same dance. You spent a lot of time waiting for the dancers to reappear.

Tharp liked slowness and stillness then, as I remember -bold poses, deadpan stares and big, deliberate movement. Some of the material was very simple, as if she needed to be sure you could recognize it if you saw it again. The dancers, all women, performed with an almost beligerent objectivity, giving the impression that they wanted to come by admirers the hard way, without resorting to seductive -or even friendly- demeanor, although they always looked very glamorous in the chic, spare costumes designed by Twyla's then-husband, artist Robert Huot.

There have been many subtle changes in Tharp's style, in the look of her dances. Around 1968, you could notice a lot of big leg movements flung into the air and allowed to trail casually away. For a while, she augmented her company with hordes of student-dancers; the works looked healthy and athletic -no special costumes or lighting. And for a while, music was out, although Tharp says, “We always worked with music; we just didn't let the audience hear it."

Although Tharp's dances are mostly about dancing they are also intermittently about how dances get made. For example, in New York, "Excess, Idle, Surplus" (1968) was accompanied by a tape of the dancers' voices arguing about how to reconstruct the original choreography, while the onstage dancers often fumbled or stopped dead in perplexity. The last section of the 1972 "The Bix Pieces" was in part a witty and moving lecture demonstration of how the dance was made. In "Group Activities" (1969), 10 women danced over a grid of adhesive tape, occasionally asking a timekeeper for the count -as if they wanted to make the complicated space-time ratios of the dance highly visible. Tharp at her brainiest.

Some of the dances, like "Re-Moves", have a lot to do with how people perceive dance. One 1969 work, premiered at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, strewed dancing through much of the building -cueing performers and aiding spectators by means of closed circuit TV. The New York performance of the beautiful "Medley" (1969) occurred in Central Park near dusk; toward the end, the vision of those watching had to accommodate to distance and darkness as 50 or so dancers spread over what seemed like miles of grass into the approaching night.

It's difficult to keep up with Twyla Tharp. Her dances are often premiered in out of the way places or such unusual spaces that they can't be repeated. Even her works for prescenium stage don't stay in repertory for long. It's not that she disapproves of her past -she wouldn't mind televising works, or teaching them to a second company, or putting on a retrospective, if time and money permitted- it's just that she and her company don't like performing a dance over and over. They reach a peak, maybe after 10 performances, and then they want to move on to something new. That's what excites them, and if the studio is big and clean and the dancers are getting paid, so much the better. A few weeks ago, Tharp was happy as a clam because she'd been able to work on the new ballet, "Deuce Coupe," from 9 A.M. to 9 P.M.

It's possible that Tharp wanted to produce this particular dance with the Joffrey company because of the challenge of working with (or against) the expectations of an unfamiliar audience which may be baffled, delighted, or infuriated by a brand of virtuosity different from the pose-oriented beauty of most ballets. In setting her work to what amounts to a retrospective of Beach Boy hits, she has created another challenge for herself: after all, the Joffrey is the home of "Astarte", the first so-called rock ballet.

Tharp herself and her own company of five will perform along with a group of Joffrey dancers in "Deuce Coupe" this season. Yes, Tharp is putting some of the Joffrey dancers on pointe. And yes, it's bound to be surprising. In the wonderfully written speech that accompanied the last part of "The Bix Pieces", Tharp asked, "Can anything be new, original, private?" Maybe not. But she has ways of putting things together that makes them look like nothing you've seen before, even if you've seen them a million times.