O.C. DANCE : Tapping a Small Group’s Talent : Actor/dancer Gregory Hines is rehearsing the five women members of Rhapsody in Taps for the premier of his new work.

With a flurry of tap steps, six women in T-shirts and leotards skip, leap and skim across a dance studio floor.

“What are you doing?” laughed dancer/actor Gregory Hines. “It should be like this.”

Hines broke into a series of steps that set off a rainbow of percussive hues and colors.

Hines is rehearsing members of Rhapsody in Taps for his new work, to be given first performances Friday and Saturday at the Japan America Theatre.

Renowned for his innovative and assaultive tapping, Hines said he did not have to change his style in working with Linda Sohl-Donnell (director of the company) and dancers Monie Adamson, Pauline Hagino, Marci Jurls, Karol Lee and Beverley Scott.

“They wanted something powerful and a-rhythmical, so that’s what we did,” he said after rehearsal in the Venice studio.

“As we started to dance together, (the dance) started to reveal itself. I certainly felt that I didn’t want to censor myself in any way, and I didn’t need to because their ability is very high. They have a real sense of themselves and they would suggest steps. It’s as much their piece as it is mine.”

How did this collaboration come about between one of the great tappers and a small local company of women?

Hines laughed: “Linda Sohl-Donnell hounded me. She threatened my life. So ultimately I acquiesced.”

He added, more seriously: “I said yes to them before I had actually seen the company perform because I had worked with Linda in (the movie) ‘Tap,’ and I had seen her around at different seminars and tap gatherings. So I just assumed that anything she was involved with, the dancers would definitely have to be on her level or higher.

“When I saw them dance (last spring) at Orange Coast College, the place was packed. They were just tremendous. I was just so happy. And then I got nervous. I thought, ‘I hope I can come up with something interesting for these dancers because they have a serious repertoire. I mean, they’re not playing around.’ a”

Sohl-Donnell had won an $8,000 matching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to have Hines choreograph a work for the 9-year-old company. (The working title for the six-minute, four-segment piece is “Toeing the 3rd and Fifth.”)

“This was interesting to me, right from the beginning,” Sohl-Donnell said, “how he was going to adapt from how he dances as a soloist to creating something for a group, for one thing, and for a group of five women, for another.

“Gregory’s style of dance is very emphatic, and he did achieve a sense of that trademark power style, but it was also clear from the beginning that he wanted to make a dance (that stressed) femininity and sensuality. . . .

“So when he began the blues section in the piece, he was willing to do something that wasn’t going for that obvious power, power, power. It’s subtle, release, soft, not pushing or driving in the beginning at all.”

In fact, the only point of contention, according to Hines, is the costuming.

“I want them to dress more provocatively,” Hines said. “One of the areas that tap-dancing has not progressed is in the way tap-dancers dress. We’re always shrouded. . . .

“Women tap-dancers who have been struggling to gain credibility as tap-dance artists (are not inclined) to come out and be provocative. But I think we may have gone too far the other way.

“One of the reasons that I’ve enjoyed working with these dancers,” Hines said, “is that I’ve been able to let myself go in front of them. I feel like it forces me to push myself in an area in which I rarely push myself, which is trying to come up with things and putting them in place.

“If I come up with a really good step when I’m dancing live, I try to retain it and remember it and do it again sometime, and somehow try to work it in again if it’s a good step. But I could also forget it.

“I like to get into what the late, great (tapper) Steve Condos used to say to me, he liked to get into what he called ‘the zone.’ And when he got in that zone, he was another man. He was very confident, and he would let himself go, and he was confident that the stuff he would come up with would be good.”

(Condos, 71, died Sept. 16 after a performance at the Festival of Dance in Lyon, France.)

Hines considers the piece more of a work-in-progress than a finished product.

“I want them to own it and to feel that they can make changes in it based upon how they feel, after having done it,” he said. “I think of this choreography as a gift to them. You know, somebody gives you a gift, you can do what you want with it . . . because in many ways that is also continuing to be spontaneous with the piece.

“All the choreographers I worked with were open (to this). They would come up with great steps, and then if they saw I was taking a step and maybe opening it up a little or changing it, they thought, ‘Great, good, do that.’ ”

Hines, who starts work on a new film next month, is encouraged about the resurgence of tap-dancing and believes that it is in companies--more than in the solo form--that tap is “now making its biggest strides.”

“The thing is,” he added, “I would just like to see dancers being able to make a living at their dancing. And this is not unique to tap-dancing alone. All the dance is struggling.

“For a time, (tap-dancers) were just nonexistent, and we had to struggle to come back into the public’s consciousness; now, to try to make a living in addition to that, that’s a tough thing.”