Step, Kick, Kick, Leap, Kick, Touch…Again!

Step, kick, kick, leap, kick, touch…Right!
That connects with…
Turn, turn, out, in, jump, step….

Sound familiar? These musical theater lyrics from A Chorus Line are the mantra for choreographers. Choreographers are known for teaching steps, demonstrating them, calling them out, and intermingling them with numbers in a rhythmic fashion. (Have you ever heard a choreographer call out something like 1, kick, 3, 4, ball-change, reach, 7, dig?) After calling it out a few HUNDRED times, or so it seems, the choreographer calls for the music and then suddenly magic happens: music and steps link, and a dance emerges.

I love the thrill of that moment. As a choreographer, I dream up steps to a score and often, these patterns of movement will stay unrealized for a long time, until finally the day comes for that rehearsal when they come to life. It’s really hard to explain how that feels. It’s like a mix of going to confession, with finally taking a deep breath after holding your breath, with finally eating your favorite dessert after having been ‘eye-ing’ it all evening. There’s a pleasure and relief in finally getting it out and onto the dancer’s body.

Like when I direct, when I choreograph, I start with the music and the score. I look at it, hear it in my head, and look for inspiration. For a musical, dance is one more way of expressing the emotions of the story, and great dance integrates seamlessly with acting and singing. I like to think of it as the final polish on the story. In a musical, when words fail the actor, the actor sings. When the singing fails the actor, the actor dances.

Sometimes the score makes it clear where a dance break needs to take place. In other places, there is a hint of dance that needs to effortlessly arise out of the blocking of the scene. And then there is the ‘Mt. Everest’ of musical theater dance, the dream ballets – those extended musical sequences with pages and pages of music – that challenge choreographers to enrich a musical by creating a dance that tells a story without words within the story. Those are hard to make, but they can be the most satisfying to both create and watch take shape. And cutting dance from a musical – like cutting scenes or songs – is sad. (This usually occurs when someone doesn’t want to do the job at hand, but let’s not go there.) Why not give the musical its full voice?

Like all the arts – all of which demands technical skill to create something of depth – dance in particular requires training in order to master how the human body moves to create emotion. I don’t know many people that can just go and choreograph without lots of dance training. Different styles of dance communicate different things and whether it be an adage or allegro, the choreographer must understand what is going on with the movement against the music. Are you going to create a fast series of steps against a slow melody line to communicate stress? Are you going too move slowly to fast music to show that that a character is independent and doesn’t care? What kind of dance do you use – do you choose soft-shoe, Pointe, tap, jazz or rap to illustrate your point? Choices, choices, choices.

Again, having a good dance vocabulary and understanding how the human body moves to express emotion is key, and the first thing is to start with the music. The music clues you and cues you what to do.

Because music and dance are basically mathematical, the first step in choreographing is a rather dry one. You count. The song begins with counts and ends with counts. There are a limited number of counts to a song, and movement needs to fit to these counts. How much time a movement takes needs to be calibrated and it must fit the counts. Choreographers count and demand that their dancers count, and if you do not count it like the choreographer, you will be corrected. As a choreographer teaching a dance, you count my counts. It’s my way or the highway. I have the counts – you have to learn them. I don’t need interpretation – I need you to dance my counts. But if you do count it right and practice it over and over and over again, it may perhaps transcend to something that’s art and dance.

But first you count.

It’s funny. Directors like being original with something – “I want to interpret and stage this like no one has done it before” – whereas choreographers often like staging something that has come before – “That dance is great – I want to do that!” In dance, there is a real respect for the past and recreating it. Agnes de Mille’s dream ballet for Oklahoma! has stood the test of time for 60+ years – why not recreate it? Petipa/Ivanov’s pas de cygnettes from Swan Lake, Jerome Robbins’ Dance at Gym from West Side Story, Fosse’s Hot Honey Rag from Chicago, Bennett’s Finale from A Chorus Line are prime examples – who does not want a crack at dancing those dances? And choreographers certainly want a crack at recreating them in the style of these geniuses.

Follies has one such dance that I want to recreate: Michael Bennett’s “Who’s that Woman?” – the mirror number. In the middle of the party, former showgirl Stella Deems recreates a tap number without tap shoes with her fellow aging showgirls. While they try and remember and then recreate the number that they danced more than 30 years ago, they experience the joy of what it was to be a follies girl. That emotion summons the ghosts of their younger selves who simultaneously dance and mirror their older selves in this dance. Hailed at the time and since as one of the most perfect pieces of musical theater choreography, this dance BEGS to be recreated. I’m going to do my best to honor Mr. Bennett’s work when making this number. I can’t wait.

The rest of the choreography is not for a choreographer who is faint of heart. It demands that the choreographer dig deep in his arsenal of dance steps for it needs both depth and breadth of dance movement. This piece showcases such a variety of dance styles: an opening dream jazz-ballet adage prologue for the ghosts, vaudeville masque-like pageantry, comic shtick, a leading man’s dance solo about emotional frustration, a leading lady with back up boys, a leading man with leggy showgirls with Sally Rand fans, ballroom partnering, and finally, just good old classic musical theater staging. It’s got everything but the kitchen sink.

The point of all this choreography is to ultimately bring memory back to life and that memory is Vaudeville. It needs to live again this night as this party remembers the glory days of this theater and its past. Vaudeville is the vehicle for the four leads to live out their follies artistically: Buddy gets the clown number, Sally gets the torch song, Phyllis gets the boys to back her up, and Ben gets the kick line of showgirls. As the director has told me, only if these numbers are rendered as classic Vaudeville, will we be able to see clearly the harsh judgment of the leads’ follies. I’ll have to take the director’s word on that. I will just create some great dance numbers, don’t you think?

The director is back for the next blog. I’m not sure what he will write about, but he’s sure to wrap things up soon since auditions will be here in a few weeks.

For additional information about the production itself, go to The Arlington Players website: www.thearlingtonplayers.org.

If you have questions for the director, feel free to respond to the blog or email him at folliesdirector@gmail.com. Responses to the blog may be posted publicly; email correspondence will be private.