Postmodern dance's season on Broadway

Dance Magazine, Dec, 1997 by Valerie Gladstone

THE CURRENT BROADWAY SEASON HAS A RECORD NUMBER OF SHOWS CHOREOGRAPHED BY CONTEMPORARY MASTERS.

Classical and modern choreographers have long found work on the Broadway stage, beginning with Balanchine in the thirties and continuing with Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, Helen Tamiris, Hanya Holm, and Lar Lubovitch, to name a few. What distinguishes the current season is the contemporary dance choreographers' virtual monopoly so far of the new musicals and revivals. Last year Marlies Yearby earned a Tony nomination for the hit Rent and Lubovitch won praise for The King and I. This season Doug Varone is choreographing Triumph of Love, Garth Fagan The Lion King, Mark Morris The Capeman [see Dancetheater, November, page 901, and Graciela Daniele Ragtime. All face the same problems when they move out onto the bigger stage of musical theater--loss of control, short periods for developing ideas, and pressure from backers to reach the biggest possible audience.

When the late composer Jonathan Larson approached Yearby in 1993 to choreograph Rent, an updated version of Puccini's opera La Boheme set on the Lower East Side, she saw it as great opportunity to make all the movement integral to the story line. Since Larson had hired her because the aesthetic of her company, Movin' Spirits Dance Theater, Yearby looked forward to total freedom. She says, "Over the years I have developed a gesture-based form of dance-theater that incorporates dance, spoken words, and music. Jonathan said he was taken by the emotional presence of my company's work and that he wanted to give me that kind of realistic edge to the characters in Rent."

First she closely studied her cast. "Before I gave them something to do," she explains, "I watched them and talked to them to find out who they were." This made them comfortable with the movement and helped the show flow. Even when the actors simply walk across the stage, it's rhythmic. No one is ever not dancing." In time, however, many numbers in Rent became more "showy and presentational" when producers started experiencing the usual dread. As Yearby puts it, "Fear developed that the audience wasn't getting the subtleties."

Doug Varone brings some musical theater experience to bear in stressing the subtleties in Triumph of Love. The romantic comedy, based on a play by Pierre Marivaux written in 1732, opened in October. Besides staging shows in his parents' Long Island basement as a child, Varone created dances for the 1994 off-Broadway production, American Dreaming. He established his own company in 1987. Since he's working with a totally nondancing cast this time, which includes Susan Egan and Betty Buckley, the play doesn't have big production numbers. Still, he had to get used to the difference between even simple choreography and staging. He says, "You just don't have the independence you have with your own company, where you share an ideal and it's all about process." Like his colleagues, Varone wants "to get away from the stop-go-stop-go rhythm traditional on Broadway. It interrupts a scene's whole momentum." Nonetheless, he says, "I relish doing a big dancing show."

A big dancing show is exactly what Garth Fagan has on his hands with Disney's The Lion King, based on the film, with music by Elton John and lyrics by Tim Rice. It had its world premiere in Minneapolis in July and opened on Broadway in November. The cast of forty-six, directed by Julie Taymor, includes John Vickery, Samuel E. Wright, Max Casella, and twelve professional dancers. "For the first time, I had to choreograph for a wide range of viewers. People who come strictly for entertainment," says Fagan, gratified by the first favorable reviews. "There's no time to ruminate on any point."

This pressure can't be easy on Fagan; he won his reputation making thoughtful pieces, such as the beautiful Griot New York, performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1991 by his Garth Fagan Dance. Fagan had his work cut out for him with The Lion King, in part because many members of the cast wear puppet masks and lavish costumes. "The dancers are used to the total freedom of unitards," he says. "Now suddenly they're draped head to toe in yards of fabric." Not only that, they must perform almost every day--and sing. Given these circumstances, he explains, "You can't give them the same kind of choreography you would for a modem dance concert that might run a week."

One of the most difficult assignments was to make the half-animal, half-human characters believable. In a three-and-a-half-minute dance for a lioness, Fagan had to get across her femininity and pride as a hunter. On trips to Africa with his company, he witnessed tribal dances and visited animal preserves. He says, "I could recall the movements I saw and incorporate them into my choreography."

Tad Simons of Variety put his stamp of approval on the show: "Literally hundreds of exquisite details are sprinkled like diamonds throughout the production. And, of course, there are the brilliantly conceived big production numbers: the great gathering of bloodthirsty hyenas dancing in the elephant boneyard, making anarchic, metalhead mayhem; the love scene between Simba and Nala, in which pairs of love sprites float through the air over a designer jungle of green and fuchsia; and, of course, the thunderous wilde-beest stampede, which rolls toward the audience in a tidal wave of increasingly enormous masks."