Fagan's Flight - the accomplishments of choreographer Garth Fagan - Brief Article

American Visions, April, 2000 by Sharon Fitzgerald

Garth Fagan's dancers land upon the stage of the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., and proceed to mesmerize. Outside the theater, snow-covered sidewalks and icy winds require that every Step and breath be rendered cautiously, but inside, the pre-concert rehearsal is defined by the artists illuminate precision and scorching sense of abandon.

The company's fearless leader and muse, 59-year-old Garth Fagan, has yet to appear. Still, each performer seems well prepared to meet the choreographer's omniscient gaze. There is no shoot-the-breeze warm-up session, nor is there music. Instead there are twirls, jetes, hops, arabesques--all accompanied by the melodic rhythms of uncovered feet.

In the dancers' possession, the McCarter stage becomes a new universe, infinite, without boundaries. One woman, in black, ankle-length tights and a gray sweatshirt, orbits the area in a steady jog. She disappears periodically, and it is futile to anticipate when and where she will appear next: She might exit at the foreground of stage left and then re-enter--a split, Faganesque moment later--from the back corner of stage right. After several equatorial laps, she slices the floor diagonally, interrupting her incision at center stage with one expert skip.

Meanwhile, in neighboring spheres, other planets seek alignment. One male dancer wearing a black wool hat, black sweat pants, and a bright orange Nike sweat jacket tests and re-tests a leap that requires that he raise and turn his right leg at an angle that only an abstractionist could envision.

Another man, in red sweats and a gray shirt, secure in his axis, experiments with several stages of an arabesque. Satisfied at last, he launches into a breathtaking array of spins, swirling off the stage like a gentle tornado.

The stage director and crew are testing the lights, so there is no illumination in the house. But though Garth Fagan's arrival cannot be observed, his presence is felt instantaneously. A tidal wave of purpose, wry wit and charisma, he enters a space perceptively and leaves powerful, imaginative, astonishing things in his wake.

One is well advised not to blink when watching any of the works that Fagan has created. Whether it's his Tony-award winning choreography for the Broadway musical The Lion King or his collaboration with musician Wynton Marsalis and sculptor Martin Puryear on the full-length composition Griot New York, Fagan is never predictable, relentlessly original. While critics around the world comb their thesauruses for superlatives, he remains focused on inventing movements that explore the essence of humanity and that explode the oft-familiar vocabulary of dance.

When asked to define a word frequently associated with his achievements, Fagan does something that seems uncharacteristic: He stalls for time. "Transcendence? Oh, dear, I need some coffee," he says. "Well, it's not the real meaning, but I like to think of it in a Duke Ellington kind of way: beyond category. It's moving from one point to the next, one place to the next."

It has been nearly 30 years since the Jamaican-born Fagan graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit and accepted what he expected would be a temporary position at the Brockport campus of the State University of New York, just outside Rochester. His devotion to dance--ignited during his formative years in Kingston and augmented by his parallel lives as both dancer and student in Detroit--was about to take full flight.

Fagan was entering academia to satisfy the strict expectations of his Oxford-educated father, who was Jamaica's chief education officer. However, ever since his teenage years--when a gymnastics class had lured his attention away from soccer-he felt driven to dance. While still in high school, he studied and performed with the Jamaica National Dance Company, led by Ivy Baxter. He also took classes with Pearl Primus and Lavinia Williams. Jamaica's national company toured extensively throughout the Caribbean, including a performance at Fidel Castro's inauguration in Cuba, in 1959.

"Ivy Baxter was very seminal because she was my first dance teacher," says Fagan, "and she was one of the first people in the Caribbean, if not the first, to realize the value of our dance vocabulary. She had studied modern dance in Germany with Sigurd Leeder, so she was one of the first people to integrate the element of Caribbean dance--which is a folk-based dance with lots of African roots--into modern dance.

"She was a stickler for detail. We left rehearsals at 1 and 2 o'clock in the morning because we stayed until we got it right. She also showed me A Dancer's World, by Martha Graham, which was so articulate and so clear. I'd never seen men dance like that before. [Graham's] men were very virile and very male. I also saw Mary Hinkson, my first overseas-accomplished dancer who happened to be black. She is my mentor and patroness and saint and goddess right now. She was a Martha Graham star. She was so beautiful and sublime; she is still beautiful and sublime."