SDC Journal Fall 2023

FALL 2023

CHOREOGRAPHERS + CHOREOGRAPHY

A SPECIAL ISSUE GUEST CURATED BY JOSHUA BERGASSE

JERRY MITCHELL + HARVEY FIERSTEIN IN SERVICE OF

THE STORY

RICH + TONE

TALAUEGA

AN SDC JOURNAL ROUNDTABLE

ANNIE-B PARSON + SAM PINKLETON

CHOREOGRAPHERS ON COLLABORATION

DIRECTORS ON CHOREOGRAPHERS

OFFICERS

Evan Yionoulis PRESIDENT

Michael

John Garcés

EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

Ruben Santiago-Hudson FIRST VICE PRESIDENT

Dan Knechtges TREASURER

Melia Bensussen SECRETARY

Joseph Haj

SECOND VICE PRESIDENT

Casey Stangl

THIRD VICE PRESIDENT

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Laura Penn

HONORARY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Karen Azenberg

Pamela Berlin

Julianne Boyd

Graciela Daniele

Pam MacKinnon

Emily Mann

Marshall W. Mason

Ted Pappas

Susan H. Schulman

Oz Scott

Dan Sullivan

Victoria Traube

SDC EXECUTIVE BOARD

MEMBERS OF BOARD

Saheem Ali

Christopher Ashley

Joshua Bergasse

Jo Bonney

Donald Byrd

Rachel Chavkin

Desdemona Chiang

Valerie Curtis-Newton

Liz Diamond

Lydia Fort

Leah C. Gardiner

Christopher Gattelli

JoAnn M. Hunter

Anne Kauffman

Kathleen Marshall

Michael Mayer

Robert O’Hara

Annie-B Parson

Lisa Portes

Lonny Price

John Rando

Bartlett Sher

Susan Stroman

Seema Sueko

Maria Torres

Tamilla Woodard

Annie Yee

SDC JOURNAL

EDITOR

Stephanie Coen

MANAGING EDITOR

Kate Chisholm

GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Adam Hitt

EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Melia Bensussen

Joshua Bergasse

Terry Berliner

Noah Brody

Liz Diamond

Justin Emeka

Sheldon Epps

Lydia Fort

Annie-B Parson

Ann M. Shanahan

Seema Sueko

Annie Yee

SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED

SECTION EDITORIAL BOARD

SDCJ-PRS CO-EDITORS

Emily A. Rollie

Ann M. Shanahan

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Kathleen M. McGeever

SDCJ-PRS ASSOCIATE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Ruth Pe Palileo

SDCJ-PRS SENIOR ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Anne Bogart

Joan Herrington

James Peck

SDCJ-PRS PEER REVIEWERS

Donald Byrd

David Callaghan

Jonathan Cole

Thomas Costello

Kathryn Ervin

Liza Gennaro

Baron Kelly

Travis Malone

Sam O’Connell

Scot Reese

Stephen A. Schrum

FALL 2023 CONTRIBUTORS

Dani Barlow

Joshua Bergasse

Ayodele Casel

Carmen de Lavallade

Michelle Dorrance

Daniel Ezralow

Harvey Fierstein

Robb Hunter

Denis Jones

Kitty McNamee

Danny Mefford

Jerry Mitchell

Darrell Grand Moultrie

Mayte Natalio

David Neumann

Adesola Osakalumi

Annie-B Parson

Jennifer Paulson-Lee

Sam Pinkleton

Steve Rankin

Misha Shields

Katie Spelman

Rich Talauega

Tone Talauega

Julie Taymor

Anthony Van Laast

Talvin Wilks

FALL 2023

SDCJ-PRS CONTRIBUTORS

Thomas B. Costello

SUNY DUTCHESS

Heidi Winters Vogel

WABASH COLLEGE

COVER Jerry Mitchell PHOTO Amanda Crommett

the Musical, directed + choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon; Michael Jackson movement by Rich + Tone Talauega PHOTO Matthew Murphy FALL 2023

PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

52 Book Reviews: Two Directors Share Stories

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEWS

53 Jack in the Box: Or, How to Goddamn Direct

BY JACK O’BRIEN

REVIEW BY HEIDI WINTERS VOGEL

54 Staging Story: Five Fundamentals for the Beginning Stage Director

BY ROBERT MOSS + WENDY DANN

BY THOMAS B. COSTELLO

SDC FOUNDATION

55 Beyond Narrative ANNIE-B PARSON

IN CONVERSATION WITH SAM PINKLETON

IN MEMORIAM

62 November 1, 2022–July 31, 2023

SDC LEGACY

63 Susan Kikuchi 1948 – 2022

EDITED + INTRODUCED BY KATHLEEN M. McGEEVER + RUTH PE PALILEO

REVIEW

Carmen de Lavallade dancing for Josephine Baker PHOTO c/o Leo Holder

FROM THE PRESIDENT

In these post-Covid shutdown days, the American theatre is facing daunting challenges. Many of our major regional companies are scaling back or suspending production, affecting the number of opportunities available for directors and choreographers. At the same time, there is a vibrancy happening on stages throughout the country, and it is this abundance of creativity that is documented and celebrated on each page of this SDC Journal dedicated to choreographers and choreography.

I’ve always admired and been inspired by choreographers and have to confess that, for periods of my life, I wanted to be one. Like Laura, as she describes in her letter about her own formative experiences (p. 6), I danced throughout grade school. By high school I was taking ballet, jazz, tap, and something called “character dance” five days a week. (Modern wasn’t really a thing at the studio where I studied.) I became a member of North Carolina Repertory Ballet Company in Raleigh where I grew up. We did seasonal and annual performances and also toured the area doing “dance demonstrations” in schools and shopping malls.

I broke into directing in college by choreographing other directors’ musicals, and then I directed and choreographed my own, starting with Alfred Uhry and Robert Waldman’s The Robber Bridegroom, and eventually, I moved into directing plays. Now I have the privilege of working with a variety of choreographers who bring their expertise and kinesthetic vision to our collaborations. There’s a special alchemy in the director/ choreographer collaboration, whereby pre-rehearsal discussions of story and intent become—through the choreographer’s art—a spectacular dance number fully integrated into the fabric of a production; or a rehearsal sketch develops into a safe and repeatable combat or intimacy sequence as director and choreographer work in tandem on the floor.

As we are in the rehearsal hall, directors and choreographers have been collaborators in our Union from the beginning, working side by side for fair compensation and the protection of property rights. As quoted in Ben Pesner’s “Agnes de Mille: A Pioneer On Stage + Off,” reprinted in last fall’s commemorative 10th anniversary issue of the Journal, de Mille, iconic choreographer of Oklahoma! and a founder of our Union, when addressing Congress on the question of copyright for choreography, stated that

Choreography is neither drama nor storytelling. It is a separate art. It is an arrangement in time-space, using human bodies as its unit of design. It may or may not be dramatic or tell a story.

The definition of choreography and how it is practiced may shift from choreographer to choreographer or project to project as articles in this issue reveal. We have seen our Union umbrella

expand over the years to include choreographers of dance, movement, and stage combat. Wherever there are humans moving in timespace on a stage in front of a live audience, there is choreography, and SDC unites, empowers, and protects the creators of that movement.

These pages, beautifully guest curated by Joshua Bergasse, contain insights from more than 20 choreographers as they discuss their own understanding of what choreography is and can be, their personal artistic paths and processes, and their approaches to story and space, preparation and practice, composition and collaboration. Highlights include a fascinating conversation with the legendary Carmen de Lavallade; Rich and Tone Talauega on inspiration, music, and cognitive listening; a roundtable with choreographers who work in both the musical theatre and dance company/concert worlds; and extended, wide-ranging conversations between Jerry Mitchell and Harvey Fierstein and between Annie-B Parson and Sam Pinkleton.

The contribution of choreographers in our theatremaking and in our Union is profound and invaluable. They bring intuition and imagination along with considerable technical skill to their work in a variety of theatrical genres, collaborating with directors, with designers and composers/arrangers, with dancers and actors, with their Associates and each other, to create indelible experiences in the theatre and advance our art form. It is a pleasure to celebrate them with their own words in this issue of the Journal.

In Solidarity,

Evan Yionoulis Executive Board President

FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

When I came to SDC some 15 years ago, I knew very little about choreography. I had done what many do. I took childhood dance classes with recitals in the neighborhood park on one of those “stages” next to the BBQs, perfected the Hustle thanks to Van McCoy & the Soul City Symphony, and performed in the requisite high school musical. I knew West Side Story, Chicago. Dance was not unfamiliar to me—at least that’s what I thought. I think I sensed that dance was a portal into another world, but I was naïve about how it was manifest. Almost immediately upon arriving at SDC in 2008, I realized that I, like too many in our industry, had no real idea about the craft of choreography, or the artists who created the work, or how they did just that.

Thus began my education.

My first teacher was Donald Saddler. I seized the opportunity at a lunch set up to discuss the event at which he would be the recipient of the SDCF “Mr. Abbott” Award. It was an all-too-brief conversation in which he walked me through his process and the unique challenges and opportunities of choreographing work on Broadway with leading directors for leading actors. We also talked about his lifelong relationship with SDC Member and fellow dancer Marge Champion. (They met each week well into their 90s to dance together.) I asked him if there was anyone who inspired him. Without a beat he said, “Andy Blankenbuehler.” He talked about Andy’s storytelling and vocabulary, his rigor and vision. I listened attentively, not fully understanding much of what he shared. A few years later, we launched SDC Journal, and the centerpiece of the second issue was a conversation with Andy (which was reprinted in the Fall 2022 commemorative anniversary double issue). I heard Donald in my head as Andy talked about how he approaches building a vocabulary. I soon began to understand the different ways choreographers make their work— on their own with their own bodies, working with Associates, with dancers, in collaboration with a director.

George C. Wolfe once talked with me about the tragic impact AIDS had on the passing on of knowledge from one generation of choreographers to another and how this made mentorship today even more vital. When I first saw Steven Hoggett’s work, I understood movement as a form of choreography, and the boundaries widened for me. My understanding deepened. Liza Gennaro schooled me on the theatrical family tree going back to Jack Cole. I watched combat sequences on stage, looked beyond the sword or fistfight, and saw choreography.

Today, SDC Membership includes nearly 1,000 choreographers and director-choreographers. Choreographers are at the table, impacting the shape of SDC—just as some 65 years ago Agnes de Mille, through her own tenacity, placed choreographers at the table right next to directors as the Union was formed and named: The Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.

As SDC keeps a keen eye on the horizon, it is clear that choreography is playing an increasingly influential role not just in

the theatre, as we have always considered the bounds of the theatre, but in the larger cultural fabric. More and more choreographers are shifting forms, breaking through cultural barriers, collaborating with one another and artists in other fields. Choreography continues to be on the leading edge of the evolution of the theatre.

And so, my education is not complete. Today I am schooling myself in the work of choreographers who are creating in other live spaces—a journey that began before the pandemic but now seems even more relevant. I recently had the pleasure of spending time with Vincent Paterson, whose career spans many stages around the world, most notably creating work for pop stars— both on stages and in videos. When the stage is different and the relationship to the audience and to other artists is different, does it change what we call “choreography”? It’s the same, and different. I’m still learning.

In this issue of the Journal, we glimpse just a few of the stories that choreographers have to tell. Deeply insightful and wonderfully readable, we are lucky to have their words on the page and their vocabulary on the stage. It’s a joy and a privilege to be part of sharing these stories.

In Solidarity,

Laura Penn Executive Director

PHOTO Hervé Hôte

WELCOME FROM THE GUEST CURATOR

BY JOSHUA BERGASSE

I was thrilled and honored to be asked to curate this issue of SDC Journal. Not only because I think having an issue dedicated to choreographers is so important, but also because I knew it would give me a chance to get to know many of the choreographers in our Membership in a much deeper way, and to discover other Members I wasn’t familiar with. What I didn’t anticipate is how much I’d learn about my own approach to the craft by reading this material and discussing it with the staff at SDC.

For many of us choreographers, written or spoken language isn’t always our preferred method of communication. We rely on movement as our primary language. Personally, I sometimes struggle to find the exact words to express myself clearly or can get nervous when I’m expected to speak at an event. I’m always more confident when I’m moving. So I found it profoundly inspiring to hear the voices of so many

of the choreographers in this issue. Clear, precise expressions of what their art means to them. What their processes are, their techniques, and how they enjoy and respect the collaborative aspects of our work as much as I do.

It seems the question so many of us hear these days is: What is choreography? We all try so hard to define it. Of course, it’s a form of physicality through space, right? But I guess it’s also physicality through emotion—for instance, when defining how a character would dance and even just gesture or stance. And doesn’t it also include scenic transitions, “backstage choreography,” and even dodging tourists in Times Square to get to tech rehearsal on time? There really isn’t a limit on how we can use our choreographic skills. I’ve been asked to choreograph a Steadicam moving through a non-musical scene for a TV series as well as the way a water fountain lights up

and moves to music. In fact, after reading about all the brilliant ideas and creations by my fellow artists in the essays and features as this issue of the Journal came together, I found myself asking a different question: What isn’t choreography?

I think about how many times I’ve heard the word choreography or choreographer mispronounced. It’s truly comical at times, isn’t it? Sometimes people stumble over the pronunciation so badly I have to finish saying it for them as an act of mercy. Or when they ask me what I do and I tell them I’m a choreographer, they may have a blank look on their face as if I wasn’t speaking English or they’ve just heard the word for the very first time. My hope is that the more we talk about what we do, how, where, and why we do it, the more people will understand just how important the art form is, and ultimately, they will appreciate it that much more.

Jerry Mitchell PHOTO Amanda Crommett

start at the beginning

begins the generous conversation between longtime collaborators Jerry Mitchell + Harvey Fierstein for SDC Journal . Rich with insight into the creative process, this far-reaching dialogue encompasses Jerry’s years as performer and professional dancer, his earliest projects, and his storied career as a choreographer and director-choreographer on such joyful musicals as Kinky Boots , for which he received his second Tony Award for Best Choreography.

HARVEY FIERSTEIN | Let’s start at the beginning and work our way up to where you tell people what to do. So you’re this little kid in Paw Paw, Michigan. Your father didn’t say, “Hey, Jerry, after school, you wanna go tap dancing with me?”

JERRY MITCHELL | No, though he did make me come in and watch Lawrence Welk.

HARVEY | Oh. He was a Lawrence Welk. My father was a Judy Garland.

JERRY | Lawrence Welk because he was an accordion player. My father would say, “Oh, get in here and watch Lawrence Welk.” And I would watch Lawrence Welk when the tap dancer—Arthur Duncan, who just passed away—was on.

HARVEY | So they knew that you loved the show business?

JERRY | I was first in a show in the Paw Paw Village Players when I was 10, and I was pretty sure at that point I wanted to continue doing it. They knew this. I actually told my mom, “I’m gonna be in show business. Don’t get in my way.” At 10!

HARVEY | Did dad catch onto it right away? He was a musician.

JERRY | My dad loved music. We had a bar and restaurant, Gene Mitchell’s Friendly Tavern, and he would get up and pull out his accordion and entertain the beer drinkers. I’d watch him literally work them into a frenzy playing Polish polkas. He’s where I got any sense of theatre; he was a performer. He saw that I was into it by the time I was 15; he was at my first dance recital. He came and my mom told me that he cried through the whole thing, watching me tap dance. I did “Singin’ in the Rain” with a yellow slicker, and he was crying the whole time. You knew my dad; he came to Hairspray, he was there for all the shows. He was just so proud of what I did.

HARVEY | Looking back, did you always know it was dancing that you wanted to do?

JERRY | Just musical theatre. What happened was very Billy Elliot. The choreographer of all the community theatre productions, Cindy Meeth, also owned the dance studio in my hometown. She invited me to come, invited me to come, invited me to come—and I kept saying no because I was gay.

HARVEY | You knew that dancing was a gay thing?

JERRY | I perceived dancing was for girls only, because mostly only girls were at this dance studio. But I broke my collarbone on the way home from football practice racing my best friend on a bike. I thought, I’m gonna keep my legs in shape for basketball, and that’s what got me in the dance studio. That was my excuse. Once I was in there, Cindy put the hook in my mouth. She paid me to take lessons and teach on Saturday. I never paid for a dance class for three years. And, basically, I was in that dance studio every day.

HARVEY | Did you get the difference between dance teacher and choreographer at a young age?

JERRY | No, I didn’t get that difference until I got to college. I just thought dances were routines, and the dance teacher made up the routine, and the kids did the routine. That was the kind of dance school I went to. Cindy Meeth was the dance teacher; she was the choreographer. She made up all the routines for the kids who were taking classes, made up all the routines for the shows. I knew there was a position for a choreographer, but I didn’t realize it was something as creative as creating a show. I didn’t know there was a Hermes Pan working with Fred Astaire. I didn’t know that there were other choreographers that did the choreography for those dancers. I just didn’t know that.

I remember thanking Cindy for teaching me how to dance when I graduated from high school. She said, “Honey, I didn’t teach you how to dance. I just brought it out.” I do

feel like dance was in me from the minute I was introduced to it. It just came naturally. I didn’t take a ballet class till I got to college at Webster College.

HARVEY | What did you go to college for?

JERRY | For musical theatre. I was in the conservatory program. You couldn’t perform your freshman year, and I had to perform. So, of course, I joined the dance company. I was in Ballet One, and Gary Hubler, the head of the dance department, saw me and invited me to join the dance company and be in Ballet Three.

HARVEY | Now, obviously as a teenager and all that, you were going to school dances, or were at least exposed to them. You know about square dancing and polka from the family business. Did you feel those were community dances? Did you feel those were traditional? How did you feel about that kind of dancing?

JERRY | I remember that I had a teacher in Paw Paw High School, Mrs. Nance, who always wore dark blue glasses and Chanel suits, with cotton candy hair. She was into the arts, and she walked by my desk one day and threw down a Time magazine—it was Donna McKechnie in the red outfit. And she said, “Read this article. I think you need to pay attention to this.” I didn’t know what A Chorus Line was. But I went, “Oh, there’s a place where you go, and you make a living doing this.”

I thought that dancing was purely social. My dance partner from the dance studio and I would start entering talent shows, and we won talent show after talent show after talent show. I remember making up a routine to KC and the Sunshine Band—“Do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight.” We won a talent contest doing the bump, basically.

HARVEY | So you knew there were teenage dances? When I was a kid—of course, this was the 1900s—we would learn the Mexican Hat Dance, we were taught the Chop Chop

“Let’s

and work our way up to where you tell people what to do.” So

line dance. I watched Soul Train and saw kids dancing and I went, whoa.

JERRY | Soul Train was a big influence.

HARVEY | That was a big influence on you; you knew that kids were making up their own dances. Did you feel that freedom, at that young age? I know you worked for great choreographers down the line, but did you see at that point that you could actually make up dances?

JERRY | Yes, because I just jumped up and did it. The Paw Paw Village Players would do an annual kids’ musical, and the woman who ran it said, you’re going to direct and choreograph the musical. I was 14 or 15 and I said, okay, no problem. I called my best friend, and I made her the musical director. I called my other best friend. I said, you’re gonna be in it. I called three other friends— you’re gonna be in it, you’re gonna play this part, you’re gonna play this part. I created the set; it was a box. Everybody came out of the box. I choreographed all the routines. We did the whole show. It was a big hit. It ran for four weekends. They were happy. That was the first time I directed a show. It was called Aesop’s Fallibles. It was a take-off on Aesop’s Fables for the Paw Paw Village Players. In high school, I choreographed for the school play or the school musical, or I would choreograph for the pom-pom girls. I would make up dances for the pep rallies.

HARVEY | When did you decide you had to get to New York?

JERRY | I knew I was going to come to New York after college. I went to college at Webster, and I thought, after I graduate

from college, I’ll come to New York. But I came two years after school because I got a Broadway show.

HARVEY | You got the Broadway show while you were still in college?

JERRY | I was in Webster College in St. Louis, and I auditioned for the Muny after my freshman year and got into the Muny opera; I got my Equity card. I went back to college for sophomore year. [Choreographer] Tony Stevens came through St. Louis, because he was filming a national Dr Pepper commercial with David Naughton, and they had auditions at the college. I auditioned and I got a principal part.

HARVEY | Hopefully, they will find the footage.

JERRY | It exists. It’s on YouTube. I’m dancing under the St. Louis Arch. I started to get checks from Young and Rubicam. I was in college and I’m getting checks—I had never gotten checks like that in my life, so I’m saving this money. I went to New York on spring break to stay with friends who I had met at the Muny, and they’re going to an audition for a Broadway show. They said, “Come with us. You’ve got an Equity card, it’ll be fun.” I followed them to the audition. I didn’t even know that it was for [the 1980 revival of] Brigadoon, for Agnes de Mille. She was there and she hired me on the spot. “Hire him, he’s tall. He can be a clan leader.” Done.

HARVEY | You know how many people you’re breaking their fucking hearts?

JERRY | I know. It really was fate. I went back to college. Told them I got a Broadway show and they said, we’ll give you credit. I had two weeks left of my sophomore year. Brigadoon was starting rehearsal in September of my junior year.

HARVEY | You’ve got to talk to me about Agnes de Mille.

JERRY | Well, Agnes de Mille had already had her stroke, so she was in a wheelchair. James Jamieson, her assistant, did all the work and was brilliant. I was one of the understudies for John Curry, the gold medalist ice skater, who was playing Harry Beaton. I had private rehearsals with Agnes de Mille on the stage, sitting there in her wheelchair. She had a knuckle ring. And when she wanted to stop and give you a note, she would knock at the chair with her one good hand. And she would be very clear: “Point your foot a little more that way when you cross the sword.” The detail was so specific for someone who obviously had been around for a long time and was sitting there without physical mobility, but very clearly knew what she needed you to deliver. It was amazing just to be in the room with her for that first show.

HARVEY | Did she give you any advice that you remember?

JERRY | Not really. I was just watching her; she was very present. But it was 1979, 1980. Dancers didn’t speak; you come in your tights, you’re warmed up, you’re ready to go. You do what’s required. You don’t ask questions, you listen. You do it until she’s happy, and you go on to the next piece of choreography.

HARVEY | But is that not the same now? All great choreographers need you to do what they saw in their minds. I’m not a dancer—as you know better than anyone— but I get upset when people question a choreographer. This is a vision that’s being given to you. This is a gift that’s being given to you. Shut the fuck up about what you wanna do and do what the choreographer’s telling you to do; there’s time later to discuss and to negotiate.

JERRY | I once heard Fosse say something like this in an interview: “There’s a vision in my head. I’ve been listening to the music for months and weeks and years. You’re coming into the room to rehearse with me. You’re hearing it for the first time. I’ve got a plan, and I have to get the plan out of my head onto the bodies. Before we start editing the picture, let’s get the picture out and then we can color it in, shade it in, edit it, cut it—but first we have to get it out on its feet.”

Jerry Mitchell (left) in the 1980 Broadway revival of Brigadoon, choreographed by Agnes de Mille PHOTO Martha Swope/New York Public Library

I found it so helpful when I heard that, because it gave me the ability to trust myself and not edit myself until I get a version out there. It’s like writing. You’re a writer—you write a paragraph, you go back and you edit it; you write a scene, you go back and you edit it. Choreographers do the same thing. We’re writing with physicality; you write with the steps, then you go back, and you edit them to make them better.

HARVEY | I’m not a dancer, so I can say this, but you as a dancer were hired for a reason. You were hired because you move in a certain way, or you look a certain way. I chose you to put this dance on. Let me put the dress on you before you tell me you don’t like that color.

JERRY | I’ve seen a couple of musicals recently where there’s no dress to put on, there’s no story thought coming from the choreographer on the stage. There’s a step, but the step doesn’t mean anything. It’s not telling a story. It’s not moving the narrative forward; it’s not lifting the lyrics.

HARVEY | We have to understand what choreography is. The bottom line is that there is character. There is a story. There’s a reason that a dance exists. Let’s use Hairspray as an example. As the choreographer, you’ve got a bunch of kids at a school dance, you need to show us what that school dance would’ve looked like. You have to consider character, story, music—

JERRY | Period.

HARVEY | Period. Of course.

JERRY | Authenticity to the period of the story, which I find sometimes is out the window. John Waters did two things for me when we first started on the show. He set me up with a couple who were on The Buddy Deane Show to teach me the authentic Madison. They came to New York, and I worked with them. Then he said, “I want you to go to the Museum of Television [now the Paley Center for Media] and watch all the shows from before 1963 that had dance. When Kennedy was assassinated, America lost its innocence. We were innocent prior to that.” And it was true. If you watch some of

those American Bandstands, they’re dancing 12 inches apart. They’re a foot apart! It really was informative to watch all of that and then watch Hullabaloo [a musical variety series that ran in 1965–66] where everybody was cutting loose and getting down and getting dirty. Integration had happened and things had changed.

HARVEY | Right. You have period and you have the actual dances going on in the period, and you have your music.

JERRY | I listen to the music nonstop. If Marc and Scott [Shaiman and Wittman, the composer and co-lyricists of Hairspray] give me a CD or Cyndi [Lauper, composer of Kinky Boots] gives me a CD, I listen to the music nonstop. The music starts to formulate visual ideas in my head. Thoughts just start to appear based on the rhythm I’m hearing and feeling.

HARVEY | And then you go into a room with a couple of your dancers, not the cast yet, but just to try things on people.

Marissa Jaret Winokur + company in Hairspray on Broadway, directed by Jack O’Brien + choreographed by Jerry Mitchell PHOTO PHOTO Joan Marcus/Photofest

JERRY | Try steps. When I first started, I wanted to do it all. Then as I got better, I released myself from having to figure it all out the first time I walked into the room. Now I use the time to explore all possibilities. I listen to the music, create the steps, and go back to the script and look at the story and the lyrics and what it is I’m trying to tell with this story.

One of the examples I always use when I’m talking to people is the conveyor belt number in Kinky Boots. You had written in an early, early, early draft that the shoes are on conveyor belts.

HARVEY | All through the show. That’s how we were going to tell the story of the show, through conveyor belts.

JERRY | Conveyor belts, conveyor belts, conveyor belts. I went to the Tricker’s Factory, in Northampton [a shoemaking shop in England where much of the original movie of Kinky Boots was filmed], and there wasn’t a conveyor belt in the store; they pushed everything on carts. In the movie, the guy gets on the conveyor belt, and he walks in the boots. I thought about a video that I had seen years ago when YouTube first took off,

of OK Go dancing on gym treadmills. And I thought, “Ah.”

I went to [scenic designer] David Rockwell and said, “Can you make me a conveyor belt three-and-a-half feet off the ground that that will hold my weight, so I can dance and jump on it?” And he said yes, and he made one, and I got on it, and I fell off about 10 times. There were no rails on it, so I said, “You’ve got to put rails on it.” “Where do you want the rails.” “I don’t know where I want the rails, so give me eight holes and rails that I can move around.” Then I called Stephen Oremus [responsible for music arrangements and orchestrations] and said, “Give me the tempo of this number. Once we set it, this number will be like this for eternity, because I’ve gotta make a belt that moves to the beat you’re gonna play. We’re going to have to lock it all in so it will stay on the beat no matter where we do it.” That was six months of figuring out that treadmill. But it all goes back to the script. What inspired the treadmill number was the very first draft, where you had the shoes on a conveyor belt.

HARVEY | I’m trying to give people an idea that choreography is not just about steps. There is a vision. You had gone to England to

see the factory, and you called me up in the middle of the night and said, “Harvey, you’re not gonna believe it. We’re in a pub and on the second floor there is a boxing ring. We’ve gotta do that.” And, of course, I had been struggling with the arm-wrestling contest [from the movie], which I didn’t want to do. How boring is arm wrestling? And you came up with that boxing ring. That made a perfect sense. It gave Cyndi something theatrical to write; she gave you the music for it, I gave you the structure for it, and then you came in. I think there are many genius moments of yours in Kinky Boots, but the thing that will always touch my heart is that you threw a drag queen down on the floor, put a rubber band on her leg, and it became a boxing ring. Where does that kind of genius come from? Where did that vision come from?

JERRY | You know where it came from? It came from me loving puzzles and that little square that we decided to make the factory office. I kept saying, what can I do with that square? We ended up cutting it in half and opening it up and I said, “Oh, there’s two sides of the ring. I need to make the other two sides.” I took two pieces of elastic and stretched them and put a leg in the air, and now I’ve got a boxing ring.

HARVEY | So there’s more to dance than steps. There’s character, there’s the interpretation of music, there’s the period that we’re in. What else would you say?

JERRY | Space. How to define the space you’re in. Because theatres can be used in a lot of ways. I’m working on a show now where I’m planning to use the aisles. I’m really psyched about it because I don’t like to use the aisles just to use the aisles, but it’s perfect for this story because it’s going to represent something that makes the story work. I’m using them because they serve a purpose in the storytelling. So how do you use space to tell your story? Whatever the theatre is, how do you transform it? Nowadays you go into the theatre, and you see shows like Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, where they changed the entire space completely. Even Moulin Rouge!, they changed the space into the, you know, the Moulin Rouge.

HARVEY | Now we’re into something else called collaboration. You are now at a point of your career where you direct and choreograph. Can you step back to just choreography in your mind, and explain to

the people reading this article what that collaboration is?

JERRY | You know this better than anyone, because you’re the star on stage, but I’m the person watching you—I’m watching everything you say, everything you sing, and every step you take, and I’m crafting with you how to best tell that story of that character you’re portraying. I never get tired of watching someone on stage when I’m working with them, because literally you’re doing a dance with that actor and crafting that thing to make it work for them and the audience.

I had the pleasure of working with [Michael] Bennett and with [Jerome] Robbins, two great master director-choreographers. But it wasn’t until I had the experience of working with Jack O’Brien on The Full Monty that I realized the difference in the jobs and how they need to feel like one, even if two people are doing them. Manny Azenberg had tried to set us up 10 years earlier; he said, “You two should work together. It will be a good collaboration.” It took us 10 years to get to that date, but we finally did. And then we were together for 10 years, and did some

amazing things, and had an incredible time doing them, because there was complete freedom shared between us.

The brilliance of Jack is that Jack was absolutely comfortable letting me go. He would let me get up and direct a scene if I wanted to direct a scene. And, in turn, I would let him get up and choreograph one if he wanted to choreograph one. That was the kind of collaboration we had right from the start. The other gentlemen were brilliant, but their collaboration efforts weren’t quite as successful. Jerry [Robbins] was certainly a dictator from the start, from the get-go. Michael had learned to manipulate people so they would think that he was collaborating with them, but he was getting exactly what he wanted. Jack genuinely lets people collaborate. He’ll let the best idea in the room win. And I learned that from him— being able to listen to the people you’re doing the show with, knowing that we’re all there together to make it successful.

HARVEY | Let’s get to putting the dance on an actor. With Hairspray, you all hired mostly actors.

Kinky Boots on Broadway, directed + choreographed by Jerry Mitchell PHOTO Matthew Murphy

JERRY | Yes. There were only two dancers. Everybody else were actors and great singers. The challenge with Hairspray, which is the challenge with a lot of musicals these days, is every single person in your ensemble has to be able to act and sing, because they have to cover a role.

HARVEY | Exactly. It’s not like the old days.

JERRY | No. You need double covers. You can’t have just a dancer on stage. If I’m dealing with someone who’s a star, like you, and I have to work with them in a choreography number, I use it to my advantage. I will only look good if they look good. That’s a great lesson I learned from Bennett. He said, “If they don’t look good, you don’t look good. You have to figure out the moves that work for their bodies and make it charming and wonderful for you.”

I loved that. And Robbins loved that. Susann Fletcher was not a dancer. She was an actress; she played Golde in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway. But she also played the lead in the Billion Dollar Baby Charleston number, because she could come out the door and scream and shake her fringe and shimmy

and make Jerry laugh. She made Jerry laugh when she did it, and that’s why he cast her, because it was funny and he wanted that to be funny. He said, “I’ll teach you the steps, but you’ve gotta make me laugh.” That’s how she got the part.

HARVEY | Did Jerome Robbins walk into the room, and everything was done?

JERRY | No, we rehearsed for two years. One of my favorite memories of Jerry was when we were trying to put together the On the Town ballet for Jerome Robbins’ Broadway Fancy Free had been running for forever at New York City Ballet, but he wanted the On the Town ballet to be different. We started to work on a new version, we worked for six weeks, and he came in one day and he chucked it all out. He said, “This is terrible. I don’t like it. We’re starting over.” And I just thought to myself, “You know, if Jerry Robbins can work on something for six weeks and chuck most of it and start over, I should never be afraid to throw out my own crap.” Because you don’t know what you’re gonna learn.

Perfect point—you came into the room [during Kinky Boots rehearsals] when I was doing “What a Woman Wants.” I had done weeks of pre-production with a Latin tango scarf dance, with all the Angels dancing. I turned to you and said, “This isn’t any good. I have to change this.” You asked me, “What do you want to do?” “I think I want to cut everybody except for Lola and the factory workers.” And you said to me, “Try it”—and that’s all I needed. I just needed permission to cut my own shit. That’s the best thing a collaborator can say to you.

HARVEY | Here’s the difference. The first one was a fabulous dance. I mean, I remember that tango, but it had nothing to do with the story.

JERRY | It was purely because I loved the Angels, and I wanted to put them on stage in another number because they were so good. But they didn’t have any reason to be in the factory.

HARVEY | No reason at all. They took away from the meaning of that number, which was Lola dancing with women.

Kinky Boots on Broadway, directed + choreographed by Jerry Mitchell PHOTO Matthew Murphy

JERRY | Yep. It’s story, story, story.

HARVEY | You learned these lessons because you always had dance in you. Was The Will Rogers Follies your last role?

JERRY | Most people don’t know this. I stopped dancing after On Your Toes in 1984. I was 26 and working for Michael Bennett on Scandal and Chess, and I said I wanted to be a choreographer. I was going to stop dancing and just assist and work. And I thought, “Oh, I’ll be on Broadway in a year. I’ll have my own Broadway show. I’ll be doing a Broadway show in a year.” I spent 17 years as an assistant: 17 years as an assistant working for Michael, working for Jerry, working for Ron Field, working for Joe Layton. Working, working, but never getting the gig. I did the first workshop of Smokey Joe’s Cafe. I did an audition for Jerry Zaks for Guys and Dolls; Chris Chadman got it, God bless him, and it was brilliant. I auditioned for other things, I just didn’t get them. Then finally Michael Mayer saw my production of Follies at Paper Mill Playhouse, because Andrew Lippa and I had done Broadway Bares together, and he said to Michael, “You should talk to Jerry.” He did, and he asked me to do You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown with him. That was the start. That was my foot in the door. But it was 17 years as an assistant.

HARVEY | Go back. Why did you do The Will Rogers Follies?

JERRY | I did The Will Rogers Follies in 1990 because Jeff Calhoun, my dear friend—we had done the film of Whorehouse together— was assisting Tommy [Tune] and he knew he needed somebody to dance without their clothes on, basically. He knew I was in great shape, and that I had just broken up with my first partner of seven years. I wanted to go to work, I wanted to get my self-respect back.

He asked me to do it, and I said, sure. Okay. I went into the show for a year and a half.

HARVEY | By then you were already on your trail to be a choreographer.

JERRY | But I was still working as an assistant and not getting a Broadway show. And while I was in The Will Rogers Follies, Tommy’s agent Eric Shepard, who was trying to help me, said, “Tommy’s got a movie that he doesn’t want to do, and he said to send you over there.” I went across the street after the show, at 11 o’clock at night, and I met the producer and the director of the film; they told me they had a star who had to do a dance, and he was uncomfortable and unhappy, and could I help them? And I said, “Who is it?” They said, “Come tomorrow to practice and you’ll meet the star.” I came, and I walked in, and in the corner, Al Pacino is doing authentic tango with some girl who was just pushing him around the room. He was doing authentic tango, but he wasn’t being choreographed, so he was getting frustrated because he couldn’t remember anything.

I said, “Wait, wait, wait. You’ve got to do eight counts and you’ve got to do it 10 times. And then you add the next eight and you do 16 counts and then you do another. Now you’ve got a routine and he can repeat it and he doesn’t have to think about it. And you’ll get the performance out of him.” We started building the tango that day and the producer, I think, gave me $2,500 in cash. Said, you just saved us, because now he wants to put the scene in the movie [Scent of a Woman].

The Full Monty at The Old Globe, directed by Jack O’Brien + choreographed by Jerry Mitchell PHOTO Craig Schwartz

Jerry Mitchell + Jodi Moccia rehearsing Scandal with Michael Bennett PHOTO c/o Jerry Mitchell

HARVEY | That’s a great story.

JERRY | For the next seven years I choreographed films while I was waiting to get a Broadway show. I did In & Out with Kevin Kline. I did One True Thing, Meet Joe Black, The Mirror Has Two Faces with Streisand and Jeff Bridges—I did the last number where they dance around during the credits. I did all these numbers in movies. It was crazy.

HARVEY | Right. But there is a great example of building a dance on an actor, building a dance on a performer.

JERRY | Most of those were working with actors who were uncomfortable with moving, so you’re just trying to make them feel comfortable in a scene where they have to dance. One of the things that I think is really important for choreographers of stage to understand is that it’s different from film and television. In film and television, the story is controlled by the editor. You are not as responsible for telling a story with your steps; the edit is the final storytelling.

On stage, you have to tell a story. It can’t just be steps. Even if the number is just about an entertaining number, a show-within-ashow number, you still have to have a story of how that show number is going to be entertaining the audience. And that’s your job. Nobody does that for you.

HARVEY | Let’s talk about the person who does the dance arrangements. You’ve got a song, and now it needs to be a number in a show. In the old days, there was a different person who just came in to do the dance arrangements. Is that the way it is now?

JERRY | It depends on the musical. I’m using Zane Mark right now on Boop!

[Boop! The Betty Boop Musical, based on the classic cartoon character, is currently in development, with a pre-Broadway tryout slated for this fall in Chicago. Jerry is directing and choreographing.] Zane did The Full Monty with me, and he also did Never Gonna Dance. Zane is one of my favorites because he just gets me and my rhythms. We have a rhythm communication.

In Boop!, we meet the character in the opening number, which is called “A Little Versatility Never Hurts”—so I have to show her versatility throughout this musical number. What better way to end a star number than in the classic Betty Boop look with the top hat and the tap shoes and the little pants in her black-and-white world, and so it turns into a giant tap dance where she is the star of the number. The goal of the number is to make sure the audience understands that Betty Boop is the star of

Fleischer cartoons. I knew what I wanted to do, but I was having trouble figuring out where I wanted to cut into the song to do the dance break and then return to vocal. Zane was very helpful, because he helped me find the right place to get in. Once I was in, we built three different sections of dance and we tooled around with them all. I think I cut one down in half, I cut another one in half, I created another section, and it returns us to vocal in a big Broadway musical kind of way. That’s Zane building music. I start to work the steps with him rhythmically, and then we start to build music on top of that.

Stephen [Oremus] did the dance break for “Everybody Say Yeah” [in Kinky Boots]. Stephen would sit in the room and watch me on the treadmill. I told him that I wanted to mix it up, do a five section—a “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 3, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.” We counted it out and then he came up with that beautiful music that supports it. Usually, I work from a rhythm place with the dance arranger first before all of the music is added on.

HARVEY | So there are no rules. It could be the dancer first and then the dance arranger. It could be the song first. It could be, as with any brand-new show, that all of a sudden you throw the whole number out and get a new number overnight and have to start all over again. Because in the long run, we all are working in service of the story.

JERRY | When we did the little Tracy break in “You Can’t Stop the Beat” [in Hairspray],

I started go-go dancing, like I was in a ’60s movie, and Shaiman just started following me; again, it was someone I was working with where I was comfortable enough to do what I do and just let them follow what I was doing. That’s sort of what Zane and the drummer do—whoever the drummer is. I always have a drummer. I can’t work on a dance arrangement without a drummer in the room.

HARVEY | There are a lot of people who have a dream of one day doing this. What should the concentration be? Take the jobs as they come?

JERRY | There’s always a lesson to be learned in every job you take as a choreographer. The thing that I take away the most from the work I’ve done is the collaboration. The collaboration and how we build something together. Because as a choreographer, you can come in with all the bells and whistles, but if it doesn’t work in the story and the musical, everybody’s gonna be looking at their watch.

Jerry Mitchell + Harvey Fierstein

PHOTO c/o Jerry Mitchell

WORKING WITH GARTH

BY JULIE TAYMOR

I was looking for a choreographer for The Lion King and went to see Garth Fagan Dance at The Joyce Theater. Immediately, I was attracted to the details of Garth’s choreography. In particular the isolation movement of the dancers, which clearly could connect to the movement of the animals in The Lion King His rhythmic sense of time, athleticism, and his own unique style were perfect to join in with the puppetry and mask work I had imagined. So, we met. And that was that. It would be Garth. He loved the challenge of the puppets on the body which many choreographers had shied away from in previous works, feeling that the puppets were just props and would undermine the freedom of the choreography. Garth was game.

Garth not only embraced the puppets but found them inspiring and took the challenge of these extra limbs, heads, bodies, and tails

as inspiration for new ways to move and dance. His expression, “Discipline is freedom,” says it all. Or one could add, “Limitations are freedom,” and understand that these creatures that fused with the human dancer or actor forced the choreographer to invent a new language. We had a great time together finding the spaces and places for stylized movement for the principal performers as well as full out choral dance numbers for the hunt, the stampede, the battles, and the moments of love or exhilaration.

Julie Taymor won the Tony Award for her direction of The Lion King on Broadway.

PHOTO Annie Leibovitz c/o Julie Taymor

The Lion King on Broadway, directed by Julie Taymor + choreographed by Garth Fagan

PHOTO Matthew Murphy FALL

“I’ve always tended towards drama. Some people just do steps, I never could just do steps. I had to have a story.”

With that statement, Carmen de Lavallade, the grand dame of modern dance for many decades, attempts to respond to my first provocation, “What informs your sense of dance as a choreographer?” Known more for her collaborations as muse for many legendary, visionary choreographers, her understanding of movement and how to move movers is rooted in the earliest foundations of modern dance. It was her formative years as a teenager dancing with

I’VE ALWAYS TENDED TOWARDS DRAMA

A BRIEF CONVERSATION WITH LIVING LEGEND CARMEN DE LAVALLADE

BY TALVIN WILKS

Lester Horton in Los Angeles that shaped her understanding of movement as drama.

“I’m glad I was at Lester’s because he was more dramatically oriented, he always gave you reasons for doing things, exercises about the body, the fun stuff, the partner work. So when you came out of there you could work with anybody. The stage was not foreign to us, I knew what to do with set pieces, to find distance, to move, to leap. He choreographed dramas, not dances; he would choreograph plays—Salome, Oscar Wilde’s version—and based the dance on that. He had his way. I was greatly influenced by his sense of

storytelling. In a way, Lester was giving us imagery, and that was how we explored his choreography.”

Along the way she brought her Thomas Jefferson High School pal, Alvin Ailey, to Horton, and the rest is history. Rooted in Horton technique, Carmen and Alvin formed an initial partnership in Los Angeles, found success on Broadway in the infamous run of Truman Capote’s House of Flowers starring Pearl Bailey, toured internationally with the US State Department, often under the banner of the de Lavallade - Ailey American Dance Company, and eventually parted

Carmen de Lavallade

PHOTO Betti Francheschi c/o Leo Holder

ways, artistically. Carmen’s subsequent choreographic vocabulary was then informed by a series of collaborations from a list that reads as a who’s who in American modern dance: John Butler and many a Spoleto adventure, Glen Tetley, touring to Yugoslavia and Ravinia, her late husband Geoffrey Holder, opening for Josephine Baker, Agnes de Mille in the Four Marys with Judith Jamison, and numerous works by Donald McKayle. Other groundbreaking achievements included stints in Hollywood, dancing in the film Carmen Jones and as Jack Cole’s voodoo priestess in Lydia Bailey, starring as Harry Belafonte’s love interest in Odds Against Tomorrow, and dazzling as a dancing sylph in Duke Ellington’s A Drum Is a Woman, adventures of a young artist doing it all in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

Carmen has always been an astute observer; part of her practice as dancer and choreographer is one of observation. She says, “I’m a people watcher. I learn from watching, it is all there. People are movers— they choreograph without even knowing it. We dance all the time and don’t know it. I learn so much from sitting on a park bench along the boulevard.”

THE YALE YEARS

Carmen built an illustrious, international career as soloist, muse, glamorous sensation, but it was a significant, almost 10-year stretch at the Yale School of Drama (1969–1977) that really formed and shaped her sense of herself as a “choreographer.”

“Alvin Epstein knew Geoffrey [Holder]—they starred in a famous staging of Twelfth Night at the Cambridge Drama Festival in 1959—and he recommended me for the job. They wanted to add a movement approach to their actor training. I love working with actors, they come up with crazy ideas. Using everyday language in a funny kind of way for choreography, that’s what I found at Yale, we were doing so many different plays, I liked working with the actors, because I could get them to do anything.”

People are movers—they choreograph

CARMEN DE LAVALLADE

Teaching movement to drama students, she found herself in familiar territory. Relying on her early training with Horton, who insisted on knowing and understanding every aspect of one’s surroundings, Carmen found herself

without even knowing it. We dance all the time and don’t know it.

Carmen de Lavallade + Jack Dobbs in Lester Horton’s The Beloved PHOTO Constantine c/o Leo Holder

Carmen de Lavallade dancing with the Lester Horton Dance Company PHOTO c/o Leo Holder

TOP LEFT Carmen de Lavallade + Alvin Ailey in House of Flowers on Broadway

PHOTO Zinn Arthur c/o Leo Holder

TOP RIGHT Joe Grifasi + Carmen de Lavallade in The Banquet Years: The Prince and the Butterfly at Yale Rep PHOTO c/o Leo Holder

BOTTOM Carmen de Lavallade + Gus Solomons jr in PARADIGM: It All PHOTO Marta Fodor c/o Leo Holder

guiding and shaping the movement of a next generation of young stars in ever-surprising ways. Her students were a group of headspinning devotees, including Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver. She talks fondly of forging longtime friendships with thenstudents like the wonderful comedic actor, Joe Grifasi. It was quite a time of discovering a voice and developing a movement practice and vocabulary.

“I would ask them, how would you do it physically? They would do it; they were wonderful, they really were terrific. I find ways, I have my own little technique, I like to give them images—how would you react with your body? How would you react, and then they would take that movement and incorporate it into the choreography.”

Carmen credits her Yale years as a significant time of discovery at a time when she felt a bit aimless due to the whims of the professional dance world, and although she won’t say it, the fickleness of race and bias. She thrived in the young adventurous environment of New Haven, with a background of social unrest, as she says, “the time of the Black Panthers.” She took on acting roles as well, including one legendary performance as Titania in Alvin Epstein’s revelatory vision of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Yale Rep. Carmen was also assigned choreographer duties, getting the fairies to move as forest creatures, toads, beetles, butterflies... Jack Kroll’s review in Newsweek explains it all: “The fusion of Shakespeare’s language and Purcell’s music is pure enchantment, intensified by the decisive contribution of Carmen de Lavallade as choreographer, dancer and the play’s Titania. It would take Shakespeare himself to describe Miss de Lavallade, whose supernal beauty embodies not only the physical but what I will splutteringly call the moral power of her presence. With Epstein she has devised witty behavioral music for the different levels of character.”

For nearly a decade, she choreographed works with Epstein, Robert Brustein, and Andrzej Wajda, moving fluidly as actor, dancer, and choreographer. She considers it a thriving period of learning and discovery. Although the success of the Yale years never translated into the acting career in New York that she desired—“they only ever could see me as a dancer”—she was able to forge a subsequent path choreographing such works as Porgy and Bess, Lucia di Lammermoor, Die Meistersinger, and Rusalka at the Metropolitan Opera, the US premiere of Die Soldaten, and original works like Sweet Bitter Love for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Company. She also continued her solo career, ever evolving her dazzling performance of

At 92, Carmen follows the mantra, “been there, done that, now what?” Our conversation is peppered with ideas for future projects, TV pilots, children’s books, and an ongoing memoir. Snippets of poems and musings surround her. As for choreography or dancing, that seems to no longer be of interest (“been there, done that”). Let Legend be legend…. For her enduring artistry and accomplishments she received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2016 Obie Awards and the Kennedy Center Honors Award in 2017. When asked to sum up her career and her ease working in all guises, she says, “I had good things happen to me, I have no complaints, a good life, wonderful people. You learn from everybody and that’s the fun part. I was fearless, really. Absolutely fearless!”

Talvin Wilks and Carmen de Lavallade conceived and co-wrote her one woman show, As I Remember It, with longtime Yale friend, Joe Grifasi, director. The work premiered at Jacob’s Pillow in 2014, with stints at the Kennedy Center, Pittsburgh’s Kelly Strayhorn Theater, New Haven’s International Festival of Arts and Ideas, and the Baryshnikov Arts Center, and ended its tour at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in her hometown of Los Angeles. Wilks and de Lavallade continue to collect her writings and musings for a future memoir.

The Creation by James Weldon Johnson, choreographed by Holder and often performed with national orchestras like the Boston Pops.

Carmen de Lavallade in As I Remember It at Jacob’s Pillow PHOTO Christopher Duggin, c/o Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival Archives

ALWAYS BE A STUDENT

RICH + TONE TALAUEGA

BY DANI BARLOW

Rich + Tone Talauega are brothers, collaborators, and multi-hyphenate creatives whose work spans live shows, tours, television, and film. One constant among the forms of entertainment they touch is their natural curiosity. They spoke over Zoom with SDC Foundation Director Dani Barlow about the influences, inspirations, and lessons learned that they have carried with them from street dancing to Broadway, where they are currently represented as curators of Michael Jackson’s style for MJ the Musical

DANI BARLOW | I know that you grew up street dancing and dancing in the church in Richmond, California. I’m curious if you considered that choreography. How did you know who did what moves, and when?

RICH TALAUEGA | We didn’t even know the word “choreography” existed. It was like, “What does that mean? Is that a French word?” I don’t know if you know about Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-Hour Rule? [In his book Outliers, Gladwell writes that the key to achieving greatness in any skill is practicing for 10,000 hours.] Coming into the business, unbeknownst to ourselves, we were putting in our 10,000 hours.

We came from a neighborhood called North Richmond, which was pretty much the ’hood; we didn’t have any access to dance studios or dance classes. We were ignorant of that whole world, but we were highly inspired by our community—Richmond, Oakland, San Francisco. The Bay Area is where a lot of styles were birthed, and the late ’80s, early ’90s, was the golden age of hip-hop. This was also around the time of the big street dance craze that was going on—breaking and popping, which started in the late ’70s, early ’80s.

We were part of a dance crew of seven or eight and we called ourselves Housing

Authority. What would happen was Tone would come up with a great idea, and then someone else would have a great idea, then I would have a great idea. All of us had great ideas, and we started connecting them. Now, mind you, we didn’t know what we were doing. But you know how you start to create a syllabus, a vocabulary of movement that you always go back to and kind of remix for another show? It got to a point where the system of movements that we created became choreography.

DANI | Were there certain artists or mentors that helped inspire or develop your dancing?

ABOVE Rich + Tone Talauega PHOTO Lee Cherry

AN INTERVIEW WITH

RICH | Our older brothers got us into dancing, so we were highly inspired by them, but we were also very, very inspired by what was going on in the world of music and whatever we could catch on video. This was before the days of social media, iPhones, everything, right? Back in those days, people used to record videos on VCR tapes and people would borrow the tapes. We would see a four- or five-second clip in a video, and we were like, “Oh, that’s cool. We love that. We can do that.” Another thing, too, we’d just be inspired by watching cartoons. One thing I would say about hip-hop street dance, or whatever people want to call it, is that a lot of people along the way have been inspired by what was going on at that moment, in that time, right? Whatever you consumed—whether it was Bruce Lee, Bugs Bunny, robots—anything you consumed, your mind just went there, and you started to put moves together. Next thing you know, you started a style.

TONE TALAUEGA | Our two older brothers were responsible for bringing the culture of street dance into our household. There’s a thing in street dancing that is called battle dancing—where somebody goes off against somebody else—and they would do twoman routines, practicing in the front yard of our house. They were our first inspiration. Then you had local street legends like the Electric Boogaloos, Popin’ Pete, and Boogaloo Sam, who came a generation before us. We regard them as the top of the mountain in terms of street dance. They were responsible for creating the funk style called Boogaloo from Fresno, CA, which— along with Locking, from Los Angeles—were the two styles that were at the focal point of early street dance culture. The Nicholas Brothers, who performed in the 1930s and ’40s, were also a really huge influence on our upbringing in terms of the world of dance. To this day, I can’t imagine anybody doing the type of routines that they did.

Travis Payne and LaVelle Smith Jr., who discovered us, were a very integral part of building our skills as choreographers. They were the ones who took us under their wing and started showing us the ropes on how to put a performance together for recording artists—whether it was a tour, a 30-second commercial, film, TV, or live. We started to understand that there was a method behind choreography, whether it was staging, knowing how to pull focus on stage, knowing how to tell story with movement. They sat us down, and were like, “Look, if you guys are serious about this, you need to study X, Y, and Z.” So, we started getting hip to Bob Fosse. We started getting hip to, obviously, Michael [Jackson]’s genius in terms of how he would create a stage performance.

TONE TALAUEGA

Their methods were unconventional because they would take a little bit from the ballet world, they would take a little bit from the street world. We also influenced them, because when they saw us dance, we introduced them to a whole new language of movement. They would take a little bit from what we did, and then they would mix it up and create a hybrid. We picked up a lot from these guys, but we put our own spin on it. We were taking a little bit of influence from the streets and a little bit of influence from what they taught us, and also trying to match the sort of acrobatic, high-energy vocabulary that the Nicholas Brothers did. We tried to put that all in a pot and create our own style.

RICH | Two other groups I want to add to that were Demons of the Mind from the Bay Area and Mop Top from New York City.

TONE | I would say that we are historians when it comes to the street styles of dance; we like to do a lot of research and a lot of homework, and we love it because it makes us stronger. A lot of people don’t teach the basics of this language in school or in classes. They’ll make money off it, but they don’t necessarily know the history behind it. Michael would always tell us that if you want to be great, study the greats, so that’s what we would do. They didn’t have to be super famous or popular in the commercial world. We found icons and legends within the street world, as well, who didn’t get credit. We would always big them up any time we would do interviews and people would ask us who we were influenced by; we put them on a high pedestal because if it wasn’t for them, we probably wouldn’t be here talking.

DANI | I think it’s so good to be able to say their names whenever you have the chance. Dance doesn’t come out of nowhere, but if you don’t have that history recorded, if you’re not able to speak it, then people won’t even know where to look for it. Being able to say these things in recorded moments is what allows their work—and everything they did that looks like something that is familiar to us, but we don’t know where it came from—to live on.

The Nicholas Brothers...were also a really huge influence.... To this day, I can’t imagine anybody doing the type of routines they did.

Fayard Nicholas + Harold Nicholas in the film Stormy Weather PHOTO Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation/Photofest

You created your own style by pulling from different inspirations and doing a lot of research. When you work with artists like Michael Jackson or Madonna, I’m curious how you approach the creative process and meld their styles and their types of music with the unique way that you move.

RICH | When we were starting, we knew that we wanted to be choreographers, and that we wanted to choreograph these artists. We had our dream list, our goals. Then, of course, when it happens, you’re like, “Oh, oh, oh my God! What am I going to do?”

I use Madonna as a great example because she’s conceptual; she’s the Queen of Pop and a conceptual dance artist, if that makes sense. We’ve done four or five tours with her; the concepts that she and her team— including Jamie King, who has been an amazing director for her—come up with help create a nice playground to play in, because it gives us some direction. If there isn’t anything like that, if you don’t come in with a set of rules or a set of ideas, you are kind of just wandering. One thing I would say with choreography is that what helps create movement is ideas and themes and thesis. Even something small, because otherwise, it goes back to just the whole raw, “This is what I feel,” and there’s only so many times you can get away with that.

With every artist we work with, their ideas help us create movement. With Chris Brown, it’s more, “I’m going to have fun with this movement.” It may not be as conceptual as working with Madonna, but it’s something that is going to move. It’s young, it’s a party,

and so on and so forth. Now, the King of Pop, that’s a whole other thing right there. You’re talking about the man that actually created his own style of dance—you really don’t stray away from the power of what he created.

When we did “You Rock My World,” it was challenging, obviously. It was our first time actually being choreographers for Michael Jackson. We had the concept, but still—to create movement for that song was challenging. What’s inspirational for us is to make sure that we know how we are going into a project. What is the idea? What is the theme? That is going to inspire the movement.

TONE | Exactly. You create a set of rules within the world that you’re given, and then when you follow those rules, you start to really be creative instead of just going off on a tangent because you want to create eye candy. You work off the narrative, which the good choreographers do. It’s like my brother was saying: What is the theme? What is the world? What’s the zip code that you’re in? When you start understanding that, you start to build a narrative. Then when you start following that narrative, everything starts to make sense as to why you’re moving the way you’re moving.

Music is key because that’s where you get the feeling that enables you to move a certain way. I will say all three artists that my brother was using as examples are all very different zip codes to live in, and the challenging part was how to weave in what you want to say as a creative artist.

And to do it in a subliminal way where it doesn’t take away from the narrative, but it elevates it.

DANI | You are multi-hyphenates— performers, choreographers, creative directors, and musicians, to name a few. Did expanding your style and the type of work that you do happen naturally or intentionally?

TONE | I would say it came naturally. My brother and I are passionate about all aspects of entertainment, from lighting to costumes to musical direction to narrative to writing to directing. We were always very curious about the method to the madness. When we worked on projects, whether it was a commercial or a music video or a live tour or a film, we would always be behind the camera, always studying what every other department was doing. It was almost like going to the ultimate film school, but we were getting paid to go to school and we took full advantage of it. We would see why directors would choose certain angles to elevate the dance or the choreography and we would study that, and how lighting, color, costumes, and sound design help push the narrative forward.

We did a documentary feature called Rize, where we featured this new street style called Krumping. We did it with David LaChappelle, who is a high-end photographer/director, a really good friend of ours. That was our opportunity to showcase everything that we’ve learned so far in terms of dance— telling a story with dance, and also directing and producing and editing. At the end of the day, it’s all knowledge. It’s all education, right?

To get better, you have to just jump off the cliff and do it. That’s what we did, and that’s how we sharpened our skills in all these different facets of entertainment. That’s how we fell down the rabbit hole of learning all the aspects of telling a story through art. We took full advantage of where we were at each particular moment in time. Some people can just let it fly over their heads. We took the opportunity; we knew that there was some knowledge going on and being passed around here. It’s either you want to dive into it or not. You can stay in your own lane and just work on choreography and this, that, or the other. We didn’t see it that way. You want to be better at something, you’ve got to want to learn it.

Michael always used to tell us to always be a student, because if you think you’re a master, that’s when it dies for you, because you don’t want to learn anymore.

Rich + Tone Talauega

PHOTO c/o Rich + Tone Talauega

We always took that saying literally and we always applied it to every job that we worked on, including the musical. MJ the Musical was our opportunity to learn real Broadway theatrical language, how it’s done, how it really works. We kept our antennas up the whole time.

DANI | This is not your first Michael Jackson endeavor. You bring a very specific knowledge and skill set to lifting up the legacy of such an iconic artist, preserving the authenticity of Michael Jackson’s movements, but you work with new creative teams each time.

RICH | One thing that can get in the way of the work is ego and not being able to want to work with people. Tone and I harbor the realm of energy of collaboration big time. It goes back to our early days when we were part of a group, you know? “Oh, Tone got a hot move. Okay, well, I got a hot move. Okay, now, let’s put that other hot move together.” It was a collaboration. Fast forward, that concept just kept rolling with us. That’s something that is great about art.

Tone and I are also two individuals. There are things that he focuses on that I may not focus on, and vice versa, so then we have to have a collaboration between ourselves and be able to agree with that before we can agree with the person that we’re going to help. Does that make sense?

DANI | It does.

RICH | It’s like therapy. The more you work on projects, you find yourself being a therapist or a psychiatrist, because the majority of the time you’re trying to help that person believe, or help that person move from point A to point B, or help that director round out their thoughts, you know? Each project that we go to, we immerse ourselves into that project like a halfway-molded piece of clay, and then that piece of clay gets formed into whatever statue it needs to be. Or it’s like a bunch of Lego pieces coming together and you don’t have directions. Then, finally, the director’s like, “Aah,” and you help put those directions together. Next thing you know, you have a guide to follow, you know?

We are blessed and lucky to be able to be curators of Michael Jackson’s dance style. That is something that we hold very dear to our hearts, and that’s something that we have to uphold. It’s a task that was given to us unbeknownst, and we’re trying our best to make sure that we uphold it. We’re very lucky that we’re able to be on these different projects and have his dance style be respected. That’s first and foremost. What’s the constant? The constant is Michael, and the constant is his music, and there’s this other language that he created, which was dance. It’s the moving picture language. That’s what it is. You see it, you get inspired by it without even having to know what he said. That right there is a power, and sometimes we pinch ourselves, “Wow, man,

we’re jumping from project to project and we’re upholding this man’s legacy by way of his second language, which is movement.”

The most exciting thing about working on these different projects is that we’re adapting Michael for each generation. That is the cool thing right there, man. Young kids are going to watch this Broadway show and they’re being introduced to Michael, and they’re able to see someone emulate his movement to a degree that is respected within the rules of his style. Michael made it to Broadway and it’s a hit show. Being in that theatre and seeing people of every age and walk of life just be inspired, from the youngest of the youngest to the old cat— you know what I mean?

DANI | This is your first Broadway show. Is there anything about the experience of working on Broadway where you felt this was super different?

TONE | One of the main things was the live music in rehearsal, the freedom to do things in the moment—“Could you do it under tempo for me just to work on this one section so the dancer can understand the pocket that we want the moves to be set in?” My brother and I wish that we could have that on every project. When we got a taste of it in rehearsals, we thought, “Okay, this is how it really should be done in all spectrums of the entertainment world.” That spoke to us because we love live music.

Michael Jackson + Rich Talauega PHOTO John Isaac Tone Talauega + Michael Jackson PHOTO John Isaac

Anything done to track is good. You still have the spirit of it. But the soul, the heartbeat, is when you do it live, and then you can hear it coming from the drummer, and then you get this feeling that you can’t get from playing from track. That would be the number one thing that I took away from my experience working on Broadway: Yes, always do it live. What was cool was that it was a rule; we would use the track music to do a warm-up, but when it was time to work on the actual number, we couldn’t use it. It was exciting to work with the musicians—face to face, hand in hand—and be able to say, “Michael would do an accent here.” Then we would add that accent right then and there.

RICH | On top of what Tone just said, the rehearsal process is what I love. I can say, “Give me two bars before the first verse when da da da da da,” and they go right there. “Can you slow it down about two beats?” It’s just like, “Oh my God, this has warmed my heart.” You know what it felt like working on Broadway? It was like, “Oh, wait, this is what we are supposed to be doing. This is it. This is it.” You know what I mean? It was almost like doing 10,000 hours all over again.

The challenge—that we had to do everything over and over again—was stressful, but it made us better. It made us work... I wouldn’t say faster, but more expeditiously.

TONE | What was fascinating to me were the transitions from scene to scene; in my mind, those were full-out numbers. How they used the lighting, or the quick change of a coat, or how they used choreography and staging to transition, and how that all weaved together. When you see a transition in the show, it

goes by so quickly, right? When you see it in rehearsal, you see it was very carefully crafted by Chris Wheeldon. As my brother was saying, we were going back to school all over again, but this is the stuff that we’re geeks about, because a transition would be just as important as the next scene coming up or the scene before.

TONE TALAUEGA

DANI | I saw it again the other night, and I was like, “Wow, those transitions!” I know there is something expert being done that allows the whole piece to feel like it is one. It’s all the little things that you saw in the rehearsal room that the audience is not catching. I love what you say about always being curious and being a student; that’s a great thing to be reminded of. Often, there is only one director and choreographer in the room, so there isn’t the same kind of opportunity to learn from other choreographers.

I’m curious if you have any lessons you can share for how you have figured out how to work with each other. Obviously, there’s an element that is family, but are there other moments where you’re like, “We know that if we are struggling with something, sitting

over in the corner and hashing it out is best” or “We figured out that you take this, I take that”?

RICH | Tone and I can both answer this. One of the most important things is cognitive listening, making sure that you are in the moment and being able to listen to your partner, listen to one another. Being able to know how to read the room is another. There may be days where we come in and one of has had a bad day. Knowing how to read the room equates to making sure not to get on each other’s nerves. That’s the main thing right there; once you get on each other’s nerves, ain’t no work getting done at all. You’ve got to be sensitive to that. There’s that and making sure there’s always respect. Tone and I are brothers. We know each other’s buttons to push; we know each other’s everything. Respect is big because if you don’t have that, then there is no team. The T in team is the last letter in respect.

There are times where Tone has a very good idea for one part of the song. When that happens, I have to be able to put my ego to the side and be like, “Okay, he’s hot on that. I may have wanted to do some of that, but no, if he’s hot on that, let him be hot on that. Let me go be hot over here so we can make sure we finish this in the time that we have.”

TONE | If we’re working on a song, I might come in with a frame of what it could be movement-wise and aesthetic-wise, and then my brother will say, “Okay, yeah, I have an idea, too,” but if I’m hot on it, he’ll let me do it. My brother will come in after I’m done, and he will be like, “It’s great, but I think if you were to do this and move these people down at this particular time on this part of the music, I think it’ll be a lot more effective.” After I put my ideas out, I’m more open to it. And obviously, if I did have a thing against what he’s trying to do, I let him finish the idea first instead of butting in and being like, “No, no, no, no, no. I think it should go back to the original,” because that’s the line of respect that you don’t cross. You only cross it when they fully have the idea out in the open. That’s when you can cross the line and be like, “Now that I’ve seen it, I think keep your idea, but hold these guys back for eight counts before they come out.”

Then, next thing you know, we’re shaping together without disrespecting each other as creatives. We didn’t understand that method in the early days, but we learned that over time, working on different projects and working with other people, too. If you don’t understand the whole concept of checking your ego at the door, it’s not going to work well for you when you’re collaborating with

Ifyou don’t understand the whole concept of checking your ego at the door, it’s not going to work well foryou when you’re collaborating with other highlevel thinkers, creative minds.

Rich + Tone Talauega with Billy Porter on the set of the Netflix series The Get Down, choreographed by Rich + Tone Talauega PHOTO c/o Rich + Tone Talauega

other high-level thinkers, creative minds. At the end of the day, you want to learn, but also you want to kind of show off your creativity, your creative skills, as well. It’s understanding that fine line, that imaginary line and when to cross it or not cross it; you only understand that with experience.

With certain projects those roles can be switched, and I will be the communicator and my brother will sit back and be the thinker about specific things. But we always go in with those titles first—that my brother would be the communicator of the idea, and I would be the thinker of how to create or what should be presented.

Those are the things I will say in terms of what really works with us and how we communicate. Also—my brother would say this too—sometimes he would be the communicator and I would be the thinker.

RICH | The last thing I would say is still being able to love what we do because if we don’t love it, then we need to do something else, or the product is not going to come out the way that we see it in our minds. I think I speak for both of us on this. We still love what we do. It’s like back in the days with our homies in recreation centers or garages or front yards and it’s like, “Hey, did you do that move? Then I’m going to do this move, and we’re going to do it after the boom, boom, boom.” That’s the language of putting things together.

TONE | The common denominator for me and my brother is that we love music. We love making music. We love choreographing the music. As my brother was saying, it always goes back to the early days of how we used to create. We still hold onto that now, but we do it in a much more professional manner. And we always hold onto the idea of finding the little kid in you. Obviously, there are pressured moments where you really need to buckle down and finish something, but also you are always trying not to get too lost in the seriousness of creation. The stuff that actually makes you strong as a creative is just going in and having fun with the music and being inspired by it, or finding other inspirations in other things, and then coming back to the project more inspired to work on it. Always find that little kid in you, man, and always make sure that comes out first.

You know what it felt like working on Broadway? It was like, “Oh, wait, this is what we are supposed to be doing.”

RICH TALAUEGA

MJ the Musical, directed + choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon with Michael Jackson movement by Rich + Tone Talauega PHOTO Matthew Murphy

BY KITTY McNAMEE

as it were—in concert/company work, and one foot in musical theatre/Broadway. Moderator Kitty McNamee began the conversation by asking everyone about their backgrounds and the trajectories of their professional lives.

, choreographed by Daniel Ezralow PHOTO Angelo Redaelli

MODERATED

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Ayodele Casel, a Doris Duke Artist, is an award-winning and critically acclaimed tap dancer and choreographer. Born in The Bronx and raised in Puerto Rico, her practice centers highly narrative works rooted in expressions of selfhood, culture, and legacy. She serves as tap choreographer for the Broadway revival of Funny Girl, which garnered her a 2022 Drama Desk nomination.

Michelle Dorrance is a NYC-based tap dancer and the founder/Artistic Director of Dorrance Dance.

Choreographic commissions include: Martha Graham, Vail Dance Festival, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Center, Works & Process, and her choreographic Broadway debut, Flying Over Sunset . MacArthur Fellow, Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow, Doris Duke Artist, Princess Grace, Alpert Award, and Bessie Award winner.

Daniel Ezralow, an artistic director, choreographer, writer, and performer, has made a career expanding the boundaries of dance; he is known for his work in theatre, film, opera, and television. Honors include two American Choreography Awards, Choreographic Media Honors Award, an Emmy Award and nomination, Premio Positano (Italy), Nijinsky Award, Ischia Award, NEA Choreographic Fellowship, and McCallum Theatre Choreographic lifetime achievement award.

Kitty McNamee is an artist, a creator and, most importantly, a collaborator. Spanning genres, Kitty’s passion for the human heart, psychology and storytelling fuels her work with non-dancers and dancers alike. Her directorial work is infused with this same kinetic wonder. Her dance films have screened at over 50 festivals worldwide.

David Neumann works across many disciplines including film, television, opera, and musicals. As Artistic Director of Advanced Beginner Group, Neumann creates nationally recognized original work for the stage. His many awards include: Hadestown: 2019 Chita Rivera Award, 2019 Tony nomination, and 2022 LA Drama Critics Circle Award. For ABG: three NY Dance and Performance Bessie Awards.

DAVID NEUMANN | I started downtown—way, way, way downtown—doing concert dance and experimental theatre at venues like The Kitchen, P.S. 122, et cetera, et cetera. Concurrently, I was working in the theatre, mostly at Soho Rep and New York Theatre Workshop, those kinds of spaces, and then I started to branch out and get into musicals. And now I’m working on musicals that are headed towards Broadway, and I’m working on films, and I’m still doing the downtown work as I can. And so here we are.

MICHELLE DORRANCE | I’m a tap dancer first and foremost. Ayodele and I could both speak to this, but tap dance lives in a space in our tradition that is not entirely embraced by the theatre or the concert dance world, at least the legacy that we’re part of. I came up in tap dance in the early 1990s, which was during a renaissance and resurgence and a point at which folks were being gathered together, including the last elders of the jazz era. Savion Glover creating Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk [with George C. Wolfe] and choreographing that work was a huge push for the legacy we believed in entering the theatrical space. And there were, of course, a number of companies that were pushing into the concert-dance space, but they didn’t seem to have the same respect or staying power that one would hope.

I grew up watching dance at ADF [American Dance Festival] because my mom was a professional ballet dancer. As a young dancer, I understood the canon of ballet and classical forms in the country, but I fell deeply in love with tap dance at age seven. I vividly remember an evening with tap dance in it at the American Dance Festival that blew my mind. It was 1992, I was 12, and the evening included Savion Glover, “Buster” Brown, and “Sandman” Sims. The second act was [with flamenco dancer] José Greco II, and they ended with a big flamenco-tap dance off.

When I was given an opportunity in 2011 to present at Danspace Project and share an evening with Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, another peer of Ayodele’s and mine, I realized it was an opportunity to show how expansive the form is. I made the choice to honor the tradition and also kind of step outside the bounds a little bit; that was the beginning of making a choice to engage with concert work. When I had a conversation with James Lapine about Flying Over Sunset, he said, “When I saw your work, I thought you were a choreographer who could create something that had to do with LSD.” That’s how I stepped in a more formal way into the theatre world.

AYODELE CASEL | Hi Michelle. Hi everybody. I’m Ayodele Casel. I actually came into tap dancing as an actor. I was an acting major at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, in pursuit of being a film and television actor, and I got the opportunity in my sophomore year to take my first tap class. My interest had already been piqued because of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, seeing tap in the way it had existed on the screen. I happened to be at NYU in the mid-’90s, when there was a resurgence, as Michelle said, of young people tap dancing—young people of color and Black men in particular. I remember going to The Public Theater and seeing Noise/Funk and recognizing that there was a space for people who looked like me to do this art form that I had only seen Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell and Gene Kelly and Ruby Keeler and Ann Miller and so on and so forth doing. And then, of course, learning about the depth of the form and how deeply rooted it was in African culture and Black American culture kept me involved for the rest of my life.

I do not have a dance company, though I do dance with, if I had to say, a “pickup” company of dancers that I work with very consistently for concert work. I have worked primarily as a

soloist, as a performer, and I have enjoyed a great career and also being in other folks’ companies and, of course, in my own practice. To fast-forward to where tap dancing and theatre connect again for me— there was Gregory Hines in Jelly’s Last Jam and all of the ways that he brought his tap dance artistry to the theatrical world. There was Henry LeTang [choreographer of Eubie!, Sophisticated Ladies, and Black and Blue] and the way those shows took up that space so beautifully and so authentically on the Broadway stage.

For me, the leap back to tap dancing and theatre was twofold. One, it was my own desire to marry my creative expression as an actor and storyteller with my tap-dancing skills. That was one personal pursuit. In 2016, I did a piece called “While I Have the Floor” at City Center for Jeanine Tesori’s Jamboree, which was directed by Michael Mayer. From that, Leigh Silverman, another wonderful director, invited me to choreograph Really Rosie for Encores! Off-Center the following year. By then, Michael and I had become pretty friendly, so when Funny Girl came on the table, he said, “I have an idea. The choreographer [Ellenore Scott] doesn’t tap dance, but I would love for you to do the tap choreography.” And so that’s how my return to theatre has developed and where it lives right now.

DANIEL EZRALOW | I was a pre-med at Berkeley—had never taken a dance class in my life—when I took a Martha Graham dance class with David Wood from the Graham Company [and founder of the dance program at the University of California at Berkeley]. It was hard, and I kind of fell in love with it. A couple of years later I found myself in New York City thinking, “Forget about pre-med, what the hell is this thing called dance and why do people do it?” I ended up finding my way to a little dance company called 5X2 Plus, then into Lar Lubovitch, and finally into Paul Taylor, where I found a bit of a home for three years, but I don’t have much zitsfleysh—that’s a Yiddish word for “sitting flesh” [the ability to sit for a long period of time]. I kind of move around a lot.

MICHELLE DORRANCE

I was into dance; I didn’t want to be a choreographer. But I realized that the ways that they were expressing dance in New York City weren’t the only ways, so Moses Pendleton [founder of MOMIX] and I decided to go off into the country and run around in the woods. This was before you guys of the MTV world were born, and dance was making its way into rock and roll. We ended up working with Bowie and U2. Things exploded in a way that was interesting because dance became not just functional on the stage for its own purpose, but it became a server for others in other forms.

I paid my dues with Hubbard Street Dance and Batsheva Dance Company, but I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do. I dabbled in film; I actually acted in movies in Italy with some big directors because they saw dance as a part of their thing, and I became this dancing character actor. I met Julie Taymor when she was a mask maker, and we had a very strong connection as friends. We ended up working together on operas, on movies, on Broadway, and various things. And then I got into ceremonies, like the Olympics and expos.

After all this time, the only question I have is: Why? “Why” meaning: What’s next? Why are we doing this? Do we express it because we believe dance is a language in itself and it needs no other collaboration? Or do we express it in the form of musical theatre or a Broadway piece or a movie as a coinhabitant with the drama and the visuals and the music? These are all questions. I think,

ultimately, we just have to keep making, we have to keep creating. We have to keep our bodies and our souls creative.

Once in a while, I put together a little dance company, like Ayodele said, sort of a pickup thing, just because I’m thirsty for getting back to a stage where it’s just watching movement and understanding what is this neuron mirroring that I’m getting that’s affecting my body. And then I’ll say, okay, I’m done with that. I’m kind of okay where I arrive, I have no idea where I’m going next. I like building decks, and I like a chainsaw.

AYODELE | I would like to do that with you. I did my whole backyard by myself, it’s fantastic.

DANIEL | It’s so hard doing it alone.

AYODELE | It’s therapeutic.

MICHELLE | I’m with you both. When I lived in a mechanic’s garage—this is 15 years ago—I finally learned how to put up drywall. It was one of my favorite times of my life— there were rats in the place, it was 400 bucks a month; it was awesome. I’ve never been more grateful for learning anything, because since then, I’ve built people beds and lofts and sets for my company because we have no money. You have to do it yourself. We’re all carpenters.

DAVID | I built a shed.

KITTY McNAMEE | We’re builders, we’re makers.

AYODELE | My landscaping company will be called Tap That Grass.

KITTY | I’m not handy. But I think something that we all have in common is this drive to make and to do it yourself and be a little on the punk side of things where you just have to make do with what you have.

My next question is: Who inspired you or gave you the vision that this world could be possible? For me, it was a weird mix of reading about Martha Graham and looking at photographs of dancers, watching old movies, and seeing Bob Fosse films. David, is there a person or a combination of people where you saw their work and you thought, “This is possible for me, too?”

DAVID | I had an unusual background in that I grew up in the experimental theatre. I was watching The Wooster Group and Mabou Mines and Richard Foreman and all that New York kind of scene. But at the same time, I grew up in suburbia, so I was watching MTV and Soul Train, and also Jackie Chan films. I would say it was a combination of Michael

[Noise/Funk] was a huge push forthe legacywe believed in entering the theatrical space.

Savion Glover in Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk on Broadway

PHOTO Photofest

Jackson, Freddie “Rerun” Stubbs, Jackie Chan, and the experimental theatre folks. That mixture of influences was my first love and my exposure to making art; there was a lot of permission in terms of what one considered art making.

I came to dance a little bit later, concert dance formally, maybe like Daniel, too. But I think it was learning how to do early versions of popping and locking and that stuff, sitting in front of my TV, that started the DIY thing. It’s just sort of putting it together. You assemble these influences, feeling it in your body, and that’s what eventually turned into dance making. I didn’t really dance formally till college and after college, and then it just took off from there. That was the art form I really responded to the most.

KITTY | It’s interesting because I think there is a mindset that says TV is bad, media is not as good as live. For many of us, certainly for

me, growing up in the country, I couldn’t see live theatre. Everything I saw was on TV.

DAVID | It’s the original YouTube.

KITTY | Michelle, you started dancing really early. Do you have flickers of what made you think, “Oh, as a choreographer, I could follow that. I can see a way in through that?”

MICHELLE | I have two very different branches of influence. One is my childhood mentor in North Carolina, where I grew up; his name is Gene Medler [founder of the North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble and director of the NC Rhythm Tap Festival]. Gene brought the young people he was teaching to meet the elders of tap dance, so we were part of understanding the great depth of tap dance as a legacy that illustrated the history of America in both its darkest corners and also its most transcendent. Everyone was so generous. I met “Buster” Brown when I was 13. “Peg Leg” Bates would just sit and

talk with you for hours. Both of the Nicholas Brothers, the folks that we saw in movies. It was insane.

The other thing I can say is that I loved live music. Chapel Hill had a huge indie scene when the indie scene was developing. On MTV, I was obsessed with the Chili Peppers and early Pearl Jam and Nirvana. But also, of course, as a young person I would smoke pot and fall asleep to the Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane album. I was also a huge bluegrass fan; there are just so many different forms, and eventually I fell in love with the blues.

I feel really lucky to have grown up in the music community that I grew up in, with music and indie films—not to mention the golden era of hip-hop dance, which also has a deep relationship to the footwork in tap dance. There was so much that intersected that made me curious about the larger world—and, of course, the very African

Jared Grimes in Funny Girl on Broadway, with tap choreography by Ayodele Casel PHOTO Matthew Murphy

PEARL, directed + choreographed by Daniel

Ezralow PHOTO Jason Woodruff

Reeve Carney + company in Hadestown, choreographed by David Neumann

PHOTO Matthew Murphy

diasporic world of the intersections of these dances. They were the only ones that felt good in my body, because I was terrible at classical forms.

DANIEL EZRALOW

Tap dance is the reason vernacular jazz exists. The first time I saw house dance as a teenager, I was like, “They’re fake tap dancing. What are they even doing?” I didn’t know what they were up to. And then I realized it was West African and it all resonated. This is what our culture actually is. Academically, I went to NYU Gallatin where you create your own major. I was really curious about the way tap dance was the vehicle through which the American story is told in its really true form; that we don’t talk about minstrelsy as a cornerstone of American culture is insane. Everyone should acknowledge what a lot of our larger culture comes from and how much oppression exists, and how Black forms of resistance are the reason there is a triumph and benevolent

energy. Otherwise, this is a horror of a country.

AYODELE | I know everybody talks about diversity, equity, and inclusion right now, but when I was a young person in the ’90s, those words were not circulating. I was one of two Black people in my NYU class at Strasberg. The material I was given was what we consider standard classic American plays— we did Tennessee Williams and Ibsen. And I remember feeling like nobody’s going to cast me because there was no representation. The first time I thought that it would be possible for me in the theatre world was when I saw a poster for Rent in the subway, and I saw Daphne Rubin-Vega and thought, “She looks like me.” That was the first time that I thought, oh wow, there’s somebody who’s doing this that looks like me in this theatrical space.

The second time I thought it was possible was when I saw Savion Glover and those other young men in Noise/Funk. Up until that point, people would constantly compare me to Rosie Perez. We don’t look alike at all, but there was no reference. I think it’s really important to point out, because, in a way, you have [to make] something happen against all odds and against everything that you think is possible.

When you finally do see yourself as it relates to your color and your ethnicity, and then they’re all men, then it’s like, well, where’s the space for me there? But I think perseverance gets you through. Once I educated myself about what was possible within the art form, I understood that it was beyond just what I had seen from on the silver screen. I knew about Gregory Hines and the Nicholas Brothers and Bill Robinson. That was the blueprint, and I knew that we belong here.

Not only do we belong here, but like you said, Michelle, when you talk about minstrelsy—let’s talk about minstrelsy and vaudeville and those beginnings of theatre and the appropriation of our communities. And when I say “our,” I mean the Black communities and dance and appropriating those into performance, and then us not being able to do them and not being invited back into the space. I feel like now understanding context is so important— historical context. And it makes me feel like, yeah, we belong here. It makes sense to me that tap dancing is happening again in this way in theatre again, because it’s where we belong all the time.

DANIEL | I’m constantly searching for my voice. I’m constantly searching for the singular voice against the mass that wants

Ultimately, we just have to keep making, we have to keep creating.

The Blues Project performed by Dorrance Dance

PHOTO Em Watson

to squish me down. As artists, you have to just keep searching for your voice. What is it that you need to say?

What I have found is the great inspiration for me didn’t come from dancers, it came from other fields. The inspiration came from people, really great people, at the top of their field, who were so simple and yet so profound that when I asked them a question they would answer and there was no attitude, no hierarchy, no I’m this or that. In fact, the people I met in the dance world, on Broadway, in movies—I hate to say it, but there’s a power thing. The #MeToo movement in a way broke out the whole concept of the power struggle; now it’s the people who want to be in power. Ultimately for me, it’s constantly searching for creative people that speak their voice. I respond to that creative urge.

Ayodele, what you just said about how you broke through is really—it’s inspiring to me, because that’s the same thing we all fight for in our own little way. It’s less obvious in some ways, but you all break through to share your voice. And at the end, “why” is the big question—why you have this urge, why you have this need. I mean, building decks is easier.

AYODELE | If I could just respond to that really quickly. There is the personal pursuit of seeking your

ETM: Double Down performed by Dorrance Dance PHOTO Matthew Murphy

Anthony Morigerato, John Manzari, Ayodele Casel + Naomi Funaki in Caravan PHOTO Kurt Csolak

authentic expression, and that journey is universal. What I was referring to before is that it does matter as it relates to who gets to do that. Who gets the opportunity to fully do that with support and representation is important. And so, for me, and I’m sure for a lot of people of color, if you don’t see it—it’s like, you have to see it to be it, right? And if that’s being suppressed, if that’s being oppressed, if people are gatekeeping those opportunities from you specifically, then it makes it infinitely harder, because it’s already hard to find your artistic voice, period, as a human being. It does make it harder when those opportunities are being given to folks that don’t look like you.

DANIEL | I totally agree.

MICHELLE | I was just going to say Ayo—I’m sure I said this to you a billion years ago, but I would love for the world to know— seeing you dance with Savion was a huge inspiration to me and all of the women who are younger than you, and probably the same age as you as well. [Editor’s Note: Ayodele was the first female tap dancer in Savion Glover’s company, Not Your Ordinary Tappers.] Because it was a bit of a boy’s club. Even Jelly’s Last Jam, it was Savion and Gregory. There were women around but not doing a damn thing! I’m a white girl who had

plenty of access in other directions, but this is the world that meant the most to me and spoke the deepest and that I identified with. It’s amazing that you pushed through in that time to become that for us. It was awesome. It was incredible.

AYODELE | Thank you.

KITTY | I’m going to make a big topic jump. Does anyone want to speak about the difference in your process when you’re shifting from leading a company and generating work to collaborating with a director?

People have asked me before, “What’s the difference between rehearsing “Rat-Tat-TatTat” for Funny Girl and the company work that we do in the tap dance tradition?” And I don’t know, of course, maybe the vocabulary, maybe some of that gets sort of—I don’t want to say simplified, because I think what I did in Funny Girl is pretty intricate. But I don’t know. To me, it’s about the room, the environment that you create in the room. What I have always found—and I wonder if you would agree with this, Michelle—is that people love tap dancing. And the Funny Girl ensemble, for example, even though they didn’t come in with all the skills a professional tap dancer would have, they wanted it so badly and they could feel how important it was and how different it was for them. They worked their behinds off to get it to that level, and that was really exciting. So, I think the spirit in the room is the same, no matter what the intricacy of the phrase is, I think that the desire is the same.

AYODELE | I have found that if a director brings you into the room, there’s a level of trust there, and it’s something that they’re really excited to discover themselves. Both Michael and Leigh were very—I don’t want to say hands off, they had opinions—but I felt like they were both open to whatever my perspective was for the particular project.

DAVID | I’ll just share that I come from a tradition, and I see it wherever I go, that theatre and dance are really collaborative art forms. Even when you’re doing a solo, you have to interact with people. Part of what the job requires is an openness to recognize who is in the room and what their needs are. That’s partly involved in the hierarchy that

You assemble these influences, feeling it in your body, and that’s what eventuallyturned into dance making.

DAVID NEUMANN

Eddie Izzard in the film Across the Universe, directed by Julie Taymor + choreographed by Daniel Ezralow PHOTO Sony Pictures/Photofest

one might encounter more in a commercial setting than in the downtown things that I’ve done; it’s not always the same uptown, so to speak. Ayodele, I think your point is really true that once the director has brought you in, there is already a conversation that has begun. Part of why I love doing this is that I get to work with amazing people on either side of the table, as it were. And that’s thrilling and inspiring.

KITTY | I know for me, going from concert dance to, say, opera, it was almost a relief because I didn’t have all of the pressure on me. I didn’t have to produce it and hire everybody and get the theatre and get the dancers. I just came and choreographed and got to meet new people. Of course, there are challenges, but I found it to be liberating in a way.

DANIEL | I think what David said is right, that there is a collaborative nature that is assumed once you’re working together. But if you hop, skip, and jump to different fields from concert work to opera, to theatre, to Broadway, to movies, to television, to MTV, to commercials, they all have their different dynamic. And each dynamic is so delicate based on, as you said, the hierarchy. Are you doing it for money? Are you doing it for art? And then each one has their little system of who’s running the business. It happens across the board—it happens on Broadway; it happens in movies; I think it

even happens in concert dance, whether you get a booking or not.

AYODELE CASEL

So, there’s this whole system that we have to deal with. It’s required because we’re on the planet together. It’s something that happens. However, I think when you find a collaborator that you connect with—be it another dancer, be it another choreographer, be it a musical artist, a visual artist, or a director—there’s a trust that develops and then your voice can come out. I find that with Julie [Taymor], of all people, because we trust each other. I mean, she’s crazy sometimes, I’m crazy a lot of times, and we won’t walk away from each other. I’ll say, “Well, what the hell are you talking about? Please explain it to me.” And she’ll start, or vice versa. There are people in the world where your voice can come out in collaboration, and you don’t have to run the show. Because otherwise, I feel sometimes, like when I make my own show, I’ve got to run it, because my ideas are crazy and nobody’s going to get them until

they’re done. I’m going to keep talking and everyone’s going to say, what the hell are you talking about? I know, I don’t do it like everyone else. When you work with someone you know, it’s wonderful.

KITTY | This is our last question. What’s next?

AYODELE | I wanted to say, Daniel, there’s a line in the movie Tap where Gregory says, “Well, I don’t do it like everybody else.” I get that.

What’s next? Well, for me, what’s most imminent is a New York City Center premiere, “Artists at the Center.” Michelle, you used the word “expansive” in describing tap dancing. I love that this first half of this particular show is 10 choreographic voices within one act so that we can get a nice view of what tap dancing looks and feels like right now. It’s so beautiful. So that’s what’s next there.

The other thing I’m working on is writing. I have a commission from A.R.T. to continue working on the show that I was researching when I was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. I’m finishing that particular project up so that we can put it on its feet and get it on stage. Those are the most immediate things. And then the Funny Girl tour is happening in September.

DAVID | Speaking of [Funny Girl director] Michael Mayer, I’m doing a couple projects with Michael right now. We’re doing workshops, which are super fun. I’m going to

If a director brings you into the room, there’s a level of trust there, and it’s something that they’re really excited to discover themselves.

David Neumann (in chair) in Advanced Beginner Group’s I Understand Everything Better at Abrons Arts Center, with concept, direction + choreography by David Neumann PHOTO Maria Baranova

continue collaborating with Noah Baumbach. I worked on a couple of his last films, which is really exciting, and Advanced Beginner Group is doing a third piece in our trilogy, which we started in 2018 and has been exploring a conversation between myself and theatre artist Marcella Murray on the subject of race and privilege, along with designer and artist Tei Blow. I’m very excited to go into that.

MICHELLE | Ephrat Asherie and I are hopefully going to be able to approach a collaboration that was almost at City Center, and now it might actually happen again. It’ll be a short something. I’m really looking forward to that, because what I’ve realized I value the most—and Daniel, you spoke to this in relationship to people’s teams and trust—is that it is so incredible to work with your friends. And I’m working with my company, remounting a few things.

But I did actually want to say one thing about that question that Kitty asked earlier, because I want to give James [Lapine] a ton of credit. There was not a ton of choreography in Flying Over Sunset, but it was a master class with him. It was very difficult for me, because I’ve been running my own company, to realize I wasn’t in charge. And James was so generous; he had me next to him constantly. And I was so grateful for what I learned from him.

His process was similar to how you described your process, Daniel. I was like, “What are we doing?” Whereas I always know exactly what I’m doing, and also like: first instinct, best instinct. James would be like, “Okay, cool. That was cool. Let’s try it another way.” And I would say, “They’re not all dancers, James. This is going to take a second. I have to tell them exactly what the blocking is. They can’t intuit it.” These actors were brilliant, these folks that I got to work with. But actors have questions; dancers don’t ask questions, they just do. I was like, “I have to answer eight questions about heel drops.”

I was challenged in all these ways that I so valued and realized that yes, tap dance can move forward the narrative, but it can also be the connective and emotional tissue, this abstract thing. Getting to feel that in this space was all thanks to this collaboration where I was pushed completely outside my comfort zone. I did get to make a “Wham! Bam! Thank You, Ma’am!” tap piece. But there are other elements, choreographically, that were an incredible challenge. It was a humbling and an unbelievable learning process to step into that world and outside of mine. I wanted to say that as well. I would not do James or that entire experience, that incredible cast, justice without it.

DANIEL | There’s a lot of different things brewing all the time. I’ve been working for five years on trying to get this show with the

music of The Doors. And I’ve been talking with Francis [Ford Coppola] for a couple years about a theatre project; we talked and talked and talked, and he ended up not having the funding for it. We would have these wonderful three-hour conversations over an espresso. He’s a great guy, a brilliant man, and he said, “I can’t do it, Daniel. We can’t.” I said, “Francis, don’t worry about it. Whatever you want to do that helps this world, I’m in, whatever it is.” And he dropped a film script on my desk that he’d been working on for 20 years, called Megalopolis, that’s coming out. It’s kind of a wild thing.

But the truth is, the only thing I really see as amazingly exciting is picking up this chainsaw and getting that big oak in my backyard and trying to do this chaise lounge, which is really hard. I mean, it’s unusual for a dancer to be holding a chainsaw, but it’s a trip. It’s the contrast that I love.

MICHELLE | Wait, Daniel, you’re making a chaise out of an oak tree that has fallen or you have taken down in your backyard?

DANIEL | An oak tree fell, it’s enormous. I cut about an eight-foot section. I can’t move it, so I have to do it up there in the hill. I’m trying to see if I can make a chaise; you can just lay on this piece of wood, and it’ll form to your body. I mean, it’ll be the most beautiful creation I’ve ever made if I can do it.

Flying Over Sunset at Lincoln Center Theater, directed by James Lapine + choreographed by Michelle Dorrance PHOTO Joan Marcus

Choreographers

Choreographers

Choreographers

Choreographers

Collaboration

Collaboration

Collaboration

A Collection of Short Essays by

For this section of the Journal, we invited a range of choreographers—covering dance, movement, and fight choreography—to address the idea of collaboration however they chose. The essays that follow include reflections on the collaborative process, evocations of projects with specific directors, and vivid examples of creative partnerships. Even as similar themes echo and reverberate, the individual voices of the choreographers shine through these essays.

ASKING FOR TRUST, SERVING THE NARRATIVE

BY MAYTE NATALIO

I believe most creatives will agree that collaborations are a practice. Some work out better than others—but all provide lessons and growth. There are so many factors that go into director/choreographer collaborations that, in an attempt to not overgeneralize, I’ll share a few things that have been working for me in my everevolving process.

The audience can understand a performer’s physicality

they can understand text.

I quickly learned that the job description varies with each director. I’ve worked with directors who prefer my input and presence every step of the way; then there are others who hold onto their vision a little more tightly, and it can seem as if they only need me for the things they can’t do themselves. Some directors have extensive experience with dance and provide feedback I can easily interpret through movement. Some are newer to movement, and in these cases, I need to help them articulate what they are asking for. There is no right or wrong way. A director’s style is driven by their training, lived experience, and the tools they have discovered that allow them to best do their job. Understanding a director’s style dictates my approach to the collaboration, but it does not mean I surrender to it. I’ve realized that I too need to have a clear understanding of how I work best, my creative habits, and my impulses. This awareness allows for smoother weaving of ideas and concepts when working with a director.

Coming up with “steps” is actually not very difficult for me. The challenge is making it all make sense. My background is in concert dance, where dance is the leading player. In musicals and plays, dance is important but

not usually what’s holding a work together. If I want dance to matter in musical theatre, then it can’t be decoration, and it must serve the narrative in the way the text and lyrics do. With movement, this is easier said than done, because you also don’t want your performers to become mimes— interpreting things too literally. This is where I lean on a director’s guidance and trust to help navigate how the movement lives in a production. I love when a director is invested in the movement, questioning gestural language, repetition, dynamics, and quality.

In turn, I try to listen to the director’s notes to the cast, the dramaturg’s anecdotes, and the music director’s notes on texture. It’s important that my work does not contradict their work. Are we accomplishing what we set out to do and

are all creative roads leading to the same goal? Where are we placing our egos—on our individual work or on the production as a whole? Sometimes I create something I love but it pulls focus from a vital story point, and a director might ask me to strip it down or remove a section completely. If we are in sync, these edits can be implemented without much hesitation. The opposite also happens, and a scene or song we thought was meant to be simple and bare is not expressing the tone or tension that we need. In these instances, I will always offer more movement. The audience can understand a performer’s physicality much faster than they can understand text. Once trust is built, discovering a show’s movement vocabulary with a director is one of my favorite parts of the process.

much fasterthan

Hair at The Old Globe, choreographed by Mayte Natalio PHOTO Jim Cox

Trust doesn’t always happen immediately, but it can be gained in the most classic ways: through listening, communication, honesty, and genuine curiosity. Sometimes I straight up just ask for it (then I have to deliver!). I have to believe that I am a movement expert, even if I might not feel like it at the time. I’ve been brought on the team for that reason. The more I trust my instincts, and the clearer I am at expressing my ideas or questions, the easier it is for a director to respond with constructive feedback and requests. I’m always willing to try out a left-field idea and devise many drafts as long as they are intentional. Often when choreographers are brought onto a team, the directors, writers, and composers have already been working together for some time, and they have combed through the lyrics and text thoroughly. As we know, in musicals, the performers learn their songs first and the music director gets them to sound great; then I come in and add a ton of movement, and there goes that beautiful song. No matter how many musicals the team has done, I always get the question, “Do you think this is possible?” There is concern that all their hard work and storytelling will suffer.

This is where I ask for trust. I make a promise to make adjustments in a few weeks if things have not improved, but I need to be able to build the performer’s stamina, endurance, quality, and physical storytelling on top of what’s already there. It’s why I’m in the room. I do feel like these days dance is not given the value that it deserves, so with a director’s guidance and our collective vision in mind, I will always fight to give my choreography the responsibility of carrying important narrative points in any process I’m in. I believe in dance that much, and I gladly accept the challenge of proving its importance.

EVERYTHING IS PART OF EVERYTHING ELSE

BY ROBB HUNTER

My role as the fight choreographer is, first and foremost, to safely and truthfully create movement, particularly those moments containing staged violence. My responsibility neither begins nor ends there, however. In an ideal world, I join the team in the early planning stages of the production with the other designers. From the moment I sign on to the project, I make myself available to the production as a multifaceted resource. A quote that encapsulates my guiding philosophy quite well is: “Everything is part of everything else.” My goal is to enhance everyone else’s work, because all of our responsibilities are interrelated.

starts with “they fight,” nor does it end with “she dies.”

In my process, the relationship that is of primary concern is the one I have with the director, although an argument could be made that it is with the text, but let’s leave that for another time. If I had to boil it down to one thing that is vital to every successful partnership, it would be trust—trust in each other’s abilities, of course, but also trust in honest discourse about the ideas that work and those that do not.

Mayte Natalio, a choreographer from New York City, will make her Broadway debut this fall as choreographer for the musical How to Dance in Ohio.

For instance, I have collaborated with costume and props departments to design, mix, and choreograph hundreds of blood effects. When a table needs to break away at just the right moment— or when a table must absolutely not break—I’ll consult with the set designer and TD to make it happen, or not. If we need to test a half-ton steel tank and trial run a “drowning,” it is me in the tank of freezing water working out the specifics and learning everything I can about the process long before the actor gets near it. If we are producing Assassins, I’ll provide research on the historical figures (the assassins), the relevant events, and the firearms needed for the show, and train the actors and crew in their use. If weapon props of any sort are needed in a production, I collaborate with the director, actors, and almost every other department to advise, provide, or possibly even build them. In my career, I have had to address a hundred different issues that seemed to have little to do with a “fight” but were vital to the actors’ safety or to bringing the director’s vision to fruition. My job is to tell a story and to protect those entrusted to my care: cast, crew, and audience. And it never simply

Trust was particularly evident in the 2019 production of Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Richard the Third , directed by David Muse. This atmosphere allowed for a wonderfully uninhibited and prolific exchange of ideas. Long before the rehearsal process began, David and I had several discussions (together with choreographer Stephanie Paul) about his overall concept and, in particular, the idea of fully staging each of the numerous deaths in the play. For a bit of background, most of these events would traditionally occur offstage, and they receive little mention textually, but David felt that staging these moments was vital to telling his version of the story, one that unequivocally indicts Richard as well as his underlings whose crime was often simply “to stand by and do nothing.” By staging these executions as entertaining, if terrible, “set pieces” accompanied by rhythmic sound and movement, the audience often found itself enjoying the gruesome spectacle and, in doing so, becoming complicit in this fascinating megalomaniac’s rise to the throne. (Perhaps an uncomfortable and all-too-relevant position in our recent political climate?)

Despite the often horrible nature of our subject matter, we thrived on the challenge of telling the story in a way that creatively and effectively engaged the audience. David would provide structure, inspiration, and insight on a day-to-day basis. The sense of trust we

We come together as individual artists with tremendous generosity of spirit to create a thing of significant, if ephemeral, value that is far greaterthan the sum of its parts.

all shared allowed us to try things that we otherwise might have eschewed. Some inspired ideas emerged late in the process while others ended on the chopping block (pun intended) days before opening. And we all brought something to the process each day. In any given rehearsal, I might present research on methods of execution from around the world or bring in various blades and files which were “tuned” for just the right clatter, clank, or menacing rasp. I might work with the actors on how bodies react to various “stimuli” while Stephanie would craft rhythms and physicality with them that would be used to build tension and heighten story. Our props designer, Chris Young, would build ingenious devices for us to play with while scenic designer Debra Booth provided us with a playground on which to explore. Costume designer Murell Horton would build or adapt his remarkable costumes to ease (and, in some cases, purposefully inhibit) actors’ movements or even become implements of murder themselves. The list of creative minds and gifted hands, including the crews that brought the designers’ visions to life and, of course, the amazing actors whose input, talent, and energy would bring it all together, is vast. There was never a challenge that was left to a single person or department as we all supported each other, because “everything is part of everything else.” Each day of the process was a fusion of ideas and inspiration that reminded me what I love the most about the theatre; we come together as individual artists with a tremendous generosity of spirit to create a thing of significant, if ephemeral, value that is far greater than the sum of its parts.

Richard the Third at Shakespeare Theatre Company, with fight choreography by Robb Hunter PHOTO Scott Suchman

Robb Hunter, an award-winning fight choreographer with 30 years of experience in professional theatre, is a Member of SDC, AEA, and SAG/ AFTRA.

CO-CONSPIRATORS

BY DANNY MEFFORD

I met Jack O’Brien in the spring of 2014, a few weeks before he began rehearsal on Much Ado About Nothing in Central Park starring Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater. I’d worked at The Public a few times, and they’d put me forward as a possible choreographer. I met him at Chelsea Studios while he was on break from auditioning. I sat down, we started chatting, and within minutes, he asked, “Do you want to do this with me?” I replied, “Absolutely.” “Great,” he said, “so here’s what we need to make...” and we dove into the production. I hadn’t done Fun Home on Broadway yet or Dear Evan Hansen I wasn’t a complete newbie, but I wasn’t exactly known. He’d certainly never heard of me before this meeting. Later, he told me he trusts his gut about people, and his gut told him that it felt right, we felt right.

Since then, I’ve hired many people the same way. Most notably for me, the late Darius Barnes as associate choreographer on the Off-Broadway production of Kimberly Akimbo. Somehow, in an instant, it makes you co-conspirators.

Then, I watched Jack work a room. If you’ve ever had that joy, you know he makes every person feel that they’re valued and integral

to the success of the story. He builds a magical bubble around the rehearsal space with his words and energy. You walk through the door into the bubble, and you feel that theatre is important, that you are important, and that your work is important. But this isn’t one of those coddling spaces, the kind that risks becoming therapy for the people involved, and thus, loses the thread of the story which, once presented to an audience, might feel insular to them. Because “the play is the thing,” and Jack always keeps that at the forefront. Everyone brings their A-game because anything less would be a betrayal of the artistic community that’s been created.

theatremaking is a tradition that artists pass on to one another, so he metes out the gems generously.

While we were rehearsing another show a year or so after Much Ado, he lost it on a designer during a production meeting. I’d never seen it from him before. Didn’t know it was possible, actually. After the meeting was over, he looked me in the eye, his baby blues a halcyon sea, “You can only do that once on every production because the second time it’s lost all its power. But if you have to do it, you HAVE to do it.”

I’ve seen a lot of directors lose it. I’ve lost it myself a couple of times! Making theatre can be stressful, and we’re not perfect. I’ve rarely seen a director lose it on behalf of another artist and not on behalf of themselves, though. That’s what I want to tell you. Without surrendering any of his power or intelligence, Jack surrenders his ego to the story and the community telling it.

He’s a rare combination of kind and extremely exacting—hilarious too. He tells you the truth. He said to me once, “Telling someone that their work is good when it’s not is the cruelest thing you can do.”

He’s full of gems like that, mined by a life spent doing so many productions it makes my head spin, and he’s deeply aware that

You walk through the door... and you feel that theatre is important, that you are important, and that yourwork is important.

Danny Mefford choreographed Kimberly Akimbo, Dear Evan Hansen, and Fun Home, all Tony Award winners for Best Musical; many Off-Broadway musicals and plays; and a few TV gigs like Dickinson

Hamish Linklater, Lily Rabe + company in The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Jack O’Brien + choreographed by Danny Mefford

PHOTO Joan Marcus

LESSONS IN HOW TO RUN A ROOM

BY DENIS JONES

Directors work differently; it’s an art—not a science. Some prefer having thorough conversations about the psychological shape of the piece, what is happening moment to moment, and how movement can help to tell that particular story. All before I get on my feet. Others prefer to let me do my thing first, so that they have something to respond to. Dance can be a hard thing to explain. It certainly is for me, and I get the value of showing before telling. Either way works, inside out or outside in, so long as you two are figuring it out together. That said, I do feel strongly that it is the director’s vision that you as a choreographer are there to support and amplify.

I was a performer in New York for many years; I did a number of Broadway shows and was the dance captain for the first time with the Broadway company of Chicago, early in its run. I learned a great deal from that experience, and I formed an appreciation

for how shows are put together from the other side of the footlights. I became particularly interested in not only teaching the choreography, but also sharing with these dancing actors my thoughts about the musical itself, interpreting and protecting the creative team’s point of view.

As a performer, I had the opportunity to do some shows that Jerry Mitchell choreographed—Never Gonna Dance and The Full Monty. Then I worked as an assistant and as an Associate to Jerry on a number of projects, including Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Legally Blonde. That was a very clarifying time for me, in terms of learning both process—how to run a room—and also discovering the kind of work I wanted to do as a creative person.

Working with Jerry as a performer gave me a particular sense of his process, but when I had the chance to work next to him, I more fully appreciated what a warm environment he created. He ran a very supportive and joyful room, something that I have tried to carry with me as I create rooms of my own, that I hope are both artistically productive and a pleasure to be in.

When I first started to work as a directorchoreographer, it felt a little lonely to me. I missed having another person to talk to. But I work with a number of Associates, both Associate Directors and Associate Choreographers—brilliant, creative people— which helps to fill that void. I appreciate a relationship where Associates are able to

speak freely as we generate work together and react to what we have created. Our conversations are invaluable to me; we may not always agree, but I don’t ever want my Associates to feel that they have to edit themselves.

I’ve definitely experienced a learning curve when it comes to those conversations. When I did Associate work, I had to figure out when it was appropriate to say something. That’s a real thing—if I ran a room where everybody was expressing all their thoughts in free form simultaneously, we’d never get anything done. Someone has to lead the process and create the appropriate space to talk about things, ideally with everyone in a “yes, and” spirit.

This article has been edited and condensed from a conversation.

Denis Jones is a New York-based directorchoreographer and a two-time Tony Award nominee.

Guys and Dolls at the Kennedy Center, choreographed by Denis Jones PHOTO Jeremy Daniel

TRUST + FUN

BY DARRELL GRAND MOULTRIE

Trust and fun. The relationship between director and choreographer is one that is totally connected in trust and enjoying the process together. I enjoy talking through a director’s vision and then putting the art on its feet and then returning for even more of the director’s feedback. I love combining both visions into something we can both creatively dig at. I definitely believe it is a sacred relationship. Sometimes it can gel really quickly—and that’s amazing—but I also believe in letting the relationship evolve over time. It’s the removing of ego and being able to trust each other’s artistic notes in line with getting the song, scene, or transition to best serve the story and experience.

I can’t help but think about my relationship with director Saheem Ali. He lets me go into a room and be creatively free. We always come together at first to talk about both of our visions. I go put the number on its feet, and then we discuss, and he jumps in with notes, and we keep building to make it better. He also welcomes my ideas and thoughts about the entire show, not just choreography. One of the most important elements of successful relationships between directors and choreographers is knowing you have someone you can turn to when you don’t understand something or need more information. When you have that trust, your creative juices fly!

Darrell Grand Moultrie is a proud New Yorker born and raised in Harlem.

Marcel Spears + company in Fat Ham on Broadway, choreographed by Darrell Grand Moultrie PHOTO Joan Marcus

MERGING MINDS

BY KATIE SPELMAN

In January of 2021, I found myself in government quarantine in Sydney, Australia. The Associate team for Moulin Rouge! had traveled across the world in the middle of the pandemic to cast the Australian production. After weeks of visa paperwork, background checks, seemingly infinite swabbing, and a rather intense escort by the Australian military from the airport to the hotel, we finally settled into our isolated rooms. We spent the next two weeks unable to set foot outside our apartment doors.

It was in the middle of the first week of staving off insanity that I stumbled across an article in the New York Times about Dr. Adam Zeman and his recent discovery of aphantasia—a descriptor he had come up with himself (phantasia is Greek for

“imagination”). Aphantasia is the inability to form mental images of objects that are not present. On the other end of the spectrum is hyperphantasia, where one has extremely vivid mental imagery. Zeman states that neither aphantasia nor hyperphantasia are conditions; they are simply variations of the human experience, different versions of how the mind processes information.

me. I rambled about this discovery to my mom on a cross-continental FaceTime. She laughed. “You never found it odd,” she asked, “that you can recall the colors and patterns of the walls of the Mexican restaurant we used to take you to when you were little, even though it was knocked down in the mid-’90s?” No. I never found that odd. I just assumed that was something everyone’s mind could do.

The research on this is in its nascent stage—loose estimates approximate that 2-3% of the population have aphantasia, and 10% have hyperphantasia. I am somewhere in, or at least near, that 10%, and this research fundamentally changed the way I choreograph—in particular, the way I communicate with a director. It had never—not once—occurred to me that there were people that could not visualize full numbers, sequences, formations, and sets in their mind’s eye. The revelation floored

Working with a director to decide what kind of movement will best tell the story is a complex collaboration. Because of the nature of the process, a choreographer often comes to the table last. The story, music, costumes, set pieces, number of bodies on stage—most, if not all, of these things have been determined before the choreographer sets foot in the room. I should note that “limitation” has a canonically negative connotation; I personally use it as a positive. In my experience, nothing is more terrifying than a blank canvas or carte blanche. Ingenuity and creativity are often sparked because of—not in spite of—limitations. They are the scaffolding.

On top of this predetermined pile of limitations is the fact that you are ultimately

Whateverwinds up on stage is a combination of what I see in my head and what the director sees (or doesn’t see) in theirs.

Krysta Rodriguez + company in Cabaret at Barrington Stage Company, choreographed by Katie Spelman PHOTO Katie Spelman

trying to understand what a director is seeing in their mind’s eye, and to bring it to life. Zeman’s research made me realize that there is an incredibly broad spectrum of what and how humans visualize. This is something I had spent 30 years of my life not knowing. It had never even occurred to me to ask. Buoyed by new knowledge, I started to change my approach to the director/choreographer collaboration. Now I begin by trying to gauge how a director visualizes, or if they do at all. Zeman has found architects, artists, and folks in various visual mediums that demonstrate some degree of aphantasia. Establishing how clearly a director can visualize helps me to understand how to talk about the choreography. For those who seem closer to the hyperphantasia end of the spectrum, we can sit and chat and plot out ideas at a table; I can describe what I see in my head, and they can respond with adjustments, additions, and negations. If I find that they are closer to the aphantasia end of the spectrum, that means I am up on my feet—using chairs, dancers, anything I can to make what is in their/my head tangible and concrete. Something fascinating I’ve learned: Both processes yield wonderful results. More visual or less visual makes no difference in the quality of the director’s

idea; it just changes the journey from idea to reality.

Collaborating with a director is a favorite part of the process. We quite literally are merging minds. And because our minds form ideas and images pulled from things we have seen and experienced throughout our lives (“Nothing unknown is knowable,” as Tony Kushner put it), and no two people share the exact same lived experience, that means that no two people can visualize the exact same thing. That means whatever winds up on stage is a combination of what I see in my head and what the director sees (or doesn’t see) in theirs. The result is something that never could have existed without these two specific minds of two people that lived their two specific lives coming together to build something new. It’s an incredibly unique kind of connection, an incredibly unique kind of construction, somehow both individual and intellectually intimate. Add to that the minds of dancers and how they interpret movement, actors and how they interpret character and staging, designers and how they interpret text, playwrights and songwriters and how they interpret the world—and you realize that every production of a musical is an amalgamation of somewhere from 20 to 100 artists’ lives and

MOM-OGRAPHER

BY MISHA SHIELDS

Flash back to seven years ago: I was choreographing an Off-Broadway show, and I was six months pregnant. One day during rehearsal, one of the producers walked up to me and casually said, “I guess you won’t be working much anymore after the baby is born, huh?” Shortly after the show opened, I was hoping to leverage my Chita Rivera nomination to sign with an agency. While meeting with an agent, she looked right at my stomach and said, “I didn’t realize you were pregnant. Why don’t you go home and have this baby, take the time you need, and then in about a year from now, if you are ready and wanting to get back in the game, come see me.”

After both of these interactions, I was terrified that having a baby would permanently set back my career. People were questioning whether I could handle or even stay in this business as a mother. Who was going to hire me or take the risk to work with me once I had a baby? Would producers and

directors think I would be “too busy” or “too scattered” to devote myself to their show?

imaginations, and that no two productions can ever be identical. Each one is its own small universe, transient and unreplicable.

So many things in our current time are mass produced, copies, derivations, or regurgitations. And so often we forget that science and art are intricately linked. Zeman’s research, which I stumbled upon during a dark time for our industry, has given me incredible hope for the future of theatre. I can see—in my mind’s eye—a future where we as artists and collaborators are more communicative, more understanding of everyone else’s lived experience, and increasingly conscious of the fact that our minds can work together, even if they don’t work the same way.

Katie Spelman, a Brooklyn-based choreographer and director, makes her Broadway debut this season with The Notebook She was Associate Choreographer on Moulin Rouge! for the Boston, Broadway, and Australian companies.

I started to actually believe that I couldn’t do both—I couldn’t be a mother and a choreographer. The theatre business was not built for parents. All the out-of-town gigs, the space needed for creative work, the allconsuming rehearsal process, and the long tech hours make it hard to raise a family. Childcare costs alone during a rehearsal process can exceed the income from a

standard contract. And on top of that, to be out of work for possibly months at a time while in between contracts is not sustainable economically. Though it was my dream to be a theatre choreographer, I was worried I needed to find something else.

Deflated, I spoke with the director of my next show, which was scheduled out of town shortly after my due date. I expressed my fears, that I didn’t want to let them down, and that I was unsure if I could stay in this business. They hugged me and spoke words I will never forget: “You are not alone in this. I am here for you and want to understand what accommodations you need to succeed. You need to pump during rehearsal? Do it. You need to leave right at six to be there for bedtime? You got it. You need a twobedroom place with a kitchen for all those baby bottles? Ask for it. Having a baby should be celebrated, and I am so excited for you. This is not going to hinder your work, only enrich it. I don’t doubt you, and

I felt like I was completely alone and that the theatre industry didn’t have a place for a working mother. It was just expected that I would figure it out quietly or leave.

you shouldn’t either.” This conversation gave me the reassurance that I needed to move forward in my career with confidence, and I will always be grateful to this director for it.

Now I am a full-time mother of two beautiful girls and a choreographer. I am doing it, and I am proud of myself! I have found a system that works for me and my family when I am on a contract. But it has not been easy. To do my job at a high level and also make sure my kids are well cared for requires a village of family support and financial resources. I worry that my experience is the exception, not the rule. I am fortunate. If I didn’t have the support of my family (both with childcare and financially) and directors who understand and are flexible, then I wouldn’t be able to work in this business, especially as a parent of young children.

Looking back, maybe I was overwhelmed at the thought of becoming a mother and losing my identity as a theatre creative, and I shouldn’t have stressed so much and just trusted the path. But at the time, and based on the reactions I was hearing about my

pregnancy, I felt like I was completely alone and that the theatre industry didn’t have a place for a working mother. It was just expected that I would figure it out quietly or leave.

It is my hope that the next generation of parents will have access to more resources (e.g., childcare and paid parental leave), allowing them to pursue a full-time career in the theatre. I wish for the theatre culture to embrace and understand each and every parent’s need to continue their creative work. No one should have to choose between having a family or having a career. Strap that baby on your back and give a 5, 6, 7, 8!

I am forever grateful to all the directors I have worked with who gave me the support, belief, strength, and understanding that I have needed to balance my choreography work with being the mom I want to be. Thanks to them I’m still creating, still snapping and calling out counts over the music, still finding such joy in every discovery and every collaboration, still crying

at every opening night, and still loving every minute of it.

Our industry and our Union do not talk enough about the challenges of being a parent in this business. I hope we can change that. I have always wondered if moms and dads had similar experiences and feelings as I did during my first pregnancy. If you have, let me know. Let’s talk about them openly. It’s the first step to making our industry more accommodating and inclusive for working parents.

Upcoming:

Misha Shields is a New York and Boston-based theatre choreographer and mother of two beautiful girls.

Private Jones (Goodspeed and Signature Theatre, VA).

Loch Ness at The REV Theatre Company, choreographed by Misha Shields PHOTO Ron Heerkens, Jr./Goat Factory Media Entertainment, LLC

INSPIRING ME TO MAKE MY BEST WORK

BY ANTHONY VAN LAAST

I started my career as a dancer in the London Contemporary Dance Theatre. Whilst in the company, we were encouraged to choreograph by our Artistic Director Robert Cohan, a former member of the Martha Graham Dance Company. Workshops were held for any members of the company who wanted to choreograph, and Cohan would guide us. He would take on a directorial role, which was helpful for when I started working in musicals. It made the collaboration with directors more seamless.

It would be very easy to talk about the challenges I have had working with some directors, but with the majority with whom I have been lucky enough to work the experience has been positive and very exciting. Three directors in particular stand out.

When Phyllida Lloyd and I first worked together, she was mainly working on plays in all the main establishments in the UK as well as operas for the Royal Opera House, English National Opera, and Opera North and hadn’t embarked on musicals at that time. Phyllida and I made Mamma Mia! 25 years ago, and we also worked together on the first Mamma Mia! film, which she directed. More recently, we re-formed our partnership to create Tina: The Tina Turner Musical

We both believe in a huge amount of preparation before we go into production. We would dissect every part of the show and work very closely with the music department. I would work with my team to show Phyllida the choreography I had in mind as it was important to see if, collectively, we had the same vision. The storytelling and the character development within the staging were very important in our process of making the work. Phyllida is very analytical, demanding, and challenging, but because I know it is about the show, it can inspire me to make my best work. I also know she is as tough and demanding on herself! Her passion for perfection is infectious.

Bill Condon is a film director and writer. His work includes Dreamgirls, Chicago (directed by Rob Marshall), and Beauty and the Beast As well as working together on the film of Beauty and the Beast, we made Side Show for La Jolla Playhouse, which then transferred to the Kennedy Center before a short Broadway run.

Bill has an exceptional love and deep knowledge of musicals but had never made a theatre show at that time. This was not the first time I had worked with a director who hadn’t worked in the musical theatre world. I am aware I can be quite forceful, so I am very careful not to be overbearing and quietly opinionated. However, in Bill’s case he knew exactly what he wanted, and I feel I ended up being the pupil. I learnt so much during the rehearsal period because, as a film director, his eye for detail was phenomenal, and as a writer, his awareness of choreographic storytelling was exceptional. Bill made me become very analytical about my own choreography in a different way, for which I thank him.

And finally, I worked with Jerry Zaks. He needs no introduction. I had worked on Sister Act with two directors—one in London and one in Germany—prior to Jerry joining the production for its Broadway iteration. He is very rigorous about every detail in a show and watching him work was a master class in American musical theatre. He is one of the few directors I have collaborated with who can identify a staging or choreographic problem and know how to fix it. He is also hugely respectful of choreographers and choreography. No one knows more about comedy than Jerry, and he really taught me about the art of staging a comedy number.

I would like to think the success of these relationships boils down to mutual respect, the ability to communicate, and the desire to tell the best story possible. In all these cases, the directors never created an unnecessary hierarchy in the rehearsal room, and they all made the space a safe space, a place to explore, experiment, and fail and then, of course, try again.

The relationship between choreographer and director can be difficult, but when it does succeed, it can make something beyond the imagination of both parties.

Anthony Van Laast is currently choreographing a new musical in Vienna, Rock Me Amadeus, and will be Creative Director for the Olivier Awards 2024.

Nkeki Obi-Melekwe and cast in Tina on the West End, choreographed by Anthony Van Laast

PHOTO Manuel Harlan

TRUST. EMBRACE. RELEASE.

BY ADESOLA OSAKALUMI

Collaboration is the lifeblood of any good production. Not just in theatre but in life, in relationships, in navigating the New York City transit system, throwing a birthday party, driving over the George Washington Bridge, and more. Interestingly enough, all of these activities are elements of what it can feel like when creating work for a show. From my very earliest exposure to dance via the Egbe Omo Nago/Africa I Dance Theater in Brooklyn, I saw how creating dance truly takes a village. Those early experiences shaped the way I work and interact inside and outside of the rehearsal room.

Having a strong background in improvisational styles of movement has given me the freedom to always leave room for the dancer and actor to find what fits and allows them to fully embody what I am asking of them. After all, what good does it serve if we can’t get the performances we desire out of the artists we are working with? Sometimes that lack can be a result of an attempt to force something where it doesn’t fit, to want a combination to work so badly that we miss the fact it simply isn’t the best fit, or to be so blinded by our own ego we block out all the signs blaring “stop and do something else.”

This is where true collaboration starts. With trust. Real trust. That happens when you are open enough to take in an opposing point of view and leave space for something that never would have crossed your mind to actually be the better option. This battle, pas de deux, tango, roda de capoeira, or whichever term we want to use starts with the director. Having the ability to discuss and share and create with the director is what makes the magic really come to life. I’ve been fortunate to have had wonderful experiences with a variety of directors, and in every instance, I’ve left with more than I came in with. Does that mean there is always consensus about an idea? No. But if we are in service to the story and moving it along, we have to be willing to try—and there is no try without trust.

For example, in Coal Country—a play with music about the Upper Big Branch mine explosion in West Virginia—I had a loosely formed idea around some of the miners entering the space and setting up their benches on the perimeter of the stage, leaving them a good amount of room inside to move around. However, after our initial exploratory meeting, director Jessica Blank (who was also co-writer with Erik Jensen) had a different idea that was more active and allowed us to showcase the physicality of what the miners’ day-to-day lives were like inside the coal mine. So with that clear and extensive blueprint in mind, I was able to bring that vision to life and create our “Big Branch Bench Ballet.”

to just make the work unencumbered by mental clutter that can be distracting at best, and paralyzing at worst.

Embracing a point of view outside of our own is another great way to grow and sharpen the tools we use in our craft. At every possible opportunity, I look forward to talking with and learning from all the creative team’s approaches to their crafts, because sound, lighting, set/scenic design, and wardrobe all impact what I’m able to bring to life. After asking all the questions, having time to sort out what makes sense and doesn’t, testing it all out during rehearsals and tech, the only thing left to do is release it to the world.

Trust. Embrace. Release. Then enjoy the show. Take it all in. Enjoy the great privilege we are given to create and share our work with the world.

Conversely, after working with Ruben Santiago-Hudson on a few projects, we had developed a shorthand and language where he offered me the luxury to go away and build something. No pressure. At all. (Ha.) Now, please don’t get it twisted, because there was still “show & tell” to get his final approval, but knowing there was freedom to just create is a luxury when stakes are high. In both Skeleton Crew and Othello, I was able

Embracing a point ofview outside of our own is another great wayto grow and sharpen the tools we use in our craft.

Adesola Osakalumi’s credits include Skeleton Crew (MTC), Cullud Wattah, Coal Country, Othello (Public Theater), runboyrun (NYTW), This Land Was Made (Vineyard), Hippest Trip: Soul Train (Associate Choreographer).

Adesola Osakalumi (choreographer/dancer) in Skeleton Crew at Manhattan Theatre Club, directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson

PHOTO Matthew Murphy

THE COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS

BY STEVE RANKIN

As I sit here in a rehearsal hall with Des McAnuff prepping a revival of The Who’s Tommy, I am thinking of all the years that I have been working with this director, and of how he likes to have a consistent group of creatives as collaborators. Over the years, this collaboration has developed into an ability to use shorthand to serve the play and the director. I am aware of his tendencies and what he is going to expect with my staging and how it fits with the vision across all departments. It gives me the freedom to come in prepped with ideas that I believe he will sign off on after giving his notes and alterations. This moves the process forward in an efficient and collaborative way, and my work becomes part of one mind. Not to say that it is easy or without challenges, but the process is one of familiarity and trust built over years of collaboration.

At the end of every rehearsal day, Des has a formatting session. During these sessions we go through the play/musical scene by scene and discuss in depth all the aspects of what will be needed for the work the next day. This covers all aspects of the production—blocking, scenery transitions,

and choreography, including fight moments. These sessions are guided with the director’s needs coming first, but then everyone else has a voice and shares ideas across departments to help the whole process move forward. Once we go over what is going to happen the next day, we format several scenes ahead of the schedule to give everyone time to come in with a concrete plan of action and the ability to suggest changes.

Now, since the advent of using Zoom, departments that would normally not be in attendance until tech rehearsals, such as our lighting designer or set designer, can share in this collaboration. The collective consciousness of the group is always active and present. We are able during these meetings to have everything on the table so there are no surprises.

This is particularly good for a fight director, because I am continually paying attention to safety for the actors and looking to avert any dangers. For example, in this production of The Who’s Tommy, we have a scene in which actors have to jump into a pit and then dash for a quick change. Now, this sounds simple, but when we were in the formatting

session, I was able to express the need for lighting that wouldn’t blind the actors so they could see where to land safely. I also had concerns about the costumes that they would be wearing, which included backpacks and goggles. I needed to discuss with our choreographer and musical director the timing by which each actor was to jump and land, as well as the protocols to get actors out of harm’s way once they were in the pit. This proved very helpful, because in the rehearsal hall, there is no pit, and we were not able to actually do this activity until we were on stage. But the discussion during the formatting cut down the use of valuable tech time. When we got to the stage, I was able to help the actors feel safe and confident to do the movement required without being rushed or figuring it out on the fly.

Steve Rankin has been a fight director for over 40 years and won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Fight Choreography for Carousel

The Who’s Tommy at Goodman’s Albert Theatre, directed by Des McAnuff with fight direction by Steve Rankin PHOTO Liz Lauren

NURTURING A COLLABORATIVE SPIRIT

BY JENNIFER PAULSON-LEE

Every choreographer has their own “process” alone in the studio—in our element with space, bodies, music, and an idea for how to “tell the story.” But when in collaboration with a director within the framework of a musical, finding a collaborative path to the perfectly braided thread that “tells the story” is often the biggest challenge. For me, it relies on a deliberate sensitivity to many moving parts: to the author’s intent within the text, all aspects of the production design-wise, my own visceral response to the music and lyrics, the casting, and then truly striving to understand the director’s vision for the project. This potion of creative ideas will help sculpt the space for choreography to breathe, so that my work furthers the story while also deepening the emotional experience for the actors, and thus, the audience.

One of the most important things I look for when considering new projects is an open dialogue with the director—am I able to communicate my own ideas freely? I find that if I am heard, I can better listen. I often ask to be included early on in design meetings so together we weave the elements of the production without seams between what is “direction” and what is “choreography.” I believe it is this creative partnership and melding of artistic languages that will captivate an audience. Choreographer to director, director to choreographer. It is a fascinating and intense relationship—you become “co-parents” to the production. So

how do you build that sense of partnership? You listen, because when you listen, you learn. When you learn, you grow as an artist and your own vision expands.

When you listen, you learn.

The role of a choreographer in staging a musical means different things to different directors. It varies and fluctuates between “the counts” and that of an intimately involved movement director—the steps themselves are meaningless unless the actor understands why they are moving/ dancing/or even walking—and you need to be able to answer questions in actor terms. Choreographers don’t simply dictate movement; we are crafting an experience— both for the audience and for the actor or dancer who is ultimately the conduit to sharing the show’s message. Choreographic shapes, styles, techniques, quality of movement, and composition help define the moments which tell the story, not only as an extension of the text, lyrics, and music but as an extension of the director’s vision.

Throughout my career—whether as a dancer in an ensemble, as an assistant or, as my career progressed, as a choreographer, director, and writer—I have been quite fortunate to witness directors and director/ choreographers who find collaboration exciting and value the contributions of their creative team and cast. Meisner-trained as an actor myself, and with classical ballet training under the wing of Mavis Ray, a

former classmate of Margot Fonteyne who later became a protégé of Agnes de Mille, I have a combination of tools and perspectives to draw from when choreographing. I am always curious about what our cast uniquely offers the project as actors, and I strive to let my movement speak authentically through their bodies, while also allowing them room to participate. Dance and choreography are always a dialogue for me—and cannot exist if there’s nothing to say. That said, everything for me is choreography. Movement is the ultimate communication device that transcends any need to speak. So it makes perfect sense that my work is blended with that of the director, not simply when I am passed the baton. Then, ideally, we go back and forth, like a pendulum, one informing the other. I feel lucky to have found directors with whom I truly felt the collaborations became seamless, and the productions we built as a team were fluidly staged. With every production, and from all departments, I can easily say I gained new perspectives and learned more than I knew before.

For a rock-solid collaboration, the focus has to remain centered on the show, not the ego. And sometimes you hit a few bumps. Brainstorming and trading ideas or concepts with directors and designers sounds simple, but when each collaborator is making statements with their work, it can be very difficult to keep the lens focused, and you must find the balancing point. Because our language is dance, movement, shapes, and composition, understanding how to communicate your choreographic vision with the director and creative team, as well as knowing how to speak with the actors, is critical. The balance you must find is staying truthful to your own artistic voice within the parameters and scope of the production. A collaboration where the director finishes your sentences, and you theirs, is a rare bliss, but when it happens, it’s often not because you know all the same things or feel the same way. You begin to finish each other’s sentences because you listen, then add something new to the conversation, building trust over time and nurturing a collaborative spirit that can blossom and grow over decades.

Jennifer Paulson-Lee has worked professionally in New York, London, South Africa, Europe and Japan, spanning a 37-year career in musical theatre.

Wonderland at Tuacahn Center for the Arts, choreographed by Jennifer PaulsonLee + directed by her longtime collaborator, Gabriel Barre PHOTO Leavitt Wells

BOOK REVIEWS: TWO DIRECTORS SHARE STORIES

After the changes of the last few years, many directors and choreographers find themselves working in new ways and under different conditions. Some directors and choreographers are heading back into the rehearsal room laser-focused on the work. Some are hungry for the energy of the creative space, dreaming of running lines and staging exquisite stories. Many are energized by the innovations and calls for racial equity, inclusion, health, and safety in production.

While directors and choreographers may be eager to return, some artists may have grown cautious of returning to the intense and intimate space of the rehearsal hall. Some seek a practice that will allow us to do more preparation “virtually” before heading “into the room.” Some never left the room and have explored new ways of working safely and with care.

Past practices have changed inevitably, growing and improving the field. With the “new normal,” where do directors and choreographers find inspiration and pathways to creativity? What are the workbooks for today, and how do they help discover a director’s vision whether in or out of the room, virtual or in person?

This issue contains reviews of two books bridging past and present. In Jack in the Box: Or, How to Goddamn Direct by Jack O’Brien, readers are reminded that each director’s path through a production is unexpected and has many opportunities for growth along the way. In Staging Story, authors Robert Moss and Wendy Dann provide marvelous exercises for honing and crafting the goals of a production. These texts open the door to the past with an eye on the present and future. They provide tools that allow directors to work safely on the text, to prepare effectively for in-person rehearsals, and to revisit creative collaborations that will inspire artists and audiences in a new time. But most of all, they remind us that directors and choreographers are humans as much as we are artists; we are on a journey, and the stories we unveil on that journey are vitally important to theatre’s leaders and audiences alike.

INTRODUCED + EDITED BY KATHLEEN M. McGEEVER + RUTH PE PALILEO

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Published by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), the Peer-Reviewed Section of SDC JOURNAL serves directors and choreographers working in the profession and in institutions of higher learning. SDC’s mission is to give voice to an empowered collective of directors and choreographers working in all jurisdictions and venues across the country, encourage advocacy, and highlight artistic achievement. SDC JOURNAL seeks essays with accessible language that focus on practice and practical application and that exemplify the sorts of fruitful intersections that can occur between the academic/scholarly and the profession/craft. For more information, visit: http://sdcweb.org/sdc-journal/sdc-journal-peer-review/

SDC JOURNAL PEER REVIEWED SECTION BOOK REVIEW EDITORS

Jack in the Box: Or, How to Goddamn Direct

By Jack O’Brien

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. 255 pp. $28.00 Hardcover.

In Jack In The Box: Or, How to Goddamn Direct, Jack O’Brien, former artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, makes puns, names names, and offers hard-won practical insights from his long career. For the theatre director, reading this book feels like sitting in a comfortable chair with a warm beverage of their choice having an intimate tutorial session with this Tony Award-winning director. Stuffed with theatrical reminiscence, this casual memoir reminds directors how much our art form has evolved over the past 50 years.

Jack in the Box begins with disarming humility: “I have never been able to shake the feeling that directing doesn’t qualify as a regular profession. I’m not saying anything one way or the other when I suggest that I never took a single course in directing from any institution. And yet here I am: I direct. For a living” (6). The joy and wonder for the director’s part in artistic creation flows through this lively story of O’Brien’s life as a director of Shakespeare, musicals, comedies, and the plays of Tom Stoppard. O’Brien, a master storyteller, recounts his experiences in the field; the cover blurb describes the book as “Being the further adventures of a director: mentors followed, giants encountered, roads taken and not taken; with practical approaches to theatrical problems occasionally tossed in.”

O’Brien recognizes the industry has changed and his path may not be the same path available to or chosen by current directors. His book is a testament to the idea that directing is less following a beaten path than a journey of constant discovery. He encourages directors to know that much of their job is to reveal “the living moment” (24) and that the moment is likely to have nothing to do with what the director intended or prepared. “It may be marvelous, or it may be something close, but whatever it is, it isn’t what I started out to do” (237). Yet the director’s job is to reveal that truth in the storytelling on stage.

O’Brien is not offering readers a map for directing in a single, particular way; his book provides “a more nuanced understanding of the craziness that is a director’s life” (8). The introduction begins with a caveat that he cannot offer us a “how-to,” that there is not a simple step-by-step process to directing a piece of theatre. O’Brien suggests that this may be because the director, as a singular artist, emerged only in the last century. O’Brien’s career developed alongside the field of professional directing itself. In fact, when he was a theatre student, directors were primarily stage managers making sure all the elements, including sightlines, cues, and entrances, happened as needed, and otherwise staying out of the way. As the field grew, he observes a divergence in types of directors: “…there seemed to be a distinct difference between those who had observed and could replicate efficiently, and others with something more to bring to the table” (5).

O’Brien leads readers on a meandering stroll through his life in the theatre, full of funny, poignant, awkward, and always entertaining anecdotes and wisdom acquired in the theatrical trenches. In Chapter 1, he gives his take on the basics of blocking and casting.

Then, in Chapter 2, O’Brien shares a transformative experience in his view of the work. He encounters a “coup de théâtre” (32) while attending an Italian production of The Tempest (Il Tempesta)—a moment that propelled him to get serious about his directorial work. This discovery led O’Brien to collaborate with theatrical legends such as Stephen Sondheim, John Goodman, Kevin Kline, and John Houseman, and he shares the lessons learned from those collaborations in the subsequent chapters.

In the very entertaining Chapter 10, “I Liked Mike,” O’Brien chronicles his relationship with fellow director Mike Nichols. The acquaintance begins, much like the other relationships described in the book, through a mutual friend offering to connect the two. Nichols gave notes on O’Brien’s first preview of Two Shakespearean Actors by Richard Nelson, which opened at Lincoln Center Theater in the early ’90s, including the profound and impracticable suggestion, “‘When you get to that second act, … cut every other word until you get to the last scene’” (154). According to O’Brien, Nichols demonstrated neatly how to give notes to a fellow director, “Be helpful. But be brief, too!” (154).

Serving as arguably the foremost interpreter of Sir Tom Stoppard’s work in the US, O’Brien chronicles the difficulties of directing Stoppard’s wordy and sometimes seemingly impenetrable plays. He also explores one of the joys of directing a living playwright’s work, that of discovering a way of telling the story that surprises the author. For instance, the Lincoln Center scenic design for The Invention of Love looked vastly different from the original production in London. O’Brien shares that Stoppard’s initial response to the approach was critical, stating it’s “nothing but a cliché,” but upon brief reflection then responding, “It’s all right. It is! I just figured it out. It wasn’t a cliché then! You’re all right” (222). A delightful anecdote showing that the nature of director-playwright collaboration is not always what one expects.

With the exception of Chapter 9, entitled “The Women in My Life (and Their Lives in My Work),” O’Brien’s text lacks the presence of women and artists of color. The only important recurring women collaborators throughout the rest of the book are Marsha Mason and Eva La Gallienne, though Stockard Channing is mentioned briefly. O’Brien admits, “… we can easily agree that women have come far too late into the fore of the theatrical world, having suffered for eons by watching young boys pretending to mimic them in roles on the stage before being ‘admitted.’ Shocking!” (140). While readers will notice the lack of artists who identify as people of color and women in this book, the omission serves as a reminder of the historical biases and exclusions in the field and the necessary work the industry must engage in to make substantive change.

Throughout Jack in the Box, O’Brien emphasizes that good theatre requires collaboration: “The director must be prepared, alert, listening, and hopeful, but the piece itself also ’wants ‘what it wants. The results should come partly from the director, partly from the active intelligence and impetus of the actors, and partly from the play itself, which appears to assert, like the natural flow of water, its own organic truth” (17). Through O’Brien’s examples of negotiations and collaborations that made a production work, the reader learns much as O’Brien learned, by witnessing his collaborative partners and the work he accomplished with their inspiration.

Staging Story: Five Fundamentals for the Beginning Stage Director

by Robert Moss + Wendy Dann

Theatre Communications Group, 2022. 111 pp.

$16.95 Paperback.

Directing work can feel solitary, even in a crowded room, so any opportunity to sit and talk shop with another director is good. Make that a conversation with two directors and it is great. To dive deeper, a visit to another director’s rehearsal room can be a rare treat, but the pinnacle, if you really want to know what makes another director tick, might be to step into their classroom to see which morsels of directorial craft and wisdom they prioritize in sharing with the next generation.

Staging Story: Five Fundamentals for the Beginning Stage Director seeks to do just that: to provide readers with an auditor’s seat in a sequence of directing exercises developed by Bob Moss and his student, then colleague, Wendy Dann, through years of experience.

SDC Journal readers may need little introduction to Bob Moss, founder of Playwrights Horizons, Artistic Director of Queens Theatre in the Park, Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, and Syracuse Stage, and a collegiate directing teacher of 40 years, not to mention a staunch advocate for SDC. Wendy Dann’s work with Moss spans back to 1992, and includes an MFA at Syracuse under Moss’s direction, followed by a broad freelance career where the two would regularly cross paths, including Dann’s seven years as Associate Artistic Director at the Hangar Theatre, and her current post as a professor of directing at Ithaca College. This book is, as they put it:

The cross fertilization of Bob and Wendy’s ideas and mutual experiences, both as professional directors and teachers. [… It] began as a series of conversations from teacher to student to teacher around the best way for students to begin the practice of directing.

For those of us who teach directing, the stage is set: a living legend and his student-turned-teacher have decided to open the door and let us in to the room. Let’s go.

In Moss’s introduction, he proclaims, “This book will not teach anyone how to direct,” and Dann continues, noting that only practice, failure, and observation will lead to strong direction. This is not a book to be read; it has to be practiced. Like a math workbook whose purpose is to be written in and its questions solved, this book is urgently about the practice, performance, and observation of the exercises contained within. Sure, you could read this book straight through in an afternoon, and in doing so you would find a few “ah-ha” moments, but you would largely be missing the point. In practice, Staging Story begs for time in the studio and offers a limitless number of characters, scenes, and directorial choices. Moss and Dann seek to guide the reader’s practice through five fundamental components: Story, Intention, Character, Space, and Theme.

The series of directing exercises begins with “Learning to See,” an observation and storytelling exercise where a blank scene is created from the most basic of movements, and the director-audience is asked to identify the potential story elements they discover within each iteration of the scene. The book then goes on to introduce five fundamental directing concepts, each with its own brief chapter and exercise, all of which scaffold on one another. A bit like Terry John Converse’s Directing for the Stage, the first half of the book is devoted largely to silent scene work, so that directors can hone their craft working with the fundamentals before building into text-based work later.

“Story,” the first and longest section in the book, focuses on “introduction, complication, and resolution” as the more active and evocative versions of the traditional beginning, middle, and end. Moss and Dann encourage directors to use simple charts to prepare short scenes including introduction, complication, and resolution. In a gentle nod toward David Ball’s Backwards and Forwards, these first scenes are to be developed backwards: beginning with the resolution to reverseengineer causal moments within the scene. Each exercise concludes with observation and question prompts for the peer observers. Following “Story” is a chapter on “Intention,” which introduces obstacle and tactic, as well as positive verbing of scenes. It is worth noting that sections are designed to stand on their own; the authors introduce new terms concisely and only when necessary, without assuming that readers/ students have any prior exposure to these concepts.

Next up are chapters on “Character,” which inform how characters act on intention; “Space,” which challenges directors to craft environment based on story; and “Theme,” which addresses the ultimate why of the story. Each of these fundamentals are grounded in exploratory directing modules, where students stage moments laser-focused on each topic, and then receive feedback. A consistent theme throughout the book is that directors learn to listen and take notes; the work must stand on its own, and observations from peers experiencing the work are the litmus test of any meaning that is created.

After the five fundamentals are established, students are presented with various scene work ideas (dreamscapes, music, beats, fairy tales, etc.) to practice prioritizing the five fundamentals in their work. The book offers a trove of open scenes for students to stage: dozens of 4-line scenes and 16 one-minute plays as well as guidelines for longer scenes and monologues.

Throughout Staging Story, chapters and exercises are punctuated with text boxes designed to replicate the conversational nature of a classroom, where a seasoned directing teacher will casually drop anecdotes from their career. These boxes are labeled with one of three categories: “Tips” are brief notes that contextualize the work, or ways to help a student understand the concept. “In Practice” boxes provide examples from previous productions, such as a specific blocking choice from a Broadway production. “Passing It Down” boxes share anecdotes of theatre legends, such as Moss’s classes with Uta Hagen or a quip from dinner with Lanford Wilson.

To be clear, this is a little book. At 111 pages, this is an evergreen tome designed to share Moss and Dann’s methodology with aspiring directors henceforth. It is narrow and focused in its scope; it does not attempt to address wider directorial concerns such as running rehearsals or director’s books, nor does it mention stage directions or most terminology. It readily acknowledges that there are many other books on directing that cover those bases and more. Instead, it is purely focused on the exercises that Moss has developed and that Dann has perfected. In that spirit, Staging Story will stand in solidarity with Ball’s aforementioned Backwards and Forwards: both are small books with very big ideas, and their paucity of words and ample white space challenge and encourage the reader to lean in and do the work.

One final observation: the subtitle suggests that this book is for beginning directors. Inside, Moss and Dann declare, “This book is meant to stimulate your practice of directing.” While clearly designed toward a college directing class, even those of us who were “beginning directors” back in the 1900s can still find stimulation in these pages. An example: when Moss offered a demonstration of the “Learning to See” exercise at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) conference in July 2022, the room was full of ATHE and SDC veterans eager to experience his class firsthand. This book seeks to replicate and expand that opportunity for a wider audience. While you may not have the chance to talk shop with Bob Moss and Wendy Dann, or visit their rehearsal rooms, Staging Story offers you a seat in their directing classrooms, all for the cost of a few cups of coffee.

THOMAS B. COSTELLO

BEYOND NARRATIVE

ANNIE-B PARSON IN CONVERSATION WITH SAM PINKLETON

SDCF’s podcast series, Choreographers in Conversation, invites choreographers to interview other choreographers whose work excites them as a way to learn more about their craft and preserve the stories of these fascinating artists in the industry. In October 2022, Sam Pinkleton spoke with Annie-B Parson about process, adding dimensionality to narrative, and the choreographic mind. Their wide-ranging conversation has been lightly edited for print; the podcast—along with insightful, in-depth interviews and panel discussions about the working processes and experiences of directors and choreographers over the past four decades—is available on the SDCF website.

SAM PINKLETON | I was hoping that we could talk about process. Can you talk about what you’re in rehearsal for right now?

ANNIE-B PARSON | I’m really just prepping right now for rehearsal. I’m not in the space yet. Both of the projects I’m working on are large-scale operas, which is pretty new for me. There are, I think, over 70 people in each one—one is Candide and the other one is The Hours. I’m really thrilled to be in the opera world. So far, both of the operas are very open to experimentation with the body in space, and both of them are ‘dance heavy,’ meaning in one of them, the dancers never leave the stage. They do a dance from the beginning to the end for two hours.

SAM | Are you working with people who identify as dancers?

ANNIE-B | In both cases I hired a cast of, I think, 13 dancers for each opera. I hired the most virtuosic dancers I could find. The Hours is all women, female-identified or femalepresenting dancers. I was looking for dancers that were pretty butch I find that to be ultimately more beautiful, more feminine, plus it’s about three women, one of which is the great feminist Virginia Woolf.

SAM | I’ve done a few large-scale operas. On the first one, I felt like I had fallen out of a spaceship onto the surface of Mars and that my job was keeping people from running into each other. I had three hours to keep people from running into each other. You said this is new for you and I’m curious what feels different about it, beyond just perhaps the scale or the palette that you have to work with?

ANNIE-B | Well, in one sense, nothing is ever different, because everything is based in composition, everything is energetic, kinetic. Everything is about rotation and locomotion and duration and the basic elements of choreography. Whether you are working with a pop band or the symphony orchestra, a marching band or a ballerina, or a chorus in the opera, you’re still dealing with compositional elements. What is different in each one is the emphasis on story; I’m narratively challenged. The narrative to me seems minor compared to the light and the space and the sound and relationalities.

What seems new is the emphasis on this little part of the body that is between your chin and your clavicles, which is your throat! It seems like there’s this hot circle drawn around this voice box, around the throat. The emphasis on the voice is pretty extraordinary. I do think it

already has affected the way that I’m generating material and I can’t really describe it. Maybe we can talk about it after I’m all done.

I’m happy you asked that question because I’m realizing that I’m so affected, even on terrible recordings, by what these people are doing with this tiny part of their body. The other thing about opera that I always noticed, even though I hadn’t seen that much, is the imagination in opera is so far out. I once saw Pavarotti, and he was quite large at the time, and quite old, play a very young prince.

SAM | Nobody cares.

ANNIE-B | They don’t! When he died, it took him like 10 minutes to get to the ground, and nobody was bothered that it wasn’t realistic! Everything is very unreal, and I love that. In a sense, I feel like I’m born to it. So we’ll see, we’ll see.

SAM | Folks ask me, “How did you start doing opera?” And the answer was, “A director asked me.” My experience was, I think, probably a less confident version of your experience. The way you do opera is you start doing opera. But I hope that more people who would think they would never show up in an opera room develop a curiosity for that form, because it can be bonkers.

PHOTO Ike Edeani

ANNIE-B | I’ve been reading about [director] Yuval Sharon’s work in Detroit. That stuff is so large scale, it’s so everything, there is no element that is not addressed. And now he is redefining the use of the proscenium in opera. I think it might be the future.

SAM | Can I go back to a question of narrative?

When you said that about the story, my eyes turned into giant heart emojis. I’m directing a play right now, and I love the play. I love being in the room, and part of why I love being in the room is because it is a room that can hold abstraction and image.

ANNIE-B | What play is it?

SAM | You Will Get Sick. It’s a play by an amazing, amazing, amazing writer called Noah Diaz, who just graduated from Yale; it’s a weird little five-person play, and people get attacked by birds and somebody turns into a scarecrow. I’m in this room wondering about why we always must make only one story for audiences. I’ve always felt like human beings look at images and put them together no matter what; and, actually, I don’t feel that I can control that. I don’t want to control that for them.

I have seen your work in a narrative context, and it has elevated the whole event to something that to me is more emotional. I’m curious how as a collaborator you encounter something that does have a story built into it, if the director cares about story, of course.

ANNIE-B | I really don’t give it more attention than any other element—or I enter it through a different door.

SAM | Awesome.

ANNIE-B | I just don’t know how. If the director is asking me to make a dance about a narrative moment, for instance, I might ask, is it about conflict? Then that’s what I’m working on. What is conflict about, from a kinesthetic perspective? It’s about weight, in a sense. Maybe if I give my weight to you, then that sharing of weight, that trust, gets interrupted or dislodged. There

are ways kinesthetically and through all the compositional elements of motion to show that. That’s not exactly story, but it might help add dimensionality to the story. I don’t know how to do story ballet. I don’t like story ballet, and I think it’s a bit silly and odd.

SAM | Do you always distill it down to a word or two? Or would you go to the director and be like, “Hey Alex Timbers, what’s this actually about to you?”

ANNIE-B | I guess I would just vibe something.

SAM | Then when you’re on your own with your people, you might say, we’re making a thing about conflict, as opposed to, we’re making a thing about Bob who went to the store or whatever.

ANNIE-B | Well, maybe I would even be like, we’re devising a dance about an interruption of sharing our weight. I’m not very conceptual.

SAM | You’re working with kinesthetic words from that time.

ANNIE-B | Always.

SAM | Thrilling.

ANNIE-B | Pretty much always.

SAM | Even if we’re doing Arthur Miller.

ANNIE-B | Definitely.

SAM | I feel totally liberated by that, but I don’t always trust it. I think part of that is—and I really want to know what you think about this—part of this is because I have spent a lot of time in this weird job called “movement director.” I love that it’s a job because it gives choreographers work. But I have many, many, many times been in theatre rooms, capital T theatre rooms, where we are doing a capital P play, and we are telling a capital S story. My job is sometimes to keep people from running into each other and sometimes to make the couch come on in an elegant way and sometimes to tell somebody what their shoulder might do if

they were much older, but it’s often bound in a kind of narrative realism that actually, I will confess, doesn’t interest me. I’m not excited about it. The real secret is, and I feel weird saying this out loud because I’ve done a lot of it as my job, I don’t enjoy it at all. I’ve been a part of some amazing shows in that role, and I feel very grateful to have witnessed process in that way because I’ve learned so much, but the joy of it has actually been as a collaboratorobserver and not as a choreographer.

ANNIE-B | Well, the one is very generative and the other one is not.

SAM | I’m a problem solver. I’m the urgent care, and that’s fine. It’s better to have a choreographer in the room than not, but when I allow myself to think the way that you think— which is, I’m sorry to simplify what you just said, I’m actually not going to worry about narrative, I’m going to worry about composition—my work is always better. It’s also always more fun, because I sometimes feel like I’m pretending to be someone who cares about these important theatre things in these important theatre rooms, and the fact is I don’t. I’m excited to hear this from you because I think of you as a theatremaker.

ANNIE-B | Yes, definitely.

SAM | A theatremaker who I and many others really look up to. I think it’s very hard to trust myself to be like, I actually don’t care about that. And guess what? The show’s not going to suffer. I’m just going to go through the back door rather than the front door or the side door or whatever.

ANNIE-B | I really believe that it adds a dimensionality to the narrative. The swagger of the story is so overrated. Also, our training is the opposite—of course we feel this way. You don’t go to dance class six times a week for 20 years and walk out wondering, how can I tell a story?

SAM | When you say your “training”—can you tell me what you mean by that?

ANNIE-B | My training was dance class, modern dance, and ballet for at least 20 years—6 times a week. If you didn’t go Saturday to ballet, oh my God. The only thing that you could do was just show up, and that showing up was so rigorous. Do downtown dancers still do this? A lot of class was moving through space, as opposed to yoga, and we always called it class! Which I think is really sweet in a certain sense. It’s not a class or classes, it’s just “class.”

SAM | Yes. Class.

ANNIE-B | I also studied choreography in high school and in college. I went to school as a painting major, as a visual arts major. My advisor was [contemporary American painter] Barkley Hendricks, which is insane! I left the art department because I was more comfortable in the dance department. I don’t know, it was just kind of a fluke.

SAM | Were there dance or choreography teachers who you’ve carried with you?

Big Dance Theater’s 17c, conceived, directed + choreographed by Annie-B Parson PHOTO Maria Baranova

ANNIE-B | Bessie Schönberg, very much. She was extraordinary. When I had her, she was like 90. Robert Ellis Dunn, who was also extremely old when I had him. He was the pianist for John Cage and was the teacher at the Judson Church. When I had him, he was so old, and he was a smoker, and he would stand outside the classroom, smoking, with his head poked in the door. Even just to get that sliver of him was a huge, so valuable—what a genius. I learned so much from him, and it was all about the basic ideas of postmodernism. Nobody ever talked about content.

SAM | I want choreography students to know that it doesn’t always have to be carrying a couch across the stage. Can you just say why we should all care about Bessie Schönberg?

ANNIE-B | Okay. First, I think we should make a piece where we just carry a couch across the stage.

SAM | For 45 minutes.

ANNIE-B | That’d be incredible. Please!

SAM | Yes, actually.

ANNIE-B | Bessie Schönberg was in the [Martha] Graham Company. She came from Germany and taught at Dance Theatre Workshop, and you really didn’t study with her until you had done a number of pieces. She was not a dancer; she was a choreography teacher—so it felt very different. It was very European.

You would bring a piece in and she would respond to it. And the way the class was set up was quite difficult, because you had to have dancers and there was no money for them. You had to figure that out. How were you going to pay the dancers, get them in rehearsal, and bring enough material in? And the piece wouldn’t be finished, because she didn’t want you to be finished. She wanted you to be in the middle of it. So you would bring something in— isn’t this cool? And then she, every week, would watch it progress and respond. The only thing you were not allowed to do was talk about your work.

SAM | Cool.

ANNIE-B | She said that if you talk in response [to something she said], you have just released the pressure that you need to make that thing. “Just hold that in, whatever that thing is that I did not see, go choreograph it, so I can see it.” She was terrifying and brilliant. And she would just say a few sentences. There were no assignments in her class; that was more [the style of] Robert Ellis Dunn. He would give us an assignment that looked a lot like an algorithm or a math problem. With Bessie, she would just respond. It was so intense—I can’t even describe it. I remember one time I was working on this piece to Stravinsky, to “Les Noces.” I had this idea I was going to choreograph all the rhythms in “Les Noces.” So tortuous. After she looked at it for a few weeks, she said, “You’re going to be compared to all the greats. You’re going to live in the shadow of all the great choreographers who have tried to face Stravinsky and particularly ‘Les Noces,’ and I’m

afraid for you that you are going to not survive that. So I suggest that you throw the music away.” I took her advice and I threw the music away. And then I got a commission from ADF to work with a contemporary composer. I kept all the Stravinsky rhythms in, maintaining the complexity and the darkness, but we danced it to new music.

SAM | Just placed it in other music.

ANNIE-B | Right, I put this other piece of music on top. Since then, I’ve done that many times; it’s a very interesting process. But it really was Bessie, she had this way of just cutting through everything. After each showing she would say, “You can dismiss the dancers now.” Because she didn’t think the dancers should hear her talking about the dance!

SAM | Liz Swados, did you ever know Liz?

ANNIE-B | A little bit.

SAM | Liz was one of a few really major forces for me who basically pushed my face into the ground and was like, “You can be better than this.” Her class was set up the same way. We would just go up to 890 Broadway with stuff that we made, and she’d sit there in her giant jean jacket with her giant keys and just talk about it. We couldn’t defend it or explain, because she would be like, “Why is there an author’s note? If it needs an author’s note, then the work isn’t done.”

ANNIE-B | Right. Right. Right.

The Hours at the Metropolitan Opera, choreographed by Annie-B Parson

PHOTO Evan Zimmerman

SAM | It shook me into being a maker of things. It was terrifying.

ANNIE-B | It sounds very similar.

SAM | Very similar to how you describe it. You just kind of shook something off that I want to go back to, which is that you made a piece to one piece of music and then you took that choreography and placed it on another piece of music, and I’m sure it revealed dimensions that you never knew were there.

ANNIE-B | Yes. Magic.

SAM | I feel like one of the many terrorisms of process, especially as a theatre choreographer, whatever that means, is having to come into a room with 100% originality from zero. To completely reinvent both the job of the choreographer and the notion of choreography. In fact, many of my teachers, many of my favorite pieces, have an element of recycling or remixing or a thread from another piece. I’m curious, especially in some of your theatre work, how that has applied, or if it has.

ANNIE-B | Well, first, I’m interested that you are saying that that expectation is there for you to be original.

SAM | Oh, it could just be my insecurity.

ANNIE-B | Because I feel with much theatre, choreographically, there doesn’t seem to be any attempt to find new ideas. Most often the dances seem to be just a rehash and a trope of something I have seen.

SAM | I think the extreme pressure to be original leads to a total lack of originality, because we’re working from fear as opposed to possibility.

ANNIE-B | The vocabularies that people use are so limited on the stage. Particularly the reliance on the front body, and on unison…

SAM PINKLETON | If they face upstage, no one can see them talking. So therefore, that’s off limits.

ANNIE-B | I know. It’s so limited.

SAM | Bananas, right? Seventy-five percent of the body is not allowed just from the beginning, it’s just off limits for the duration of the performance.

ANNIE-B | For most directors but not all directors. But I think I have this sense, or belief, that is almost like religion; we’re not making anything new. That there is no such thing as originality. It’s all in a sense, repair, response, reaction, redemption.

SAM | There’s no such thing as originality is the billboard that I would like to put in Times Square. But sorry, I interrupted you.

ANNIE-B PARSON

ANNIE-B | I think there’s so much going on that has to do with being responsive and in a sense, reactive when you’re making things. Sometimes just noticing and materializing, what’s going on in this room. I had a really interesting reckoning here at SDC when, I don’t know if you’re aware of it or not, but there was a whole mishegas about cast members co-opting the identity of “choreographer.” At issue was if you made some steps, you assume authorship of the choreography. But that’s not what choreography is.

SAM | Making steps?

ANNIE-B | Making steps. That’s not what choreography is in my opinion. That is a generative collaborator.

SAM | Okay. So what’s choreography?

ANNIE-B | Choreography is the aesthetic organization of the body in space. So that could include steps, but not necessarily.

SAM | Okay, so what’s a choreographer?

ANNIE-B | A choreographer is somebody that works with ideas of placing the body in space and investigating what the body can do and express in space and time. And sometimes that has to do with stillness—that’s the choreography as well. And sometimes there are no steps.

SAM | And how does one become a choreographer?

ANNIE-B | I think by seeing.

SAM | That’s a good answer.

ANNIE-B | I think a dancer and a choreographer essentially are unrelated beings, just like there’s often little relationship between a musician and a composer, or an actor and a playwright. These tasks use quite different parts of the brain. Not that the same person couldn’t hold both gifts, but it’s rare. The choreographic mind—it’s a very unusual mind, don’t you think?

SAM | For sure. I’ve made a lot of things that have steps in them and making steps is by far the least interesting part of the process for me. Or I should say the notion of making steps in my living room that I will then go in and regurgitate to a group of bodies. I have a weird, gangly, scarecrow body, so I feel confused about making something in my living room and then being like, “Here is my blessing of this perfect choreography I made.” I just don’t understand that. But I feel like making steps is, again, in the best of processes for me, at least a tiny part of the concept.

Choreography is the aesthetic organization ofthe body in space. So that could include steps, but not necessarily.

David Byrne + company in American Utopia on Broadway, choreographed by Annie-B Parson PHOTO Matthew Murphy

ANNIE-B | Yes, steps can be a great generator for a larger idea, or they can be the central idea, or they can be unrelated. So if we’re talking about theatre, you are looking for the uber concept choreographically, of the tonality, the nature of this piece. That is what a choreographer does. You could work out some micro aspects first, and some of it could be the step-making. But overall, I feel like there needs to be some driving aesthetic of how the body is used to express this particular play or opera.

SAM | So you’re in prep right now for two operas. Maybe prep always looks the same for you, but what does prep look like right now?

ANNIE-B | I just listen to the music and dance in my living room.

SAM | Heaven.

ANNIE-B | Right. Sometimes it feels like you have a movement idea that has to do with steps, or sometimes you have a completely different idea that has nothing to do with steps. But I go song to song, and I say, “In this song, I feel like everyone should be very far apart and facing different directions and they’re like trees in a forest”—whatever your concept is. They don’t move through the whole song. And that’s the choreography.

SAM | And you write that on something and then you do the next song.

ANNIE-B | I make notes and drawings and go to the next song. Sometimes what I write is exactly what happens. “I Dance Like This,” one of the songs in American Utopia, is exactly what I wrote on the piece of paper. It took me two minutes to choreograph that, I knew exactly what it could be.

SAM | You came into rehearsal and said, this is where we’re at.

ANNIE-B | I asked David [Byrne] in rehearsal, “Could we stop for 16 counts in the middle of the song and have silence in the song?” He said, yes. So in that 16 counts, everybody dances the choreography that I made, and it’s perfect silence, and it always makes the audience laugh. I came up with that idea listening to the song once. Then there are the other songs that take me a year to figure out! I hammer away at them, and I go through different ideas and I’m never happy, and so it varies. So that would be with a song cycle, when I’m working with singers and/or musicians.

SAM | When you’re saying “song cycle” in this context, that also might mean the Lorde tour.

ANNIE-B | Yes. That was a wonderful experience. Have you seen it?

SAM | No, not yet.

ANNIE-B | I started that project by listening through her set list and dreaming about the visual world it could exist in. And then after that, the amazing associate, Lizzie DeMent, and I worked from there. We developed the material in my living room together.

SAM | So you always start alone.

ANNIE-B | I always start alone. It’s such a precious time! It’s that “fresh” thing—the newness that you only experience once, so I don’t want to hear the phone, the doorbell, my husband, nothing.

SAM | Oh, they’re out of the room.

ANNIE-B | They cannot—

SAM | It’s you and the music.

ANNIE-B | Yeah, because there’s only one chance of the fresh thing, right? There’s only one chance.

SAM | Is that an hour or is that a night?

ANNIE-B | Again, it depends. It can be days in this first phase, and after I have some sketches, Lizzie and I will go into the next phase, where she and I will work together on the ideas. If we’re working on something where the performers have no dance training, then when we get into rehearsal, we teach them the material rather than create it on the performers. Some dancers are trained to generate material—a very unusual group of people—and some do not have this training.

SAM | And different from dancers who have BFAs in dance and have taken dance all of their life. Or at least some of them.

ANNIE-B | Because those dancers, though they are great to work with too, have never studied choreography. So you can play around a little bit, but that is not their training. If you haven’t studied contact improv or choreography or any generative form in dance making, then you probably won’t be very comfortable playing hardball! Because when I’m working with dancers that have been trained like that, the metaphor would be a very highlevel tennis match where I am hitting the ball so hard in the back corner, and they’re hitting it back to me so hard, and then I’m hitting it back, etc. To me, that makes the deepest, most textured material. My less interesting material can be when I just bring it in.

SAM | Same.

ANNIE-B | Because there’s no collaborative generation.

SAM | Strong same.

ANNIE-B | Right. Right.

SAM | I did a big musical several years ago and I was very ultimately proud of what I did. We made all of the choreography for a full-length musical in five days in a studio, because I had six dancers who spoke a generative language, different generative languages, but it’s the tennis match. It just felt like we would get to the end of the day, and we smelled terrible. We were like, we made five numbers, huge step! But it requires trust, and it requires shorthand, and it requires care and preparation. I find that that Double Dutch doesn’t always happen.

ANNIE-B | I’ve worked with two brilliant virtuosic ballet dancers. Their brilliance was in interpretation. The movement would be set—

there was no tennis match—but the relationship between me and them and the material had to do with how they danced it, which was crazy, what they could do.

SAM | I find that I often default to assuming that everyone is going to want to be a collaborator or co-conspirator or creator. Then sometimes you get there and—

ANNIE-B | They’re like, no.

SAM | The person’s like, can you just tell me what to do with my fucking hands? How do you feel that out, especially if you’re working in theatre?

ANNIE-B | I think I kind of assume especially in musical theatre, they really don’t have that kind of training. When you don’t have training in something, you’re uncomfortable doing it. You might try because you’re open, but you really don’t know how to play that sonata on the piano because you never learned how to play the piano. You know what I mean?

SAM | It can feel like a bonus if they’re like, “Hey, I learned this stuff.” You feel like, “Oh, you actually want to make something.” You want to go like, “Great, great. Let’s get on that path.”

ANNIE-B | There are some musicians I’ve worked with that are very experimental with movement; I think songwriting is a craft that has some similarity. You can enter the door through that. But mostly I kind of assume they don’t want to.

SAM | You were just talking about the Lorde tour, and you were talking about an opera, and you were talking about American Utopia Aside from what you shared about whether they’re people who identify as dancers or not, do you come into those rooms any differently depending on what the so-called form is?

ANNIE-B | I think so. I think I must. But the seeds of the material, no, I don’t think so.

SAM | Cool.

ANNIE-B | I think the material is, as I said, based on these compositional ideas in a sense, but it could be done in a more virtuosic way, or a more pedestrian way. To me, that’s all interesting. But do I personally walk in feeling different? Yes. I think certain people intimidate me, or I feel like they’re going to be scared when somebody says, here’s the choreographer and they are not dancers. So, I’m always starting by saying, “Please don’t be nervous. I’m not going to ask anything of you that you’re going to be uncomfortable with,” and I try to stick by that. But I do sense that they’re very nervous, particularly musicians. I have choreographed a lot for musicians, and they have a very different vibe about the body.

I had a fabulous conversation once with a musician, and I was giving him a note, and I was like, “I know you understand that you’re supposed to walk across the stage six steps and stop with your right foot in front, but I don’t want you to get all wiggly on the stop and feel the music. Really, I want you to be very still

and simple when you get to that moment.” He just looks at me and he says, “All these years on stage as a musician, I just felt so free in my body. I could dance around and play my music. Now that I’m working with choreography, I don’t feel free.” And I said, “Choreography’s not free.” It just isn’t.

SAM | And can you please stand still at the time when I need you to.

ANNIE-B | Yes. When you improvise in music, you are always improvising in a key, or you have a certain framework; the structure is very limited, unless you’re a genius! I can hear that you’re in a certain framework—whatever the key is, whatever the tonality is, whatever the vibe of the song is, the dark versus light, all this stuff, you’re in there and you’re playing around in this very narrow space that’s not free. There are a lot of stipulations, gates, doors, limitations there to play within. I call these rubrics, and you understand those. I said to him, it’s the same in dance.

SAM | And you don’t question that. That’s your operating system.

ANNIE-B | It’s your operating system and you respect it, and your task is to understand how to be free within this beautiful structure.

SAM | I’m curious about audiences, and if when you’re making—whether it’s an opera, whether

it’s American Utopia, whether it’s a show with Big Dance Theater—whether you’re thinking about the people who are going to come or how they figure in it all.

ANNIE-B | I think I’m making it for you. I’m making it for other people that do this, that I respect, and I’m hoping that you could look at it and get ideas and be stimulated. I think it’s a real waste of time to try to figure out who your audience is and how they’re going to digest the material. Also, for me, often the audience has problems with my work, not in American Utopia, but in Big Dance. They may find it strange, and they’re looking for the story, and all that stuff. So I try not to think about it too much.

SAM | Did anything change for you when you started seeing your work in front of arenas of people who were at a rock or pop concert? It’s a long road from Abrons Art Center to 9,000 screaming people.

ANNIE-B | Well, it’s sad; I really feel like the downtown dance form [is that you] work typically for two years to raise money, work for 18 months to create a piece, schlep all your props with little assistance, perform four nights for 99 people, and maybe get a review that is cursory and nowhere near as thoughtful as what you put into it. It’s a terrible model, and it works less and less for me, because I got spoiled. Because every single night in these big

shows, thousands of people were seeing the work eight shows a week. And I like that.

SAM | I mean, that fills me with joy, but also, I want young choreographers and directors to see dance theatre and be excited by it. That’s so much more likely to happen, I think, in the context of a kid stumbling into American Utopia with a rush ticket than walking into Abrons.

ANNIE-B | Way more likely.

SAM | One of the things that was so moving to me about seeing American Utopia and Here Lies Love—and I anticipate will be moving to me when I see Lorde—is people who thought they were going to just be drinking and bouncing around are being forced to be confronted with big ideas and composition. And actually, my hope is that you see that and then you might end up at Abrons Art Center. But the reverse feels less likely.

ANNIE-B | Less likely. But we can remain hopeful!

ANNIE-B PARSON

SAM | American Utopia makes me feel like musical theatre, however we define that, might not be dead. I want so deeply to believe that strictness and protection of values and aesthetic and taste can be duplicated. American Utopia wasn’t just one little flash that happened.

I know that we should probably stop talking soon. But I know so many choreographers who, when I ask them about their teachers, you’re the first name that comes out of their mouths. I’m curious how teaching falls into your practice and forms what you do.

ANNIE-B | This is going to sound very contrary, but early on I decided that I would never teach what I do, because when you walk into the studio to make something, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. That confusion— some people romanticize it into mystery, I would just call it a kind of confusion—is really precious. You’re always making it up. You never really know how to do it—and that is why your work may be new and good. As soon as you can formalize it and teach it, it suddenly becomes known and understandable to you, a commodity, and then it’s not interesting to you when you’re actually making your work. So I always saved my experiments for myself. When I got tired of them and I would never do them

When you walk into the studio to make something, you don’t knowwhat the hell you’re doing.That confusion...is really precious.You’re always making it up. You never really know how to do it—and that is whyyour work may be new and good.

Lorde’s Solar Power tour, choreographed by Annie-B Parson PHOTO Lauren Tepfer

again, then I start teaching them. But I would never take something that I’m in the middle of, maybe even five years in the middle of, and bring it into a classroom.

SAM | Can you tell that to my eight-years-ago self?

ANNIE-B | You can really waste a lot of your good stuff figuring out how to teach it. You know what it’s like to teach. You have to be able to articulate very difficult aesthetic ideas, and it’s really cool to be able to do it, but once you’ve done it, it’s gone.

SAM | Some last questions. How do you define musical theatre? What’s musical theatre to you?

ANNIE-B | I’m not very familiar with musical theatre, so I don’t really know how I would define it, but it seems like it’s one of those forms where you sing from an emotional place like—I feel so bad, I need to sing; I feel so happy, I need to sing; I feel so excited, I need to sing. A potentially interesting path. It’s unfortunate that it’s so littered with tropes. Here Lies Love is such a rare piece of music, what David Byrne wrote, and I hope it inspires composers in musical theatre, because he really does not use one trope, not one.

SAM | How would you define the difference between a director and a choreographer?

ANNIE-B | Traditionally, of course, the choreographer attends to the issues of the body and dance, and the director attends to issues of the uber thrust of the subject matter, narrative, and container. There is this tradition that I call a couch play—where the play is staged as people just sitting on a couch talking to each other—I think it’s a crime. We have bodies. And so a director could be somebody who works with dancers or works with actors, and there’s no

text and there’s no story. It doesn’t have to be the traditional mode of approach.

SAM | When you’re in rehearsal and you really thought it was going to be great, and then you put it on its feet and it’s unwatchable—what do you do?

ANNIE-B | Well, I try not to cry in front of people! And I often will have a really bad night’s sleep. But sometimes—and I hope this happens to you, you can pray to Hypnos tonight and see if it happens—I figure out a new path in my sleep. I wake up really tired—but with a new idea!

SAM | Wow!

ANNIE-B | You have to come up with a second solution. You can hammer away at it. You can turn it upside down and reverse it and slow it down and do all sorts of stuff and see if you can get something out of it. Usually it needs a revamp, unfortunately. And sometimes that comes to me in my sleep.

SAM | Do you come in with one idea or six ideas?

ANNIE-B | Now I feel like I only have one. How about you?

SAM | I am working on only having one because I feel like I fall back on the two and the three and the four—or they’re just like doubts on my shoulders.

I will often set something up as the “bad idea” version—“The thing I tried today, I thought it was going to be great, it wasn’t great. Let’s just do the bad idea version. We’re all going to be so embarrassed by how stinky it is.” Often that ends up being the best thing. It’s manipulative of me because I sometimes know that.

ANNIE-B | Yeah. Well, you sound fun.

SAM | I believe in rehearsal being fun. If rehearsal’s not fun I don’t want to do it. There are too many other problems in the world that I could be tending to rather than suffering in rehearsal. If I’m going to tend to suffering, I’d like to be tending to actual human suffering and not at Ripley-Grier or whatever.

Can you please tell us about your new book?

ANNIE-B | It’s called The Choreography of Everyday Life. It’s a book that’s in a braid structure, so it has a choreographic structure; it also has a choreographic structure on the page. It’s about looking at the world through choreography. Like this table, for instance, that is between us right now; that is a choreographic object. It’s separating us in space, and determining our relationality.

SAM | It’s giving us composition.

ANNIE-B | It’s deciding where our bodies should be in proximity to each other. So proximity is a compositional element. It’s a lot about how we move in space, how we moved in space during COVID-19, how we moved in space in the protests in 2020. It’s about ecstatic dancing; when Biden was elected there was ecstatic dancing in the street, like ancient dancing. But it’s also about my husband and my son reading The Odyssey, and what that’s about from a choreographic perspective, and how Penelope’s dancing this solo that’s in reiterative loops. I think some people would call it a personal essay form. You don’t need to be a dancer or a choreographer to understand it at all. It’s not one of those books.

SAM | It sounds like anybody who cares, even the slightest bit, about how bodies move or even that we have bodies should read it immediately.

Here Lies Love at The Public Theater, choreographed by Annie-B Parson PHOTO Navid Baraty

IN MEMORIAM

November 1, 2022 – July 31, 2023

Patrik Baldauff

DIRECTOR

Member since 1979

Edward Payson Call DIRECTOR

Member since 1968

Kevin Carlisle

DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER

Member since 1967

Nancy Carroll

DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER

Member since 1992

Sidney Eden DIRECTOR

Member since 1977

Frank Galati DIRECTOR

Member since 1987

Adrian Hall

DIRECTOR

Member since 1987

Peggy Hickey

DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER

Member since 1997

Susan Kikuchi CHOREOGRAPHER

Member since 2002

Steve Lawson

DIRECTOR

Member since 2002

Everett Quinton

DIRECTOR

Member since 1998

Michael Rudman

DIRECTOR

Member since 1973

Barbara Siman

DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER

Member since 1986

Michael Sokoloff

DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER

Member since 2002

Andrew Leynse DIRECTOR Member since 2009

Steven Petrillo

DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER

Member since 2007

Sam Viverito

DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER

Member since 1985

Bryna Wortman

DIRECTOR

Member since 1984

Susan Kikuchi embodies the idea of legacy—literally and on many levels.

Born into dance, Susan Kikuchi was the daughter of SDC Member Yuriko, who passed away in March 2022 at the age of 102. Yuriko was a leading dancer and teacher with the Martha Graham Dance Company, which she joined in 1944. Susan studied with the company as a child, taught there, joined the company as a dancer in 1981, and was director of the Martha Graham Ensemble, the junior touring troupe founded by Yuriko. She staged Graham’s dances in the United States and abroad.

When Susan was still a child, Yuriko was cast in the original 1951 production of The King and I, dancing as Eliza in the landmark ballet, “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” choreographed by Jerome Robbins. Susan made her debut in that Broadway production alongside her brother, Lawrence. She served as dance captain and danced the role of Eliza (under her mother’s direction) in the 1977 Broadway revival, and was dance captain, dance swing, and choreography supervisor for the 1996 Broadway revival. Over the course of her career, Susan participated in 15 total productions of The King and I staging, directing, or reconstructing the original Robbins choreography.

1948–2022

There can be an elegance and purpose with each stride. The beauty and mystery of expression can be seen even in a simple step.

Susan Kikuchi + Yul Brynner in the 1977 Broadway revival of The King and I PHOTO c/o Cassey Kikuchi Kivnick

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