Several years ago in preparations for a new ballet using Motown hits that I was planning for The Joffrey Ballet (and because I was also thinking of the work as a possible workshop for a dance musical, a “dancical”, I wrote some thoughts down about the dance musical in general and Twyla Tharp’s Movin’ Out in particular. However, I never shared those thoughts with anyone - but I will later in this post.

With the recent opening of the new Tharp dancical, Come Fly Away (to the songs of Frank Sinatra), and the critical response to it, I started to think again about my own aspirations in this area and what I had written back then. Several other factors might have also gotten me thinking as well. Spectrum’s current collaboration with the 5^th Avenue Theater on its revival of On The Town probably triggered some thoughts. But my being fired from the Broadway bound musical White Noise, which I was scheduled to direct and choreograph this spring in New York, (as of this posting, it still hasn’t gone into rehearsal) is the most likely instigator. I had co-directed and choreographed the out of town tryout in New Orleans this past summer and with two show stopping numbers in it and tremendous audience response, I was thrilled at the possibility of my theater dances being seen the way I wanted them to be seen as opposed to how a director (not me) thought they ought to be viewed. I was also excited that with Bill T Jones’s Fela, the Tharp show, and White Noise, the current season might see three choreographer directed shows running simultaneously on Broadway.

The point being that with my firing from White Noise I realized that I had no power. That in the power/politics of the commercial theater, the most expendable member of the creative team is the non-author or the director/choreographer (especially if unlike Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett or Tharp he or she has no marquee value as a choreographer/director). Interestingly, composers, lyricists, and book writers are considered the authors of a musical, while choreographers whose work is also original and generative are not. So I guess what this might really be about is my desire to be in control or at least in control of the artistic material and the loss of control I felt with my firing. It seems that the only way to be in control or at least to feel like you are in the commercial theater is to author or produce. And as an artist, authoring is the better option.

Control I believe is an issue for Tharp as well. I think her work has evolved the way it has as she has struggled to gain more and more control over the circumstances under which it is produced and as she has moved closer to authoring (in the commercial theater sense). She has been smart – as she has maximized her control she has minimized her financial risk- from not for profit dance company director (you can lose everything) to Broadway author (front end guaranteed, back end the possibilities are endless). She has managed to do this by shrewdly maneuvering within or manipulating the current commercial system she works in. It was rumored that with Movin’ Out she gave up some financial benefits to gain artistic control - and it paid off. Movin’ Out was a hit and she was then able to leverage that success for her next project, The Times They Are A-Changin’. While that show was a flop, it demonstrated/indicated where her aspirations are – the commercial theater (though it could be argued this was clear even back in 1981 when her dance project with David Byrne, The Catherine Wheel, was presented on Broadway at The Winter Garden). After the closing of The Times They Are A-Changin’, she then did what she had done before (among other things like writing books on personal practices or memoir), retreated back to the concert dance or ballet world to rejuvenate, to realign herself with her beginnings and that which she understood and that had always artistically nurtured her.

I do want to say that I think Tharp, aside from being driven, shrewd, and ambitious, to be courageous. She has had her share of successes, failures and disappointments, yet, she is always pushing forward. Sometimes, I think I tend to minimize her accomplishments and talent by focusing on what I perceive as her major shortcoming – a desire for greatness. That desire/urge is what drives and propels her forward but it is also what makes her recent work seem to scream for acknowledgement of its brilliance and originality. It can make it seem needy, inauthentic, dishonest, and even distasteful. Often I think of her like Judy Garland in those old black and white CBS TV images, gaunt yet blotted with the need for love and approval, a big empty needy hole in the center of her being that can never be filled, a black hole of desire dangerously fascinating, all the while sucking us in.

Yet, I must admit I admire her. She takes risks. And when she fails, which I think is often (and oh so publicly), in spite of what must be soul-wrenching disappointment, she rebounds. She is one tough broad and I lik’em like that!!

I want to share my thoughts on Movin’ Out because I believe that Tharp created with it a model for a successful dance musical. She refined and defined the form beyond the revue or anthology formats of Dancin’, Fosse, and Jerome Robbins’ Broadway. She did something new for the Broadway stage– it was only the choreography and dancing that mattered! The dancical, as formatted and practiced by Tharp, is the one commercial theatrical form where the choreographer is the key artistic player, the top dog. It is about what the choreographer is “authoring” that counts most.

Recently, there have been several examples of the dancical that have had moderately successful runs on Broadway - Fosse, Mathew Bourne’s Swan Lake, and Susan Stroman’s Contact come to mind- but the Twyla Tharp/Billy Joel production Movin’ Out captured the public’s attention in an unprecedented way. Perhaps not since Westside Story or Bob Fosse’s Dancin’ has a Broadway production with so much dance had such audience appeal and financial success. With the success of Movin’ Out on Broadway, the “dancical” seemed to be maturing. It also created dreams of prestige and fortune for starry-eyed producers and rights holders of popular music catalogues and libraries.

Firstly, what makes Movin’ Out striking as dance narrative is that the story is original. It is not based on a well know story nor is it a re-imagining of a classic tale, like Bourne’s Swan Lake. Contact also presents an original script but its storytelling ambition is not so high. And secondly, a single lead singer, three back-up singers, and small rock band perform all of the music in Movin’ Out, not in a pit but just above the main stage picture. The band and singers act not as characters, but rather function like the famous bands in 1980’s music videos whose guitar-strumming image or histrionic singing periodically interrupts the visualized narrative of their song. However, in this case they are neither famous nor stars, and are placed uncomfortably above eye level so that the audience has to strain its necks to see them clearly.  They don’t highjack our attention or distract us too much from the main event - THE DANCING.

This places the dancing down front and center! All of our attention goes to the virtuosity of the dancers and the ability of the choreographer to convey not only atmosphere but also narrative. In its themes and tone, Movin’ Out, is the ultimate pop story-ballet. And as with all things pop, the audience needs no background knowledge or expertise to understand it. Watching the show might be a little disorienting at first if you have had little or no experience-viewing dance. But you quickly adjust and it all begins to make sense. Most importantly, you don’t need to know anything about ballet and its lexicon. The multiple-pirouettes, high leg extension, reference to vernacular dancing semaphore any meaning that is important. Add speed, sexiness, and exhaustive energy to the mix and dance literacy become about as necessary as high heel shoes. By the time the show ends, one feels pummeled into submission. We stand, applaud, and cheer. Tharp at her hyperactive worst has won out.

Movin’ Out is an ideal vehicle for a theatrical translation of the songs and music of Billy Joel. It creates a kind of nostalgia that hooks us (like Jersey Boys it’s a baby-boomers nostalgia). It is also a democratize nostalgia, someone else’s nostalgia available to any who wish to partake. With Movin’ Out, one gets to be white, working class, living on Long Island during the Viet Nam era. The experience is like a ride at a theme park with the music, dancing, and images triggering the imagination and causing “the ride”. We think, “So that is how it must have been”. So we end-up longing for something that was never a part of our personal experience or history but rather is the history and memories of another (possibly the creators/authors). Or it’s nostalgia for some pivotal moment in history, like Viet Nam, mythologized and all-purpose-sized for easy consumption. Perhaps any group of songs or music that speak to a specific demographic, an era, or a particular sensible would be ideal for translation into a dancical- like the songs of Frank Sinatra.

While the critical response to Come Fly Away has probably been equal to or better than Movin’ Out, only time will tell if it will equally capture the public’s imagination and have the same level of financial success as that show. But what I am most curious about is whether or not the dancical, like the book musical, is an enduring form or just a passing fad; and will the Tharp shows open the door for other choreographers and dancing to again to move down front and center in the commercial musical theater?

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In my first posting I wondered about how much of the personal should appear in the blog – what my personal life had to do with my professional choices and artistic creations. As I said then, the point perhaps of this blog is to provide some insight into my process of being an artistic director and choreographer and the complex array of things that go into making artistic and organizational decisions. This issue of the relationship of personal history to artistic meaning, output, and value has been around for a while in literary criticism – is knowledge of an artist’s personal history and psychology necessary to discern meaning from the work, and for an appraisal and valuation of it? But in dance these questions are seldom if ever asked. Mostly, it is that those personal truths and realities of the artists’ lives is thought to add a deeper understanding or insight into what is being seen on stage but not necessarily to contribute to the work’s artistic successfulness, worth or value.

Since so much of American contemporary dance is abstract, autobiographical elements are almost impossible to discern. One might say that American contemporary dance artists do everything they can so that who they really are as people and glimpses of their personal life goes unrevealed in their work, (Bill T Jones, David Rousseve, and Reggie Wilson might be exceptions and interestingly all African-American males). With abstract dance artists it is only through ongoing viewing of their work that we come to understand and appreciate (or not) their aesthetic concerns and interests. But seldom do we know what non-aesthetic circumstances drive them and the choices they make – how the non-aesthetic affects the aesthetic. Perhaps even the complex structures employed by many of these artists are like elaborate decoys designed to distract and to keeps us away from knowing who they really are.

I am raising the question because I recently saw a performance by a young (experience wise not chronology) and talented choreographer that caught me off guard. There were two moments in particular that were startling and caused me to gasp (and those of you that know me, know that it takes a lot to make me gasp). In the first, a woman was being violently “humped” by a man in the center of the stage just before the lights went to black ending one of the sections of the piece. The second involved the same woman being tossed upside down in a waste dumpster with her legs sticking straight up, just before another black out, this time signaling the end of the piece and the program.

The dance in general I would describe as a surrealist romp with many of the elements one would expect from a work of that nature - surprises, unexpected juxtapositions and non-sequiturs. And if you were inclined to interpret the moments I described from a feminist perspective there would be much to be dismayed, alarmed, and perhaps angered by. So, from both those viewpoints, gasping seems an appropriate response. However, what triggered me was neither. It was my knowledge of non-artistic biographical information about the choreographer and his relationship with the performers in question that provoked my reaction - the woman in the two instances is the ex-wife of the choreographer and the second man, who tosses her in the dumpster, is the choreographer’s current domestic partner.

With this additional information, other questions cascaded. What is he saying about his relationship with his ex? How does he really feel about her? What does he think of his current life with his current partner in relationship to his old married life? Does he realize that these kinds of questions might arise for viewers? How does the ex feel about what was happening to her on stage? …. I could go on but I won’t because what this points out is that none of these questions have anything to do with whether what happened on stage succeeded as a piece of good dance or not.

In someway, this is familiar territory for me. Back in 1993, I created Sentimental Cannibalism, a work that used as it reference point Jean Baudrillard’s On Seduction. The work caused quite a stir (not always positive). Like Baudrillard I was called anti-feminist (among other things). I recall vividly an incident at the American Dance Festival when David Dorfman and I almost came to blows when he said the piece was pornographic and demeaned women and that I was a misogynist. Interestingly, black women responded quite differently to the work and thought the images of women depicted in the work were not those of man eating “bitches” but rather of strong and assertive women who gave as good as they got. While my intention in the work was to create movement and visual configurations that were metaphors or signifiers of Baudrillard’s ideas, as well as to make an engaging piece of dance-theater, many considered the work to be autobiographical and interpreted it as a manifestation of my personal (and damaged) psychology. And because of that perspective many condemned the work and I was demonized. After that, it seemed all my work was scrutinized through the misogynist lens.

Now I find myself considering intent and meaning in regard to another male artist’s work. Not necessarily what his conscious intent was but what he might have unintentionally communicated. Is he (and was I back in 1993) being irresponsible by not considering how the imagery in the dance might be interpreted? Or are we as artists so caught up in our efforts to solve the technical and unique challenges and demands of creating new work that we naively create inside a bubble? And only after that bubble is burst by some viewer who is bringing all kinds of “other” information - perspectives, preconceptions, and histories (personal, generational, cultural) – are we made aware that we might have said more that what we meant to say… However, I am still left with the question – Was the work any good?

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