[I have published few articles on dance on Rick On Theater. That’s mostly because it’s one of the areas of the performing arts about which I know least. (Others are music and the electronic fields of theater tech, namely sound and lights—but at least I’ve worked in or with those aspects of theater to some extent.)
[While doing some research on the topics covered in the responses to "‘Morley Safer's Infamous 1993 Art Story,’" posted on ROT on 2 April 2024, I read an interesting article (from the New York Times in 1990, republished below) about defining—or ‘redefining’—dance (with respect to ballet) for the contemporary dance company and audience.
[Then I came across an article in this April’s issue of Dance Magazine about innovation in theatrical choreography to suit the “nontraditional” stage and set designs of some recent Broadway productions. I decided to put these two pieces, one very recent (one of the shows discussed just opened and is still running) and one 34 years old, together for the blog. They won’t close the gap between posts on dance and those on acting, directing, and playwriting . . . but they’ll narrow it a smidge.
[Previous posts on ROT on dance include “Dance & Acting,” posted on 9 June 2010; “Visual & Spatial Structure In Theater And Dance,” 11 December 2016; “Joan Acocella: Critic, Historian, or Critic-Historian,” 31 May 2019; and “Reconstruction of Ballet,” 30 July 2019. There are also several performance reports of shows in which dance was material, such as “Chéri,” 20 December 2013, and “An American in Paris,” 2 August 2015, among others.]
“How Three
Broadway Choreographers
by Rachel Rizzuto
[Rachel Rizzuto’s article from Dance Magazine was published on the journal’s website on 15 April 2024.
[There are six stage productions mentioned in the discussion below. Rather than insert a brief identification of each one as they occur, I’m going to list them all in the afterword following the text of Rizzuto’s article in the order in which they appear in the report. Since I’ll be listing them separately from the article, I’ll include more detail than I would in an insert.]
Even conventional Broadway prosceniums can present plenty of challenges for choreographers: steep rakes, gargantuan moving set pieces, awkward sightlines. But what happens when a show’s creative vision includes a total overhaul of the theater’s playing space, eliminating the familiar stage-and-seating setup in favor of something more immersive? What goes down with the dancing when the physical boundaries between the audience and the cast become less defined—or even nonexistent?
The choreography steps up to the challenge, of course. Shows like Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 (2016), Here Lies Love (2023), and this month’s new revival of Cabaret made avant-garde stages their own.
Letting the Movement Evolve
Choreographer Sam Pinkleton joined the Great Comet creative team during its second off-Broadway iteration, in 2013. That version was performed in a small custom tent—a naturally intimate environment. Its 2015 American Repertory Theater run was in a more traditional space, where it began experimenting with some of the elements featured in the 2016 Broadway production at the Imperial Theatre. Pinkleton found himself with onstage audience members to involve, a series of cascading staircases to navigate, and a cast of 30 (up from 16 in 2013) at his choreographic disposal.
What saved Great Comet from getting lost in its new digs, he says, was the creative team’s focus on its original intention. Scenic designer Mimi Lien “was really fierce about maintaining a level of intimacy,” Pinkleton says. “She wanted every person in the room to have a personalized, specific experience to this show that is only theirs.” The entire creative team, led by director Rachel Chavkin, was aligned on this mission. Pinkleton used the staircases Lien designed to connect the main and upper levels of the theater as tiny stage spaces for individual performers to interact personally with theatergoers.
Julia Cheng, choreographer of the 2021 West End version and current Broadway revival of Cabaret—which eliminates some of the orchestra seating to create a small stage space in the round—met spatial challenges by focusing on choreographic authenticity. Cheng’s movement training is in street styles, like hip hop and waacking, and she wanted to capitalize on the way those genres naturally lend themselves to an up-close audience experience.
“Those styles are about holding space, and that requires a different skill set,” she says. She created what she refers to as the prologue to the show, when arriving audience members encounter a small group of dancers and musicians “already vibing,” as if the theatergoers have walked into a club. “The prologue ended up becoming a show in itself,” she says. She let her dancers’ particular strengths shine, too. “I wanted to draw out their fortes, their specialisms from the underground and subculture—forms not usually represented on the musical theater stage.”
Sometimes choreographers even help shape transformative theater designs. When working with choreographer Annie-B Parson on Here Lies Love, scenic designer David Korins knew there needed to be give-and-take between the show’s unusual, immersive playing space—one long catwalk, with the audience below on either side, plus smaller spaces throughout the theater with room for a performer or two—and its movement vocabulary. “I think Annie is an extraordinary visual storyteller,” he says. “There were tentpole moments we wanted to accomplish, and in those, she really held her ground—‘If we’re going to do this, then we need to do that.’ When she had a sense of that, you listened.”
Rising to the Challenge
In revamped theater spaces, changes that might at first seem like challenges can actually offer opportunities for innovative thinking. Pinkleton found that to be true on Great Comet, where he had to convey a sense of closeness in a large house without a central meeting place where the entire cast could fit. Eventually, he landed on placing dancers throughout the house—on the staircases, in the aisles, on platforms, in an audience member’s lap—and choreographing intentional eye contact. “It was, ‘I am looking at you in the sixth row and waving at you and saying I’m glad you’re here,’” he says. “That became more important than asking people to kick their leg on five.”
From Korins’ perspective, the disparate stage spaces of Here Lies Love allowed Parson to create a different kind of Broadway dynamic. “Annie could stage these beautiful, isolated islands of dance and movement,” he says. “You might be looking at two people dancing in unison, but they’re doing it 150 feet away from each other. That tension and connectivity between the bodies in space was really effective.”
For Cheng, the task of choreographing in the round was a welcome one, not a thorn in her side. “When I’m in the club cyphering, that’s my comfort zone: You’re in the circle, there’s a community around you,” she says. “It’s sometimes difficult to get that in a really big space.” She saw typical theater choreographic taboos—turning one’s back to the audience, for example—as a chance to offer unexpected perspectives. “I don’t mind having a back to the audience,” she says. “I think that’s interesting.”
Overhauled theaters, with their myriad challenges, require a special kind of mind-meld between the members of the creative team. When all of a show’s leaders are invested in the same idea, however out-there it might seem—what Pinkleton calls “everybody working on the same show”—that’s when the real magic happens. When it does come together, Pinkleton says, “it doesn’t feel insane. It feels inevitable.”
Broadway Theater Revamps of the Past
Most revolutionary staging choices in Broadway’s history have had the same aim: to get the audience closer to the action than a proscenium stage can.
✦ Before transferring to what’s now known as the Al Hirschfeld
Theatre, Man of La Mancha (1965)
opened at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre in Greenwich Village, which
boasted an experimental stage with the audience seated on three sides. Jazz
dance pioneer Jack Cole was nominated for a Tony Award for his Latin-influenced
choreography, described as “blistering” and “orgiastic” by one critic.
✦ The 1974 Broadway production of Leonard Bernstein’s often-revised Candide ripped out much of the Broadway
Theatre’s orchestra seating. This meant that many audience members had an
immersive experience with Patricia Birch’s choreography, which New York
Times theater critic Clive Barnes likened to a rocket booster.
✦ For its 1998 revival, Cabaret transformed the former disco nightclub Studio 54 into a Broadway house—but with a small thrust stage surrounded by tables and chairs, to lend an authentic Kit Kat Klub vibe. Choreographer and co-director Rob Marshall used the audience’s nearness to highlight his raw, rough-edged choreography.
[Here’s the list of productions named in Rachel Rizzuto’s report:
• Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812: 14 November 2016-3 September 2017 (336 regular
performances) at the Imperial Theatre; book, music, and lyrics by Dave Malloy;
“pop-opera” based on the 1869 novel War and Peace (first translated into
English, 1889) by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910); commissioned and premièred Off-Off-Broadway
by Ars Nova (2012), further developed and produced by the American Repertory
Theatre of Cambridge, Massachusetts (2015); directed by Rachel Chavkin,
choreographed by Sam Pinkleton, with a cast including Denée Benton (Natasha)
and Josh Groban (Pierre); 2 Tony Awards, 10 additional nominations (including
Best Choreography); 4 Drama Desk Awards (including Outstanding Director of a
Musical; not choreography)
• Cabaret (official
title: Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club): 21 April 2024-Present (32 regular performances as of 19 May) at the August Wilson Theatre; book by Joe Masteroff, music by John
Kander, and lyrics by Fred Ebb; based on the play I Am a Camera (1951) by
John Van Druten and The Berlin Stories (1939) by Christopher
Isherwood (1904-86); transferred from London’s West
End at the Playhouse Theater from 15 November 2021-Present; both London’s
Playhouse and New York City’s August Wilson Theatres have been refurbished as
the Kit Kat Club in an arena-theater format; directed by Rebecca Frecknall,
choreographed by Julia Cheng, set designed by Tom Scott, with a cast including Gayle
Rankin (Sally Bowles), Eddie Redmayne (Emcee), Ato Blankton-Wood (Clifford
Bradshaw), Bebe Neuwirth (Fraulein Schneider); 9 Tony Awards nominations (not choreography);
5 Drama Desk Awards (no awards)
• Here Lies Love:
20 July-26 November 2023 (150 regular performances) at the Broadway Theatre;
music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, lyrics by Byrne; disco-pop bio-musical of
life of Imelda Marcos (b, 1929), First Lady of the Philippines (1965-86), based
on the concept album by Byrne and Slim (2010); the musical, almost entirely
sung through, has little dialogue (hence, no book-writer), instead projections at
the side of the stage by projection designer Peter Nigrini provide text that explains
crucial facts; originally produced by New York City’s Public Theater; the Broadway
Theatre was transformed into a disco ballroom; directed by Alex Timbers,
choreographed by Annie-B Parson, set designed by David Korins, with a cast
including Arielle Jacobs (Imelda), Jose Llana (Marcos), Conrad Ricamora (Ninoy
Aquino), Lea Salonga (Aurora Aquino); 4 Tony nominations (including Best Choreography);
no awards
• Man of La Mancha:
22 November 1965-26 January 1971 (2,328 regular performances) at the ANTA
Washington Square Theatre (Greenwich Village; demolished in 1968), Martin Beck
Theatre (renamed the Al Hirschfeld in 2003), Eden Theatre (East Village;
converted to a movie house in 1976, now called the Village East), and Mark
Hellinger Theatre (acquired by the Times Square Church in in 1989); book by
Dale Wasserman, music by Mitch Leigh, lyrics by Joe Darion; based on the life
and works of Miguel de Cervantes (1547?-1616); directed by Albert Marr,
choreographed by Jack Cole, with a cast including Joan Diener (Aldonza/Dulcinea),
Irving Jacobson (Sancho Panza), Richard Kiley (Don Quixote/Cervantes); 5 Tonys (including
Best Musical and Best Direction of a Musical), 2 additional nominations (including
Best Choreography)
• Candide: 10
March 1974-4 January 1976 (740 regular performances) at the Broadway Theatre;
book adaptation by Hugh Wheeler, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Richard
Wilbur r (with additional lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, John La Touche, and
Bernstein; based on the novel Candide (1759) by Voltaire (1694-1778); Broadway
Theatre was transformed by platforms on the stage and in the auditorium for the
action instead of changing scenery; directed by Harold Prince, choreographed by
Patricia Birch, set designed by Eugene Lee, with a cast including Lewis J.
Stadlen (Dr. Pangloss/Voltaire, et al.), Mark Baker (Candide), Maureen Brennan (Cunegonde);
5 Tonys (not choreography), 3 additional nominations (not choreography); 5
Drama Desks (including Outstanding Choreography, Outstanding Set Design,
Outstanding Director)
• Cabaret: 19 March 1998-4 January 2004 at the Kit Kat Klub (Henry Miller’s Theatre was renamed for 8 months while Cabaret was in residence; when the show moved to the former night club, the theater reverted to its former name; it was renamed the Stephen Sondheim in 2010), Studio 54 (2,377 regular performances); text and script details are the same as for 2024 revival above; produced by Off-Broadway Roundabout Theatre Company; inspired by the 1993 London production at the Donmar Warehouse; directed by Sam Mendes, choreographed by Rob Marshall, set and club designed by Robert Brill, with a cast including Alan Cumming (Master of Ceremonies), Natasha Richardson (Sally Bowles), John Benjamin Hickey (Clifford Bradshaw), Mary Louise Wilson (Fraulein Schneider); 4 Tonys, 6 additional nominations (including Best Choreography, Best Direction of a Musical); 3 Drama Desks, 7 additional nominations (including Outstanding Choreography, Outstanding Direction of a Musical, Outstanding Set Design of a Musical
[Rachel Rizzuto is a choreographer, performer, teacher, and dance writer. She’s a contributing writer to Dance Magazine and Dance Teacher magazine. Rizzuto earned her MFA in dance from the University of Illinois in 2021. She graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi with a BFA in dance and a BA in English.]
* *
* *
“JUST
WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED DANCE?”
by
Jack Anderson
[Jack Anderson, the New York Times dance reviewer in 1990, launches a discussion of how ballet has changed with respect to current ballet troupes and their audiences by introducing a debate he asserts was generated by productions of two ballets by the New York City Ballet in the summer of 1990.
[Anderson, whose article was published in the “Arts & Leisure” section of the New York Times on 12 August 1990, doesn’t really explain why these dances, one a première and the other a revival of a 18-year-old creation, initiated such a controversy, so I did some research, and here’s what I found.
[In his review of the first piece, the début of Peter Martins and Robert La Fosse’s A Mass, Anderson labeled the dancing “choreographically controversial” (“‘A Mass,’ a Surprise City Ballet Premiere,” sec. C [“The Arts”], New York Times, 29 June 1990), a description that applies to both ballets. That’s the crux of the debate.
[A Mass, which premièred on 27 June 1990 and was repeated on 1 July, is a Missa Sicca (literally, ‘Dry Mass’), a medieval Roman Catholic rite that takes the form of the Mass, but without communion. As staged by Martins to choral music composed by Michael Torke, it was largely a processional composed of 100 dancers.
[Anderson observed, “The question to be asked is not whether ‘A Mass’ contains choreography, but whether its choreography is expressive.” He described the movements as “kinetic austerity” and concluded, “‘A Mass’ was curiously vague.”
[Jerome Robbins’s Watermill débuted at NYCB in 1972 and was revived for the first time since 1979 on 12 July 1990 with a repeat on the 16th as part of the troupe’s Festival of Jerome Robbins’ Ballets. It was set to music composed by Teiji Ito and Edward Villella, the original lead dancer in the première, returned to NYCB to reprise his performance.
[Named for an eastern Long Island resort town (Water Mill, in Suffolk County) where Robbins vacationed, the ballet was described by NYCB founder George Balanchine, Robbins recalled, as “about there being no time” (Anna Kisselgoff, “Jerome Robbins, a Creator from Head to Foot,” sec C [“The Arts’], New York Times, 3 June 1990). Dance reviewer Kisselgoff felt that it was an “attempt to treat what Mr. Robbins called ‘the unstated’” in contrast to the literalness he’d dealt with earlier. Robbins called the work “contemplative” and “internalized.”
[Kisselgoff characterized the feel of the production as the “slow-moving time sense derived from Japanese Noh theater,” a solemn and deliberate performance form suffused with the perspective of Zen Buddhism (see my post “Noh Theater of Japan,” published on ROT on 11 April 2023). Thus, she later concluded, the audience that was “primed for toe shoes and the fasted dancers in the world was suddenly invited to watch one of ballet’s prime movers—Mr. Villella—in near stillness for an hour” (Kisselgoff, “Villella Returns to ‘Watermill,’ a Robbins Meditation on Time,” sec. C [“The Arts”], New York Times, 14 July 1990).
[This lack of movement, or, in the case of Martins and La Fosse’s Mass, balletic movement, primed the ballet world to ask ‘What is a ballet these days anyway?’]
This summer, two City Ballet productions — ‘Watermill’ and ‘A Mass’ — fueled the debate over what constitutes a ballet.
Choreographers choreograph dances. Dancers dance dances. Ballet dancers dance ballets.
Those statements are not quotations from a first-grade reader for young dance students. Instead, they constitute a primer for adult dancegoers and, even though they may sound self-evident, they point to matters of the utmost artistic importance.
They are especially worth considering because of the uproar that occurred at the New York City Ballet earlier this summer. Two productions — a revival and a premiere — caused the fuss. Those ballets were accused of being “not really dance.”
As part of its festival of Jerome Robbins’s ballets, the company presented “Watermill,” Mr. Robbins’s allegory of 1972 that traces the course of a man’s life in solemn slow motion to music by Teiji Ito [Japanese-born American composer and performer; 1935-82]. The troupe’s final performances in late June featured “A Mass,” a new work by Peter Martins [Danish former ballet dancer and choreographer; b. 1946; Co-Ballet Master-In-Chief of New York City Ballet with Jerome Robbins, 1983-90, and Ballet Master-in-Chief, 1990-2018; dancer, choreographer, film director, theater director and producer Robbins, 1918-98, was Ballet Master of the New York City Ballet, 1983-90)], the company’s ballet master, and Robert LaFosse [dancer, choreographer, and dance teacher; b. 1959], a principal, that consisted largely of ceremonial marching to a choral score by Michael Torke [composer of music influenced by jazz and minimalism; b. 1961].
Some members of the audience disliked both. Certainly, the pieces have their peculiarities: “Watermill” takes place in such a symbolic realm that its events can seem unduly remote from reality; “A Mass” never invests its Christian symbolism with genuine spiritual significance. Such criticisms point to deficiencies of content. But other observers went even further: They asserted that neither work was really a ballet; the most disgruntled even argued that neither work was dancing in any sense of the word.
These objections raise serious issues that transcend the virtues or faults of any single season’s offerings, issues that have been debated over the years. For instance, in 1957 Paul Taylor [dancer and choreographer; 1930-2018; founder of the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 1954] offered a notorious concert in which his dancers scarcely moved at all, and in the 60’s and 70’s Minimalist choreographers devoted themselves to such simple physical actions as walking and skipping.
[The Paul Taylor concert Anderson cites was Seven New Dances, performed one time on 20 October 1957 at New York City’s 92nd Street Y. New York Social Diary (The 92nd Street Y presents Paul Taylor Dance Company: Celebrating the Past, Present & Future of Modern Dance, Hosted by Alan Cumming | New York Social Diary), a website that styles itself as “a social, historical, and cultural chronicle of life in New York City,” characterizes the dance program as
a series of movement and music studies in collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg [painter and graphic artist; 1925-2008; designed costumes for Seven New Dances] and John Cage [American experimental composer; 1912-92] that sought to ask essential questions regarding “What is dance?” and “What is music?” Inspired by gestures, postures, and “pedestrian” or “found movements,” Taylor created a wholly unique performance of modern dance . . . . In one dance, “Epic,” Taylor performed a series of simple gestures for 13 minutes to the sound of telephone time signals. In another, Taylor and a fellow dancer posed on stage – in complete stillness – for four minutes before the curtain came down. . . . “Events II” features two women in 1950s cocktail dresses shifting between poses on stage to the sounds of rain as a gentle breeze billows across the stage, catching their petticoats in the wind. The 1957 performance became famous, not necessarily for its artistic momentum, but for its raw questioning of what modern dance is. While audiences left throughout the evening, it was the review by Louis Horst in Dance Observer that cemented the performance as one of the most famous in dance history: the review was simply four inches of blank space.
[Horst (1884-1964), originally a composer and pianist, helped define the principles of modern dance choreography. His famous review appeared in Dance Observer, a monthly journal he founded in 1934 (it closed down at his death in 1964), in the November 1957 issue where he wrote out “Paul Taylor and Dance Company” with the date and location of the performance, and left the rest of page 139 blank.
[In the New York Herald Tribune of 27 October 1957 (sec. 4 [“Theater – Movies – Music – Dance . . .”]), reviewer Terry Walter quipped, with reference to the program’s title, that “there were seven items, they were new but they weren’t dances.”]
To deny any work presented by a dance group the right to be called a dance or a ballet necessarily involves asking just what is a dance or a ballet. What, for that matter, is choreography? The only all-inclusive answers to such questions sound like baby talk. Dances are what choreographers create and dancers perform; ballets are created by ballet choreographers.
“Ballet,” “dance” and “choreography” resist easy definition, in part because the arts to which they refer are constantly developing. Possibly in an effort — an unsuccessful one, it turned out — to prevent people from complaining that “A Mass” was not “really ballet,” the program note for it read “staged by,” rather than “choreographed by,” Mr. Martins and Mr. LaFosse.
However, what they provided was certainly choreography, if choreography is thought of as the art of organizing movement in space and time. The results of such organizings are dances. Of course the boundary lines between dance and other related arts have never been fixed, and it is occasionally difficult to distinguish dance from mime or from the imagistic movement-theater associated with such an experimentalist as Robert Wilson [experimental theatrical stage director and playwright; b. 1941; also worked as a choreographer, among other things].
Although ballet may seem superficially easier to define, it, too, is hard to pin down. Ballet certainly involves a training method that has been evolving since the 17th century. But what makes a choreographic composition a ballet and not just a dance? The five classroom positions of the feet? Not all ballet choreographers use them in every work. An erect, turned-out stance? That aspect may also be rejected by some choreographers: for instance, they will almost certainly do so in order to depict grotesque characters. Thus, it’s back to baby talk: ballets are what choreographers devise for ballet-trained dancers.
Does this mean, then, that dances are dances and ballets are ballets simply because people who call themselves choreographers say they are? This critic would assent to such an extreme view. And adopting it does not rob the terms dance and ballet of all meaning. Rather, it involves a recognition that by calling their compositions dances or ballets, choreographers are asking the audience — for whatever possibly quirky personal reasons they may have — to regard those compositions as part of a tradition that includes other works labeled dances or ballets.
However, when some dance lovers grumble that a work is “not really dance,” they are not concerned with abstruse esthetic points. They simply mean that, for them, the work is not sufficiently virtuosic. When “Watermill” received its premiere back in 1972, it was booed by some members of the audience because its star, Edward Villella [ballet dancer and choreographer; b. 1936], was given no opportunity to display his athletic prowess.
Although dancing can — and frequently should — dazzle, dance should never be equated with virtuosity alone. This is easy to do today when dance schools are producing remarkably agile performers. Yet, to make dancing solely a matter of physical dexterity may be to limit the range of its expressive potentialities.
Fine choreographers devise movements not necessarily because of their difficulty, or lack of it, but because those movements are meaningful in a specific theatrical context. What makes a dance satisfying is not the quantity or the difficulty of its steps, but their appropriateness to a given situation.
Choreographers should always feel free to invent any kinds of sequences or phrases they wish, be they simple or complex. And it should never be forgotten that if choreography is an art of organized movement, anything a dancer does on stage is dancing.
[Jack Anderson (1935-2023) was a poet, dance critic, and dance historian. His reviews of dance performances appeared in the New York Times (1978-2005) and Dance Magazine (1964-70), and his scholarly studies in dance history and his eleven volumes of poetry are highly regarded.]
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