Pilobolus Gets a Grammy Nod

[This ran first on the LA Times' Culture blog. And sadly, Adele's Grammy sweep included a win in this category]

As the leadership team of Pilobolus Dance Theater readies itself to fly to Los Angeles for Sunday’s Grammy Awards -– the group is nominated for best short form music video for “All Is Not Lost” –- the dance troupe’s co-executive director Lily Binns is feeling “really, really nervous” (“we’re up against Adele!”) and quite celebratory about the way the troupe is expanding its artistic reach.

This is not the company’s first foray into music videos. Rather incongruously, Pilobolus dancers appeared as background elements in Marilyn Manson’s 1999 “The Beautiful People” video.

But this Grammy nod, shared with OK Go’s frontman Damian Kulash Jr. and his videographer/choreographer sister Trish Sie, was based on “truly a full collaboration for us,” Binns says. “We share a similiar sensibility with OK Go and Trish Sie,” she explains. “We all like making the impossible look possible.”

For “All Is Not Lost,” Pilobolus and OK Go set up shop for five days in a small town hall near the dance troupe’s Connecticut base (“the Woodbury Town Hall didn’t know what hit it,” she says) and shot the dancers and musicians from beneath a large glass platform atop which they undertake vintage Pilobolus contortions and organize their bare standing feet to spell out Roman letters and Japanese Katakana syllabary.

Binns expects that the band and the dancers will collaborate again (“We felt this was a beginning of something likely to be larger”) and they did perform a surprise live stage version of “All Is Not Lost” at New York’s Joyce Theater in July 2011 with Kulash and the band.

Touring internationally this year, Pilobolus’ trip will include a stop at the Irvine Barclay Theatre (May 17-18). And Binns just revealed plans for the dancers to accompany the zany proto-science-philosophers from WNYC’s RadioLab radio show, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, on a U.S. tour called “RadioLab: In the Dark.” Hosted by Demitri Martin, and featuring Pilobolus’ “visual explanations” of scientific principles, the tour is scheduled to land at UCLA’s Royce Hall on May 8-10 (tickets not yet on sale). While you wait, you can check out the 3-D version of the “All Is Not Lost” video on the Nintendo DS platform.

La La La Human Steps Premieres Opera-hued “New Work” in U.S.

[This ran in the L.A. Times.]

Thirty-plus years after founding La La La Human Steps, Montreal-based choreographer-director Édouard Lock has become a sort of philosopher-king for the fierce and intelligent abstract dance made popular in the 1980s. While other members of that chic choreographic wave (Bill T. Jones, Karole Armitage) have since ventured into explorations of history, narrative and world cultures, Lock, 59, is still ruthlessly focused on the manipulation of human gesture that arose from a revelation he had in his 20s.

“You kind of figure out at some point that movement is about 90% aesthetic and 10% functional,” Lock explained by telephone from Vancouver, Canada, on a North American tour that brings his company to the Irvine Barclay Theatre this week. “People hold a cup of coffee in a certain way — not because it’s functional but because it says something about them, because they’re being observed; they even do it when they’re alone.”

Lock’s signature style — a hybrid of full-bodied classical/contemporary ballet pas de deux whipped off in warp speed, with frequent jarring aerial launches — employs that crazy speed so as to detangle gesture from its expected meaning and build a repetitive fury that rewrites it. Speed is also meant to push his dancers “to the edge of [their] control,” Lock explains, to force them to go beyond “a simply charismatic interpretation” of performing that “maintains a wall between the audience and the dancer.”

Born in Casablanca to Spanish parents of Jewish descent, Lock immigrated to Montreal when he was 21/2 and was already a 20-year-old literature student when he discovered dance. He picked his memorable company name to indicate his intellectual beliefs about form and creation.

“Language has its merits not so much in the meaning of the words, but in the structure and the way words are placed next to each other and the flow of it,” he explained. “I think the same rules apply to dance. And my mother told me that ‘la la la’ was something that I used to say a lot when I was a kid. So I just used it as a reference to language that has yet to have meaning but is beginning to define its structure.”

Lock chose not to title his current work — a piece that takes musical and emotional cues from Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” and Gluck’s “Orpheus and Eurydice.” Written by frequent collaborators Gavin Bryars and Blake Hargreaves, and created completely independently from the choreography, the 95-minute minimalist score is performed live by a piano, viola, cello and saxophone (which carries the vocal line). The work takes inspiration from “the sort of fantastical relationship to love that both [plotlines] have,” Lock says. “With ‘Dido,’ love can kill. With ‘Orfeo,’ love can be so extreme that you delve into death to bring the object of desire back.”

Celebrated Mariinsky ballerina Diana Vishneva, who’d sought Lock out to choreograph something for her, was the original artist to develop and tour the piece when it played Europe last year. For this North American leg, however, Vishneva couldn’t appear and her role has been split between two company dancers.

After decades watching Lock’s relentlessly hard, spooling movement phrases, some critics have begged for more variety, and certain descriptions of “New Work” suggest new variances (more floor work, more stillness). Yet these also may just be a temporary result of the autumnal nature of the piece. Of Dido and Orfeo’s stories, Lock says: “They’re both very passionate discourses, but they are discourses at the end of a relationship … at the end of things … a subject more real to me now than the endlessly seductive nature of beginnings.”

My Lunch with a Billion-Dollar Tour Director

[This article originally ran in the LA Times.]

In a dark booth at the Polo Lounge, just down the street from his Beverly Hills home, tour director extraordinaire Jamie King struggles to recall the day he hung up his dance shoes for good. Though his management badly wants this interview to stay on the topic of his current feats as the director-writer of the Cirque du Soleil/Michael Jackson tribute world tour, “The Immortal” (Tuesday and Wednesday at the Honda Center and Friday through Jan. 29 at Staples Center), as well as his stint directing Madonna’s heat-seeking Super Bowl performance (Feb. 5), and please don’t forget the start of his Latin American “Idol”-esque TV series with Jennifer Lopez and Mark Anthony called “Q’Viva!” (premiering this month on Univision and later in spring on Fox), the affable King is giggling as he tries to remember exactly who was the last artist he danced for. He was neither injured nor burnt out at the time — he’d just become increasingly consumed with one-off choreographing and directing projects.

“Madonna!” he says, finally. “It was her. She wanted me to dance in her ‘Human Nature’ video. I didn’t want to do it, but she begged.” In the 1995 cult-favorite music video, a cat-suited Madonna sports a frisky S&M attitude in a realm of white-on-white boxes. King, then a spiky blond, hangs upside-down from a swinging trapeze in the scene, among other things.

A talk with King this month made Madonna’s pleas easy to understand. At 39, he is broad-shouldered and warm, with a soft Midwestern twang. It’s hard at first glance to reconcile this large, solid presence with his amazingly fast dance technique. Nor can one immediately see — as he gently cuts his pizza after a nonstop day of meetings on “Q’Viva!” — the stubborn, steely will that was needed to catapult him from dancer to choreographer to tour director by age 27.

Since 1999, he’s directed Ricky Martin (two tours), Rihanna (two), Britney Spears (three) and Christina Aguilera (two), among others. And don’t forget Madonna, whose last three stratospheric tours he conceived and directed. His trademark? Dream-like tours that feel born from the artist’s forehead, not his.

“If you can make it all — and that means the stage moves, the choreography, the costumes, the lighting — be a reflection of that artist, you’ve done your job correctly,” he says. “Because the fans will really understand the show.”

King prefers invisibility in his public life too. He keeps a low profile and has embarked on only one clunky self-promotional endeavor (a 2007 dance-exercise tape called “Rock Your Body” that’s proven too tricky for mass popularity). In the past, he’s acknowledged a relationship with the Beverly Hills Kabbalah Centre, where Madonna attends, but when asked if his close circle is made up of A-listers he’s fast to say, “No! I do that all day long!” Later, when he removes his dark sweater, a vintage Cartier key can be seen hanging from his neck. When prodded, he will say it was a special Christmas gift — but not from whom — and shyly demonstrate how its teeth spell L-O-V-E.

“Jamie has a spirit about him that is quite remarkable,” says “American Idol” founder Simon Fuller, King’s production partner on “Q’Viva!” “I need someone like him by my side.”

Especially now, by the sound of it. Fuller describes 200 far-flung contestants arriving in Los Angeles this month, to be winnowed to 60, who’ll then be coached in stage performance and presented in a concert, conceived and directed by King, in Las Vegas in late April, all played out on weekly television.

Fuller calls it “a massive, massive operation, which, with a [Lopez-Anthony] divorce in the mix, has become far-away the most complicated thing I’ve ever done.” On a happier note, it’s also the culmination of years of strategizing between Fuller and King to build a unique show around King’s artistic passions and directing talents.

“I recognize myself in those kids, those groups,” King says. He traveled to Argentine bars, festivals, dance studios and barrios during the taping. “I definitely see that hunger, just wanting to be heard, just wanting to be appreciated, just wanting someone to get you. I remember that. I still wake up like that.”

Born in Verona, Wis., to a white teenage mom and a black father who left when he was 5, King describes a people-pleasing childhood in which he felt the pain of his mother’s struggles and tried his best to ease the situation. “I learned to ‘produce’ early,” he says. By high school, he worked afternoons and weekends and summers: making pizzas, tinting car windows, cleaning offices, watering greenhouses.

At the same time, identifying powerfully with ’80s pop stars (he rotated his outfits at school, “one week Michael, one week Prince”), King danced privately and obsessively. On a foundation of self-taught MTV video reenactments in his basement, King’s storybook public dance career took off at age 16 with a fast succession of school scholarships and contest wins, which led to a Los Angeles audition for Michael Jackson that landed him the single open slot for a male dancer on the 1992-93 “Dangerous” world tour. Within weeks, King was rehearsing Jackson’s tight, skidding moves from “Beat It” and head-bobbing syncopations from “Smooth Criminal” with the master himself.

King followed his curiosity, “absorbing everything.” After the 17-month Jackson tour, King was comfortable with and interested in all aspects of stage production. Working with musical directors, lighting and stage designers, wardrobe, jumbo screens, pyrotechnics, moving sets, he wanted to choreograph it all, and honed his craft working for Prince for several years. Then in 1999, garnering attention for his carnivalesque design for Ricky Martin’s Grammy Awards appearance, King was hired to direct the singer’s first U.S. tour. After Madonna caught Martin’s show one night, King explains, she asked him to help her launch her first tour after an eight-year hiatus. And the rest — disco-ball entrances, mechanical horses, roller-skate mania — is history.

“From when the lights go down, or when the lights come on, to when the screens open or the screens come up, and how that moves with the set pieces coming on or the dancers arriving, I see it all in a dance way,” King explains. He sips an iced tea between words. “One of my biggest dislikes is when those elements are not working together. I get very uncomfortable. I like it all to move and flow together and make sense, like theater.”

Cirque du Soleil spokesman Maxime Charbonneau says King’s background with rock tours and Jackson himself made him the easy choice to help the entertainment company in its first attempt to fill 10,000-seat arenas (and not wall off portions to retain intimacy). For King, who was used to working so incisively as to move from a shoe box concept to world tour in several months, Cirque’s initial open-ended creative period was unsettling. “They like to just throw things at you left and right and see what you respond to,” King explains. “They say it’s ‘feeding’ — they like to ‘feed’ you and wait while you chew on it.”

Using 65 songs, 30 dancers, 25 acrobats, 10 musicians and a 10-choreographer team, King conceived and directed “The Immortal” to center on a place (Neverland Ranch, which he visited early on) rather than his usual artist-focused orientation. Jackson is represented by master tracks of his singing voice, video and spoken-word clips and amplified representations of his most identifiable choreography and accessories.

Since the show opened in Las Vegas in December, reviewers have paled at some cartoonish mash-ups and missteps during pivotal songs (e.g. a frolicking life-size sequined glove and loafers during “Beat It”), yet there’s been no argument over King’s ability to intensify and amplify the precise, essential dance power in such signature numbers as “Billie Jean” and “Thriller.”

Next month, even more of King’s oversize movement collaborations with Cirque du Soleil performers and crew will be visible during Madonna’s high-exposure Super Bowl performance. “There’ll be some magic,” he says slyly.

Meanwhile, as the “Immortal” tsunami rolls into Los Angeles this month (more than 900,000 tickets have sold in North America), King has officially begun work with Cirque on the more intimate, permanent version of “The Immortal” to go up in Vegas in 2013.

It had been his “great dream,” he says, to scale back to create a work for a fixed site. “The possibilities are just endless when you’re in a theater and there aren’t people standing in front of you like in a rock concert, with popcorn flying and alcohol,” he says. “This will be a focused environment where we’ll really have people’s attention. I just can’t wait.”

Los Angeles Ballet Has Kick

[This review originally written for the LA Times.]

Continuing to establish itself as a spirited and sophisticated — if itinerant — ballet company, Los Angeles Ballet opened its 2011-12 season over the weekend at the Alex Theatre in Glendale with a memorable cast for its distinctive, inspired “The Nutcracker.”

As helmed by artistic directors Thordal Christensen and Colleen Neary, Los Angeles Ballet’s “Nutcracker” delivers an admirable depth and intelligence of design combined with a light-handed approach to the ballet’s traditional Christmas-party characterizations and plot line. Catherine Kanner’s luscious Act 1 setting is 1912 Los Angeles, an interior drawing room so plush and timbered that even with its electric lights it still feels redolent of Tchaikovsky’s time.

Inhabiting this velvety parlor, the pale, winsome Clara (Mia Katz) and her incandescent Uncle Drosselmeyer (Nicolas de la Vega) make a poetic pair, and it’s easy to root for their partnership. Usually an aged, menacing creature, Drosselmeyer is drawn here as blessedly young and gregarious. De la Vega’s sweeping gestures and scampering feet swell to light the whole stage.

In lovely contrast, young Katz’s pale, long limbs move tentatively toward full expression, finally unleashing a full rush of joy when she receives her enchanting, full-sized Nutcracker doll (Nathaniel Solis). All the ensuing Act I scenes — mice battles, tree expansion, blizzard of human snowflakes — seem to extend from and amplify Clara’s core excitement over this special gift.

Set in the amorphous “Palace of the Dolls,” Act 2 fails to sustain the momentum of Act 1, but that’s no shock. Few “Nutcrackers” figure out how to unify this hodgepodge of revved-up divertissements. Christensen and Neary attend to the structural flaw with some lovely touches (members of the different sections interact frequently on the sidelines; Clara comes from her viewing perch to hug the fairies before they depart), yet there’s room to improve their thematic grouping here.

The divertissements — a mix of Land of Sweets and Exotics (Arabian coffee, Spanish, Russian, Mother Gingerbread) combined with a reprisal of the commedia dell’arte dolls (in place of Chinese) and no Mirlitones section — really become a smorgasbord of free-floating fairy-tale dreams.

As Marie and her Cavalier, newly named company principals Allyssa Bross and Christopher Revels hit all the fouettés and fish dives, though Bross looks somewhat defrocked in Mikael Meybye’s short, simple tutu with three vertical red bows. Vivid power shone from standout soloists Chehon Wespi-Tschopp (Cossack doll) and Allynne Noelle (the Rose), while the crowd went mad for the repeat partnership of Julia Cinquemani and Alexander Castillo (Arabian).

While Los Angeles Ballet certainly deserves its own theater, the troupe is a mightily impressive touring company. The quality of the recorded music, from musical director Michael Andreas, boosts this further.

Bring it On!

Professional cheerleaders featured in the cast of "Bring it On"

[This piece first ran in the Los Angeles Times.]

At the pre-show warm-up for “Bring It On: The Musical,” performers in their 20s are stretching and assuming yoga postures, others are jumping rope or jogging softly in place. It’s what you might expect from any cast of a musical. Then suddenly, downstage right, there’s a complicated, unfamiliar moving shape that turns out to be a man flat on his back, doing fast, full push-ups into the air with a tiny young woman standing straight on his hands.

A similar surprising amalgam of styles is being seen by audiences at the Ahmanson Theatre. “Bring It On” (through Dec. 10) opens on a familiar Broadway note, with the lead character, Campbell (Taylor Louderman), standing center stage, launching into a heartfelt song that quickly swells into a powerful choral number. Yet somewhere around the second or third verse, Campbell suddenly doubles in height and power as she’s boosted aloft, still singing full-voice, while a display of pyrotechnical cheerleading shoots around her.

This, after all, is a show about competitive cheerleading, so the stunts and stakes are high for a musical that’s kicking off a national tour with hopes of winding up on Broadway. Carrying along the feisty tone of the 2000 film starring Kirsten Dunst, the musical’s new story moves between two realms: a white-bread suburban high school cheer squad and a scrappy, urban dance crew. Professional singers and dancers handle the lead roles, while a crew of 12 championship-level cheerleaders traverse both worlds, changing costumes to handle the most dazzling stunts at each school.

During the rigorous casting process, director-choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler saw more than 4,000 people, seeking unconventional triple threats — singer-dancer-gymnasts — for a streamlined troupe that would have to sing, dance and build human towers. The challenge for performers with cheerleading experiences was not only their singing roles but also the need to bring life and texture to their movements as they transitioned from NBA courts and football fields to bright, shrunken theater stages.

“In cheering, everything is very rigid and sharp,” says David Ranck, a former cheerleader for the NBA’s Denver Nuggets and instructor for the Universal Cheerleaders Assn. “Clean lines. That’s it. Being in this show has changed everything about how I perform.”

Before each performance is a crucial technical rehearsal, a.k.a. the stunt call. On this day, Louderman’s ankle is taped from an earlier injury, but she’s prepared to rise again. Dance/stunt captain Rod Harrelson stands with his arms folded and calls out: “Stick to your timing and blocking — that’s all I’m going to say.” Only in this rehearsal setting is it possible to see the hives of activity required to build pyramids and launch girls overhead. During the show, this ground-level activity is smartly masked by downstage dancing and cheering.

Harrelson asks the troupe to run through the most complex acts of flying spins and balances that occur over the course of the show’s five long cheer numbers. Many are original stunts that Blankenbuehler created with the help of cheer consultant Jessica Colombo.

Body slams happen

Rehearsal goes cleanly, until Ranck missteps and takes the brunt of a flier’s falling body on his chest, not his arms. Because it’s a rehearsal, he winces visibly. Later, backstage over a pizza lunch with half a dozen cast members, Ranck says that this kind of body slam happens regularly and that it is “no big deal.”

More crucial for him was “learning to keep up with these dancers,” he says, gesturing to a group that includes performers such as Adrienne Warren, who toured with “Dreamgirls,” and Neil Haskell, a former “So You Think You Can Dance” contestant.

Courtney Corbeille, one of the daring “flier” cheerleaders who spin and fall from the highest heights, was a cheerleader for the University of Oklahoma and a member of the Spirit of Texas cheer squad. Of “Bring It On,” she describes a need for heightened awareness and adaptability when performing so much cheering in one evening, compared with a contest in which she might have to perform just one routine.

Ensemble member Bettis Richardson calls it “a kind of telepathy,” and the whole group agrees. Corbeille speaks of a recent performance when she was at the top of a three-person-high tower, ready to embark on a 360-degree spin from the top, but her foot felt shaky.

“Some way, somehow, the three of us communicated without even talking,” she says. “So the boy below and the girl on top of him and me — none of us spun. This was all within four counts. It was literally an out-of-body experience. I don’t know how, but I just did a straight cradle off of it, ’cause that was a safe thing to do.”

Blankenbuehler, speaking by phone, explains his directorial decision to include cheerleading’s most demanding technique: “We didn’t have to throw the girl up in the air.” But “when I watched high school and college nationals, and saw guys flip girls in the air and catch them with one hand, my jaw was on the floor. I wanted to go straight at the competitive cheerleading.”

Asymmetical vision

Early in the process, Blankenbuehler teamed with Varsity, the organization that oversees the Universal Cheerleaders Assn., which practices the most rigorous, frill-free, gymnastic form of the collegiate competitive sport. As a partner in “Bring It On,” Varsity supplies uniforms and helped Blankenbuehler devise a mat that would provide extra spring for the tumblers without creating a double-bounce for the dancers.

Yet despite what he calls the “ammunition” of these extraordinary moves, Blankenbuehler says he has a “problem with the symmetry-built momentum” of cheer.” His solution? A concentrated effort to use asymmetric lines and irregular traffic patterns. And he seasoned many moves with hip-hop flavors such as Tutting, the sharp box-building hand gestures modeled after Egyptian hieroglyphs.

In the end, he says, the intense, dangerous physicality of the competitive form helps convey his conception of the larger teenage story. “When young people are so courageous, not just with their bodies but when their whole life is just lunging forward for them, there’s this life-or-death sensation. And that’s how I feel about my craft. And that’s what this show is about.”

What about the performers? Would they have preferred a simpler cheerleading technique, similar to those in the 2000 film? Something like the kind of hair-tossing, booty-shaking formations and canons of the Laker Girls or the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders?

“They’re not cheerleaders; they’re dancers!” says Corbeille. “I can say that because I’m from Dallas!”

The room laughs, but Corbeille is eager to explain the difference. “One’s more of a crowd-leading,” she says, “one’s more of a crowd-pleasing.”

“And if you know anything about Andy, you know he doesn’t do anything the easy way,” says Ariana DeBose, another former “So You Think You Can Dance” contestant who plays one of the dance crew members. Even in the straight dance sections, “he wants you to go around your elbow to get to your thumb,” she says. “Just because it’s awesome.”

Hofesh Shechter’s “Political Mother”

[This piece originally ran in the L.A. Times.]

In a week of dramatic Mideast news, including the release of Sgt. 1st Class Gilad Shalit and the death of deposed Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi, Royce Hall audiences who caught the United States premiere of Israeli-born choreographer/composer Hofesh Shechter’s “Political Mother” traveled beyond these headlines into a rigorous theatrical commentary on collective life during 21st century wartime.

Now the only U.S. city to have seen both of Shechter’s two international tours (the mixed bill “Uprising/In Your Rooms” played Royce Hall in 2009), Los Angeles is fortunate to bear witness to the arrival of a dance/theater artist with this much commitment and voice. In “Political Mother” (2010), his first full-length piece, Shechter delivers 70 minutes of loud, suffocating musical and theatrical homogeneity in order to indicate the real brutalism that a society bears after years of unrelenting political tension and frustration.

The piece opens with formally poised samurai in stylized armor and sword who suddenly, violently, crashes to the ground in a hara-kiri plunge. A crowd of dancers emerges from a blackout like a storm of tumbleweeds in desert-sand fatigues -– rising, falling, twitching, skipping -– they move continuously but always with semi-collapsed and contracted carriage (is that sword still there?). Shaped by despair, their arms lift skyward but never fully extend; torsos droop or fling back, never stand simply erect; all eye contact or gaze is missing. This absence of complete limb extension or facial gaze weirdly and instantly strips them of all individuality and character. (Is this then what it means to be human? The reaching we do? How and where we fix our eyes?)

Besides their capped postures, these groups are hemmed in by an ingenious sonic barrier – instead of a scrim there is a literal wall-of-sound, composed by Shechter, made manifest. The ground level features a row of militaristic drummers (whose eyes we can see); stacked atop of them, in a second tier, is a row of heavy-metal guitarists flanking a central showman-figure (sometimes a black-suited dictator, sometimes a shrieking rock vocalist).

A second group of dancers emerges, in more colorful clothes, who present more organized, ritualistic Semitic phrases, like Teyve-style shimmying torsos, and legs stepping in single time while fingers tickle the air by their faces. Yet there is no interaction between the two groups, nor any penetration into the area where the musicians play, until the very last moments.

“Political Mother” is not an easy work: The relentless sonic discordance and movement repetition drove a number of folks out of the theater. Much like the stark Japanese Butoh dance tradition, there seems little forward motion within the grim and disfigured expressions at first, yet there is a real integrity and dedication to the chosen stylistic parameters that eventually pays off. When Shechter’s beaten tribe finally accumulates a new gesture, and then a new sense of bearing, it is as thrilling and organic and consequential as a genetic leap.

Ho-Hum “Footloose”

[This piece initially ran in the Los Angeles Times.]

By one measure, director Craig Brewer’s 2011 restraint and careful focus in the retelling of “Footloose” appear a success for Paramount, and a boon for the propulsion of American dance. With heralded performances by its young leads and critical appreciation of its punched-up energy, Brewer’s “Footloose” met box office projections for opening weekend — coming in at $16 million — and attracted a healthy range of mostly female viewers, from teens to the 35-49 crowd.

From the perspective of choreography and dance performances, the ax Brewer took to the original “Footloose” was badly needed. Despite our fond memories, there was barely any shelf life left in those physical outbursts. The dance and music in both “Footloose” (1984) and “Flashdance” (1983) feature an awkward hybrid of disco and new wave sensibilities — not a pretty combo. Characters’ courage and urban street smarts are evoked with a phalanx of strange skittering feet, air-boxing arms and insistent shots of soaring dismounts set to synthetic beats. In both films, the actors’ moves are poorly spliced in with the work of stunt and dance doubles.

In the new “Footloose,” Brewer and choreographer Jamal Sims have parsed the dance moments into single distinct idioms (a hip-hop scene, a line-dance scene, a group social-dance finale), and the original pop songs were re-recorded by Blake Shelton and Gretchen Wilson for a stronger country zest. The lead actors are dancers first: Kenny Wormald (as Ren McCormack) is a hunky former background dancer with Justin Timberlake and Jennifer Lopez; perky Julianne Hough (as Ariel Shaw) reigned for several years on America’s “Dancing With the Stars” as one of the more popular and successful professional partners for the celebrity invitees.

Critics have questioned these leads performers’ acting depth. But might it be the superior dance acumen throwing their performances somewhat off-balance? As the rabble-rousing Ren, Wormald dances with sublime technique and a warm, natural manner. He’s got moves and tricks beyond the norm, but with Womald it’s just conceivable that he picked them up from the street. As for Hough, playing the preacher’s wild daughter, her accomplished dance technique — paired with her perfectly trim physique — deftly kills most of the danger and small-town heartache in her character. Even when she’s grinding lustily in her Daisy Dukes, it’s hard not to see the trustworthy “DWTS” personality in Hough’s efficient frame. It makes one long for Lori Singer’s 1984 Ariel, an unknown then whose beanpole height and crazy broad shoulders spoke volumes about her defiance and vulnerability.

Still, the dancing figure cut by Hough is not the most critical one for the film’s redemptive metaphor. It is Ren’s buddy Willard who is most changed by Ren and his dancing ways — he transforms from a thuggish and defensive wallflower into an ecstatic, shape-shifting physical jester. And while it seemed impossible to imagine a substitute for Chris Penn’s act of physical illumination in the role, young Miles Teller (a more nimble, clever, scarecrow type) wins you over almost instantly.

Yet aside from Willard’s initial halting dance steps, where is the sense of bravery contained in 1984’s “Footloose”? Without the gawky bodies, without Kevin Bacon’s silly rooster strut, there’s little sense of risk or edge to the act of dancing here. Though the dance scenes will have you beaming, they may not leave you moved. To my mind, two hours of this spit-polished “Footloose” doesn’t carry half the cinematic power of Jared Hess’ raw, two-minute stage turn in “Napoleon Dynamite.”

In an interview in the New York Times, “Footloose” choreographer Sims discussed his emphasis on making the movie’s moments of dance appear “organic.” In a clear reference to America’s commitment to television dance competitions such as “DWTS” and “So You Think You Can Dance,” Sims said, “Our audiences are very dance savvy right now.”

But in this current dance bubble, America is inordinately focused on dancers, particularly ones who are “dancing for their life” — not sophisticated concert dance. The simple formula of smooth and rough edges is the addictive power of “DWTS” and “SYTYCD.” Week after week, audiences are aroused and moved when a dancer brings physical awareness and emotional dedication to choreography that falls outside their stylistic comfort zone. We tune in to see the lead-footed actor take flight, the ice princess break a sweat, the tough B-boy dance a tango.

To this end, Brewer’s over-polished “Footloose” cast just misses the mark. More regrettable, though, is the fact that Brewer and his longtime cinematographer, Amelia Vincent, didn’t use the camera to indicate the power of choreography, of patterning and texture and theme and variation. So, as it is each week on TV, we are left looking to the performer alone for the moment’s full evolutionary arc. The full shape of the dance itself has still gone missing.

Rockwell’s Rockwells

[this article originally ran on Crosscut]

"Welcome to Elmville" courtesy of the Norman Rockwell Museum

In 1943, Norman Rockwell — then America’s most popular artist, with regular Saturday Evening Post covers, annual Boy Scout calendars, plus scores of major U.S. advertising campaigns — was tapped by the Office of War Information to create a series of posters titled “The Four Freedoms.” Based on the central content of President Roosevelt’s January 1941 State of the Union Address, the posters were recognizably Rockwellian but featured more serene and dignified characters than his usual paintings.

The four gentle, homey compositions — advocating Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear — were published as Saturday Evening Post covers in February-March 1943 to a great public swoon. Yet according to Rockwell biographer Laura Claridge, the entire Writers Division of the Office of War Information (OWI) resigned en masse to protest the selection of Rockwell over Ben Shahn (and other more socially conscious artists), citing in particular Rockwell’s commercial ties to the Coca-Cola company, one of whose executives had been the arbiter in the decision to choose Rockwell.

In anger, Claridge wrote, Shahn and the OWI writers collaborated on a poster featuring Lady Liberty holding a Coke can with the slogan: “The War that Refreshes — the Four Delicious Freedoms!”

Yet the OWI directors were not disappointed. When the four Rockwell posters went on tour to 16 cities across the country in 1943, in a tour co-sponsored by the Saturday Evening Post, they drew an attendance of 1,222,000 people and raised an unbelievable $130 million in poster sales for U.S. war bonds.

Today, the Americana illustrations and paintings of Norman Rockwell continue to hustle — and deliver — on this country’s behalf. According to figures released by Mary Melius, director of traveling exhibitions at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., tours of Rockwell imagery and process are boosting attendance at regional museums throughout North America. An average of 55,000 visitors are attending each three-month stop of the major touring show, “American Chronicles,” featuring paintings spanning Rockwell’s 50-year career. Museums are “very, very pleased” with the show’s draw, said Melius, and it is currently scheduled out through June 2013.

In Tacoma, where “American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell” is showing at Tacoma Art Museum (TAM) through the end of May, attendance has been similarly booming. Even during a weekday, you’ll find numerous families and other humming klatches circling back and forth through the exhibit — and weekends can be downright crowded. Though she declined to release specific numbers yet, TAM’s director of marketing and communication, Melissa Traver, said, “We are trending at a 30 percent increase over projected attendance.”

Open since late February, “American Chronicles” (aka “Rockwell’s Rockwells”) features 44 paintings that the artist either kept or bought back for his own collection, plus 323 original Saturday Evening Post covers, copies of the Four Freedoms posters, a short, looping biographical film, and an in-depth display of Rockwell’s working process. Notes, staged photos of the characters, charcoal sketches, correspondence, and final oils illustrate his efforts on one late-era painting: the unusually somber and dramatic “Southern Justice ( Murder in Mississippi),” Rockwell’s 1965 oil capturing the moment of slaughter of three civil-rights workers, commissioned to accompany an article by Charles Morgan, Jr., published in Look magazine.

The exhibit does an admirable job of broadly fleshing out the fullness of Rockwell’s sensibility — from his early desire to entertain and please (and make money) to his yearning in later years to address issues of prejudice and civil rights. In the same corner of the exhibit you’ll find “If Your Wisdom Teeth Could Talk They’d Say, ‘Use Colgate’s,” a 1924 painting for a Colgate dental cream advertisement, and “The Problem We All Live With,” Rockwell’s 1963 depiction of desegregation battles for Look magazine, featuring a Ruby Bridges-type character bravely marching to school in a perfect white dress.

Unsurprisingly, “American Chronicles” serves as a colorful resurrection and recasting of the plucky denizens associated with faded Rockwell merchandise: the boys fleeing with their clothes from an illicit swim (“No Swimming,” 1921); the adventures of a scrappy pig-tailed girl (“Day in the Life of a Little Girl,” 1952); the bug-eyed kid who’s just found a Santa suit in his parents’ bureau (“The Discovery,” 1956). Seen in gallery format, in oil at their original size (each approximately 2×3 feet to 3×4 feet), these overexposed scenes glow anew with color and narrative energy.

Though he was known to overwork his paintings (throughout his life he painted compulsively, seven days a week, nine hours a day), Rockwell’s cataloguing of detail in these oil portraits exudes pure good humor when seen live, especially en masse. Proceeding through the show, the bad odors of the nationalistic agenda that attached to Rockwell’s work are replaced by a sense of one man’s individual, genuine appreciation of and attention to all sorts of shadings of the human heart. As John Updike put it, “Description expresses love,” and that sentiment is palpable when staring into Rockwell’s painted leather shoes, floppy tongues protruding, or a set of fresh comb marks traced in a young boy’s greased hair.

The show provides an experience not unlike roaming the idealized family attic. Interesting, amusing artifacts of historic eras (Post covers that move from two-color printing to four-color process) sit alongside G-rated memorabilia (the turquoise-verdigris of an old Chevy) and it all cements a story of familial love and social bonds. What could be better?

Yet an afternoon with Rockwell images also accumulates a lot of exaggerated body parts and poses, and I felt unexpectedly battered, in the end, by all the kids’ jutting elbows and knees, the old men’s lurching, squatting gestures, and all the beaming, super-responsive faces. According to biographer Claridge, Rockwell had been instructed to exaggerate facial expressions in his works so that readers could grasp his paintings’ meaning “within two seconds.” But why must the bodies be so acute, too?

Only on very rare occasions does Rockwell paint a physical environment for his scenes, which adds to the looming feel of the characters. It’s all people and props, carefully staged for an easy read, unmetered from place, making the only essential site in the exhibit Rockwell’s own stool, which may be the source of that gangly physical intensity. The artist spoke of never shedding the childhood physical feeling of being “pigeon-toed, narrow shouldered — a lump,” and in an interesting anecdote about painting a portrait of actor Gary Cooper on one trip to Hollywood, Rockwell explains how the act of seeing Cooper brought him an intensified sense of his own body. “When I looked at him,” he explained, “I actually felt my narrow shoulder and puny arms.”

Perhaps that’s part of the success of the greatest work on view, “Checkers (1928),” an oil on canvas painted to accompany a story in Ladies Home Journal featuring a downhearted, white-faced clown playing cards with fellow circus people. Allowed to amplify the depressed, clownish feeling that he was otherwise always fighting against, Rockwell blends pathos and beauty into high art in this beautiful work. The small dog at the bottom of the scene (which Rockwell admitted he often added to a painting to carry the emotion of the moment) has been put to sleep, in a clown collar, in this portrait — he is not needed. Seated on a stool in a shadowed, sunlit corner of a circus tent, Checkers the lanky clown with a painted smile has just made a shrewd, engaging move.

"Checkers" (1928) courtesy of the Norman Rockwell Museum

Alvin Ailey on 24-City Tour

How to institutionalize the extraordinary? There is a lesson to be learned from the amazing success and vitality of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, now in its 53rd year. Their current tour is packed with choreography to inspire and dancers to full-on worship.

I reviewed Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for the Seattle Times.

The next day, I had the privilege to interview 5 dancers, and artistic director designate Robert Battle, for the the Sunday LA Times.

Billy Elliot in Spades

photo by Michael Brosilow

The film “Billy Elliot” is a masterpiece of storytelling economy. Alongside its most famous thread — a young boy’s discovery of ballet — Lee Hall portrayed the impotent rage of a redundant working-class population (it’s set during the year-long strike of the British National Union of Mineworkers), the insularity and conformity of small-town England (this is Geordie territory, a Northern region with its own distinct Anglo-Saxon dialect) and the choking shame of hidden secrets and public losses (Billy’s friend Michael hides his homosexuality; Billy’s father is nearly mute for being both jobless and spouse-less after his wife’s early death).

It’s also great from the moment it begins. Even before he discovers dance, crinkly-nosed actor Jamie Bell (as Billy) shines like the blue sky over the smoke-darkened bricks and stupid, hot-headed eruptions going on around him. He’s the classic, loveable truant who runs around “like a right twat” ignoring dumb restrictions and deftly breaking societal rules. When he achieves greatness, he inspires his whole family and town to keep standing strong.

The original creative team from the film (director Stephen Daldry, writer Lee Hall and choreographer Peter Darling) was at the helm of the stage adaptation, which debuted in London’s West End in 2005 and on Broadway in 2008, and won Best Musical awards in both locations. If anyone’s going to wedge 15 songs into that tightly woven plot, you want those original visionaries to be part of it.

And so they were, keeping true to the full plotline of the film in a deft, creative manner, mashing the kids and adults into close quarters from the start of the show so as to pave the way for a continuous weaving of miners, cops, and ballet kids inside a charming set centered around a drafty room in a village hall. To top it off, they went with the music of Sir Elton John — indomitable, British, open about his struggles with his own dad, hugely successful as tunesmith for “The Lion King.”

Well, it doesn’t get any better than that. Or does it?

On Wednesday, the opening night of the production’s two-week Seattle run at The Paramount Theatre, crowds cheered and swooned from the opening curtain to the “company celebration” romp at the end. Behind me, there was a clutch of tear-streaked faces when the lights came up. Yet my date and I, avid theatergoers and fans of the film, were both as dark and disappointed as two lumps of cold black coal.

Something rather aggravating happened to “Billy Elliot” on its way to the stage: It jettisoned its core interpersonal struggles and became a portrait of brash, overflowing, unilateral defiance. Attitude and spunk are slathered across every character now. In the first scene, the supposedly dour Dad (Rich Hebert) is wearing an apron with fake boobs on it, shimmying as he cooks breakfast. (He beats up on himself later because he burns the food — not because he’s insanely lost and depressed.) Grandma (Patti Perkins) has gone from a soft, senile pillow to a crass, rump-shaking mama who gives the world the finger as her parting gesture.

Mrs. Wilkinson (Faith Prince), formerly listless and cynical, now yells “Hit It!” as she breaks into razzle-dazzle numbers with her over-the-top grotesque and charmless students. In her quieter modes she speaks Yoda-talk to Billy, espousing epithets such as “Dancing is as much about discovering things about yourself as it is about discovering things about dancing.” Most disappointing, there is now a very weird disconnect with Billy — when she hears Billy recite his mum’s letter from memory, she breaks into a feverish song-and-dance number right afterwords — which keeps the narrative from deepening where it most needs to.

There’s still Michael (Griffin Birney), who played like Billy’s meek, beautiful shadow in the film. Here, Michael is adorable, not beautiful. And he’s much younger, or at least smaller, so his gay desires look like play. He and Billy get to live out a fantasy together, in a number called “Expressing Yourself,” that makes their Durham Coalfield neighborhood look like something out of a Bette Midler review.

Why such desperation to keep the tone light? Is this really the same crew that painted despair and confusion so brilliantly in the film? Why is there no buildup to the answering of prayers? What is wrong here??

Elton John’s simple, predictable tunes may be the culprit. His music here is without complexity or depth, so all manner of guns have been brought in to keep some buoyancy and energy alive. Some of the anthems have likeable melodies (“The Stars Look Down,” “Solidarity”) but there are non-stop antics throughout, ever escalating, ever more confusing. Even the “Born to Boogie” paean to T. Rex, the glam-rock group whose music ignited the film, only serves to remind of the difference between John’s efficient Broadway tone and the hip rockabilly sound of the T. Rex song. When bits of English pantomime are introduced into the show — during a Christmas pageant in Act II — it’s the first palatable way that’s been found to amp up the energy.

The regional flavor of the film was unflinching (there were subtitled versions for international showings), but now it’s watered way down, if not completely ignored. After eight years of sell-out performances, has the figure of Billy Elliot now transmuted into a universally adopted symbol for boyish survival?

Here in Seattle, the main character is played by Lex Ishimoto, a California hip-hop dancer whose body and expressions had nothing rural-British in them. He did attempt a British accent, however — if not a Geordie one. The sparkling Faith Prince, in the role of Mrs. Wilkinson, had a nice accent, but it came and went. Several supporting actors were discernibly English, but in general the distinctive diction was annoyingly exploited for gags and energetic bursts. “Oy!” “Fat bah-stads!”

The choreography also lost its geographical distinction. Gone is the furious step dance — such a powerful UK locator. Now we have tap dancing, and back handsprings, and hands that keep making boxy shapes for some reason. Sometimes elegiac, sometimes exciting, never very specific. Billy’s dance solos, even so, are still much preferable to most of the songs.

The word “Disney-fied” gets at the feel of the sweetening and antic-ization that “Billy Elliot” feels to have received. But it wouldn’t be quite accurate, because Disney wasn’t involved here. And maybe it’s a case of weighing expectations, but the last Disney release I saw, “Gnomeo and Juliet,” which also featured the songs of Elton John, was actually a lot more fun than this.

[this article first ran on Crosscut.]