by Henry Alford
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Our conversation drifted to Wendy’s career. I applauded her for having essentially lengthened her career as a dancer by taking up a less physically demanding idiom than doing the Running Man for Kurtis Blow. “You’ll be able to praise dance until you’re ninety.”
“What we say in the ministry is, I’m gonna dance till Jesus comes.”
“And then when he comes there’ll be no more dancing?” I asked.
“There’ll be a lot of dancing, but we’ll all have recovered our glorified bodies. We’ll be like”—she looked down at her torso here—“ ‘Thank the Lord!’ ”
I laughed. It was then that I asked Wendy if God accounts for technique and Wendy told me, “I want to give God the grand jeté.”
Which led me to another question: “Do you give corrections? Some teachers, like the great jazz teacher Luigi, don’t, because they know certain students won’t come back.”
“I correct,” Wendy told me. “If you’re in my class, you’re standing before God. Also, if you don’t execute something properly, you can injure yourself. I’m known as the Lady with the Shoe.”
“Because you’re tap-tap-tapping with the shoe . . . or because you’re throwing the shoe?”
Wendy smiled sheepishly.
“Look at you!,” I gushed. “A thrower! A little Old Testament in the studio, yo!”
“Honey, you don’t know. I’ve got the grace of the New Testament and the remedy of the Old.”
2.
For its more ardent practitioners, it’s also possible for dance, or one’s life in the world of dance, to become a kind of religion. I don’t mean to disrespect thousands of years of church-inspired piety here; but any individual whose livelihood and survival are dependent on strangers paying for things that they don’t need is an individual who lives at the behest of forces unknown. In certain hands, this act of faith can become an entire system of belief.
“Why do you want to dance?” the ruthless impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) asks the aspiring ballerina Vicki Page (Moira Shearer) in what is, alongside Cabaret and Singin’ in the Rain, probably the most beloved dance film of all time, 1948’s The Red Shoes. Ms. Page replies, “Why do you want to live?” to which Lermontov responds, “Well, I don’t know exactly why, er, but I must.” Page tells him, “That’s my answer, too.”
Though this compulsive approach to one’s art would seem to be more prevalent in the worlds of ballet and tap, let’s look at a celebrated name in jazz. Who, as it turns out, had some grounding in traditional religion, too.
Bob Fosse grew up Methodist on the North Side of Chicago. His father, a Hershey’s chocolates salesman, taught young Fosse and his siblings social dancing at home. But the more formative event came from a local dance teacher and agent named Fred Weaver. When Fosse was twelve, Weaver paired him up with another boy in a tap act called the Riff Brothers. The Riff Brothers played Chicago “presentation houses” (movie theaters with live acts) as well as strip clubs.
This latter type of venue would shape Fosse’s life for years afterward, as evidenced by the Fosse canon’s allegiance to swivel hips, popped shoulders, and a louche, worldly knowingness. The seedy venues would also provide Fosse with incidents for his psyche to gnaw on: the strippers liked to lick Fosse’s ears, or to prankishly grope him so he’d have a hard-on when he went onstage.
“I was a very religious kid,” Fosse once said. “I mean, I did know all the Bible verses. I really believed that there was a god who was watching me all the time, who knew whether I was thinking the bad thoughts, the impure thoughts. I would concentrate on Bible verses if I ever thought about, uh, anything I thought was dirty . . . and being attracted to pretty women at the same time, it was a struggle, this terrible, terrible struggle, and thrown into these stripper joints when I was young, the battle that was going on inside me was just tremendous.”
As an adult, however, the creator of the most distinctive choreographic style of the twentieth century was not particularly pious. “I think he would say he was an agnostic,” dancer Ann Reinking, one of his longtime colleagues and lovers, told Fosse biographer Sam Wasson.
Yet the adult Fosse’s relationship to his art had many of the attributes of religious devotion, particularly when viewed in terms of three qualities: his humility, his devotion to his craft, and his interest in confession. It seems all too fitting that All That Jazz, his heavily autobiographical and self-excoriating film about the psychic toll of show business, was called by author and Catholic priest Andrew M. Greeley “perhaps the most religious film ever made.”
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His humility could border on the abject. For the mordant Fosse, the world was a fraud, but he was an even bigger one. Even the hat trick he pulled off in 1973 (an Oscar for Cabaret, an Emmy for Liza with a Z, a Tony for Pippin) couldn’t convince him of his talent; he earnestly told friends at the time, “I fooled everybody.”
Indeed, the man who wasn’t sold on his own talent sometimes needed a helping hand from on high—which in a few instances meant his partners. After his first major break, the 1953 film Kiss Me Kate (in which choreographer Hermes Pan had allowed cast member Fosse to choreograph his own duet), it was Fosse’s wife Joan McCracken who persuaded theater director George Abbott to hire Fosse as the choreographer for Broadway’s The Pajama Game. Fosse’s work here, which would win the Tony, would be so vivid—the automatism that would increasingly be a part of his style is on display in the great “Steam Heat” number, wherein the dancers’ bowler hats appear to be lifted heavenward by invisible steam—that Abbott would hire him the following year for Damn Yankees. Five years later, Gwen Verdon, Fosse’s muse and longtime wife, would get him his first job as director-choreographer, by insisting he be hired for the 1959 musical Redhead, which she was starring in. From thereon, Fosse would serve as director-choreographer on almost all her projects. (Partners: they can get you jobs.)
You could see his humility in his everyday behavior, too. “I threw up twice a day when I was a performer. Now I throw up three times a day,” Fosse said once he started directing. He almost always introduced himself to others with his full name lest people ask “Bob who?” Sometimes his rejections of dancers at auditions were so thoughtful that the dancers would write Fosse a thank-you note. He was slightly defensive about never having gone to college, and about not working in ballet: “Everything I know I learned from Hollywood Squares.”
His focus and devotion to his craft could come off as a kind of zealotry or penitence. Like pious people who reject colored clothing in order to keep their priorities straight, he wore all black. “Naturally hunched, he had an almost collaborative complicity with the sidewalk, a rehearsal space he could engage at any time,” writes Sam Wasson in his terrific, if occasionally purple, biography Fosse. A perfectionist, Fosse sometimes got to rehearsal spaces before dawn; occasionally his concentration during rehearsals or filming was so intense that a colleague would have to flick the cigarette from his lip lest Fosse be burned. Verdon said of his rehearsal demeanor, “His face changes. He gets ropey looking. His eyes sink into his head. . . . I’ve worked in insane asylums and the inmates didn’t look as weird as Bob.”
After Verdon asked for a separation in 1971, Fosse’s hard partying escalated—he upped with Dexedrine and downed with Seconal, padding them out with double margaritas and four packs of Camels a day. By 1977, when the director of the film Thieves, starring Marlo Thomas and Charles Grodin, needed someone to play a street junkie, Fosse volunteered himself and pulled off the role convincingly.
His overinvestment in his work had started earlier. To tell the cast of Broadway’s 1961 The Conquering Hero that he’d been fired as director-choreographer, he dressed up as the character Pal Joey, whom he’d played to acclaim in summer stock a decade earlier. He sported a trench coat, its collar up; a fedora pulled over one eye; and the ever-present ciggie, like a kick from his mouth. After Fosse unspooled his sad news to the assembled cast onstage, he strolled stage left, sa
id goodbye, dropped his cigarette to the floor, stubbed it out with his toe, pulled his fedora’s brim down even further, and disappeared into the wings. Jesus wept.
As he got older and a grimness seemed to settle over both his life and work, the zealotry got even wiggier. During the filming of the autobiographical and painful-to-watch All That Jazz, he sometimes wore lead actor Roy Scheider’s costumes. During the Star 80 shoot, Eric Roberts was having trouble portraying Paul Snider, the sleazeball who, after discovering Playboy bunny Dorothy Stratten, killed and then raped her. So Fosse screamed at Roberts that he should just play Snider as if he were playing Fosse, because Snider was Fosse, but without the success. “Now show me me,” he told Roberts.
Yes, Fosse’s working methods struck some as a kind of fanaticism. But this fanaticism was preferable to the one that came when he wasn’t working. Fosse’s assistant Pat Kiley told Fosse biographer Martin Gottfried that Fosse would get depressed at the end of projects: “He had to start on something new before the old one ended”—otherwise, according to Fosse, “my pain would be so great that I wouldn’t be able to deal with it.”
Indeed, for Fosse, show business was an all-powerful juggernaut with long, dangly puppet strings. When telling friends and colleagues, after the failure of his first film, 1969’s Sweet Charity with Shirley MacLaine, “I got so cold. No one called me,” he would hunch his shoulders and punctuate his statement with a drawn-out, hollow whistle. (The film’s failure nearly killed off the much-ailing MCA-Universal; as biographer Gottfried put it, “That was his stigma.”)
Or look at the The Little Prince episode. In 1974, while lying in a hospital bed after his heart bypass surgery, Fosse was visited by filmmaker Stanley Donen, who’d directed the film of The Little Prince in which Fosse danced “Snake in the Grass” (a number that Michael Jackson adored—and, some say, stole from). In the hospital, Fosse cajoled a reluctant Donen into watching a critic on television deliver his review of the just-released film. When the review turned out to be abysmal, Fosse became exercised and had another heart attack.
No, his lamentations were not whispered. “He hid none of his troubles,” the critic Joan Acocella has written. “He was one of those people, often veterans of psychoanalysis”—Fosse was in psychoanalysis during the 1950s—“who feel that if they admit their sins they are somehow absolved of them.” Fosse sometimes used the mediums of dance and film as a confessional booth. We see this most clearly, of course, in All That Jazz, with its chain-smoking, sex-obsessed, pill-popping workaholic choreographer whose stress about his work puts him in the hospital for coronary artery bypass surgery, directly after which he has another heart attack.
But we see signs of the confession booth elsewhere, too. The great womanizer Fosse, who cheated on Verdon throughout their marriage—one theory runs that Fosse’s having worked with strippers as a child made him try to prove that all women were whorish—loved threesomes. So he saw fit to have the character Pippin watch two women make love at one point during Pippin. Though there’s no evidence that comedian Lenny Bruce partook of amorous triads, Fosse slapped one into his 1974 biopic, Lenny.
Sometimes the impulse to confess had a more moralistic edge. He punished girlfriend Reinking for an affair he thought she was having by choreographing a pornographic ballet number for her in 1978’s Dancin’, and then casting as her partner the male dancer that Fosse thought she was having an affair with.
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It’s possible to view Fosse’s injection of self into narratives as an extension of his larger influence on Broadway. Prior to Fosse’s rise, in the 1950s and ’60s, the dancing in Broadway shows was meant to emerge naturally from the characters: Anna is at first slightly cowed by the King of Siam, but, with time, the two of them will swirl together in dizzying circles. Agnes de Mille’s dream ballet in 1943’s Oklahoma! had severed musical theater from its European operetta roots by using dance to portray the heroine’s emotional troubles, rather than as mere distraction or scenery. (This orientation, and its subsequent reign on Broadway, was not without a price for de Mille; some call her “the woman who killed tap.”)
Fosse followed the dance-as-mirror-of-emotions approach up through the sixties, “but then it started to look corny to him,” Acocella writes. So he returned to his vaudeville roots, making lots of self-aware dances that are “justified” (meaning, overtly theatrical, and often occurring on a stage that is on the stage). Look at his two most beloved works—the spectacular film version of Cabaret, and the stage version of Chicago, which he cowrote in addition to choreographing and which, decades after his death, would be his first blockbuster hit. Neither has much in the way of mortal beings breaking out into dance; we see a lot of musical staging as opposed to full-out dance numbers.
Or look beyond: “In much of his later work,” Acocella writes, “there is little or no story to humanize the dancers, or to objectify them. We can’t separate them from ourselves, can’t say, ‘That’s Laurey and Curly.’ They come from nowhere, or—as Fosse, with his hypocrite lecteur philosophy, appears to be saying—from within ourselves.”
The end game of confession, of course, is absolution. Which brings us back to All That Jazz, with its angel of death played by Jessica Lange. At the end of the film, Fosse’s stand-in, Joe Gideon (the role Roy Scheider played), is lying in his bed during his bypass operation. While thusly “dead,” he jumps off the bed, runs into the theater that the hospital set is located in, and starts to hug the audience, which is composed of all the people in his life—his wives and daughter, the movie executives, the strippers from the clubs he played in when young. There’s lots of cheering, and then Gideon rematerializes on the hospital bed, but this time zipped into a body bag, whereupon we hear Ethel Merman sing “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Fosse seems to be suggesting here that, though working in show business can be a kind of penance, death affords man a gentle exoneration.
As they were rehearsing the scene, Fosse said to Scheider, “You know, that must be exhilarating, running into the house like that.” So Scheider suggested that Fosse try it himself. Fosse got up on the bed, paused, and then ran out into the audience and hugged everyone.
Afterward, he sidled up to Scheider and said, “Jesus Christ, that was terrific, and you know, Roy? The best part of it is, they forgave me, too.”
3.
Many of us have had the experience of watching dance that is so transporting that we can only call the experience sublime. To see a corps of women wafting flawlessly across a stage as if they were all swans can make me think that there’s a force that is larger than man or any literal or temporal entity. There’s a section of Paul Taylor’s Esplanade—in the fifth movement, a little less than three minutes in—that similarly moves me. To a score of ever-beetling Bach, the dancers do a lot of big, loose, outstretched-arms full spins while relevé-ing on one foot, and then they crash to the floor. But then when one of the dancers (Carolyn Adams in the YouTube video) starts doing the spin, just as she’s about thirty degrees into her backwards fall, her partner catches her, and then gently helps her onto the floor. She does another spin and he catches and helps her again. Then again. Again. Again.
But as someone who himself likes to dance, I don’t know where I fit in on the dance-as-religion-or-spirituality front. I believe in a higher power, but I don’t call it God. Organized religion often gives me the willies. And, given that I’m a social dancer, and that I’ve been dancing in earnest for only seven years, I’m not like one of those ballet or tap people whose commitment to his or her craft or whose quest for excellence naturally gives way to discussions about cherubim or grace. I’m excited by a quote from Brave New World author Aldous Huxley that runs, “It is with their muscles that humans most easily obtain knowledge of the divine,” but my connection to the quote is almost entirely notional.
It’s when I’m watching dance, as opposed to dancing myself, that I seem to empathize most with this part of Paul Taylor’s memoir: “Some folks, especially those who fi
nd organized religion unappealing, may, like me, find in dance an ordered discipline that signals the existence of Order. Yet dance is only a symbol, not the real thing. But it can relieve instinctive cravings for ritual, ordered magic. Something tells me that when churches started making their rituals more understandable, that was when churchgoers started to look elsewhere.”
DANCE AS NOSTALGIA
1.
I CAN MEASURE MY LIFE in productions of Hair.
1969: I’m seven, and I’m starting to fall in love with the original cast album, which one of my older siblings has left near the family turntable. There are words in here that are dark and exciting to my impressionable young mind: sovody, fellatio, cunnilimbus, peberasty.
One day, while we’re driving around Worcester, Massachusetts, in our VW bug, my two sisters enthusiastically sing along to “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” when it comes on the radio, waving their arms like air traffic controllers who’ve ingested a lot of muscle relaxants. So I join in, too, desperately hoping to be mistaken for cool.
1977: In Cambridge, Massachusetts, I see a group of gushy young actors in fruit-colored leotards perform a highly aerobic showcase of some of the show’s better-known songs. I leave the theater feeling like I’ve eaten more than one piece of cheesecake on a humid day: the hallmark of overexposure to the Danskin crotch panel.
1979: I’m seventeen, and trying not to be gay, but when I watch the new Miloš Forman film of Hair, I’m strangely attracted to John Savage, who plays Claude. But I’m also drawn to the horses in the film, who, like Twyla Tharp’s dancers, can be seen prancing sideways.
The horses are side-stepping, and so am I.
2008: I’m forty-six. I’m gay and happily coupled, which is to say, I go to the theater like some people go to Costco. It’s a sport. If I run into you in the lobby before the show, I might leave you with “See you out on the ice.”
