And Then We Danced

by Henry Alford

  Oh, to have one’s obituary graced with a presence as fabulous as Miss Minnelli’s—and then to have this presence refer to the reporter as “Darling”! This is definitely the way to, uh, go.

  I hied myself to the current location of Luigi’s school, the Luigi Jazz Centre. It’s located on the Upper West Side and shares a basement space with several other dance schools, including a children’s tap school called Shuffles. Seated behind the registration desk was a deadpan, compact gentleman of a certain age named Francis Roach, a Luigi protégé who has long run the studio and taught most of its classes.

  “Are you the teacher?” I asked, handing over my $20.

  “I am today,” he said expressionlessly.

  “Just to say, I’m injured. So if it looks like I’m holding back, it’s because I’m holding back.”

  “Do you know the origin story of the studio?”

  “I do.”

  “It’s the only dance form to emerge from a tragedy.”

  Though I’d found Luigi’s triumph over physical disability to be both affecting and inspiring, it was too extreme for me to use as a template for dealing with my own comparatively modest setback. So I explained to Francis, “I also know the Liza Minnelli story. I’m trying to follow in her footsteps, actually.”

  “I’ll get your Tony ready.”

  * * *

  In a typical Luigi class, you spend an hour stretching, and then half an hour on a routine. The technique is heavy on épaulement (turning the body from the waist upward and bringing one shoulder forward and the other back); while you’re oozing thusly, you’re slowly extending your arms in front of you as if plucking ripened figs to store in your prodigious cleavage. When you put épaulement on its feet, stepping forward with your right foot while leading with your left shoulder, and vice versa, you’re doing a “jazz walk.”

  There are two iconic Luigi stances, both of them aids to balance and spine lengthening. One has you put your arms out in front of you, and then press down as if on an invisible barre. This is likely attributable to the fact that, during the three months Luigi spent in the hospital, he practiced a series of angular port de bras that were devised by a eurythmic dancer named Michio Ito to help musical conductors develop arm strength.

  The second move gives you fierce balance. You put your legs in a closed or locked fourth position by bracing one knee and lower quad behind the other leg’s knee and lower quad. This stance helped Luigi when, a year after he got out of the hospital, he kept falling on the floor, particularly during the barre-less “center” section of ballet classes.

  Francis proceeded to put five of us students through our paces, invoking the deceased Luigi frequently, at one point pointing to the sky and saying, “Luigi wants me to tell you this.” I loved the signature Luigi moves, though they both seemed like things you’d only ever do in a dance studio.

  * * *

  Jazz is the type of dance that I’m worst at. I blame nostalgia. The many hours of my life that I’ve spent watching theater and TV and film have erected a blocky, multistoried research facility between me and any jazz move I try to do. I’m not moving my body through space, I’m accessing archival clips. I’m not dancing, I’m “dancing.”

  Francis really wanted our épaulement to be chesty. At one point he had us pretend we were each wearing a $30,000 necklace while we danced. This felt very showgirl to me; my imaginary $30,000 necklace was nothing compared to my imaginary two-hundred-pound headdress. It’s hard to achieve “Nipples firing!” when they’re aimed at the floor.

  Next, when demonstrating how to bend at the waist while keeping a flat back, Francis said with each successive bow, “Thank you for this Tony,” “. . . this Emmy,” “. . . this Grammy.” Then, looking at me, added, “Or all three, like Miss M.”

  Then we tackled a combination that Francis had choreographed to Peggy Lee singing “Fever.” If the essence of ballet is, in the words of one of its most esteemed former coaches, Maggie Black, “Up! Up! Up!” then the essence of jazz is more like “Up but down! Up but down! Up but down!”: the essential slink and cool of jazz dancing is rooted in a dancer’s ability to be simultaneously pulled into the ground and pulled into the sky. This is difficult for those of us whose posture brings to mind the phrase “heavy backpack.” Much more manageable for me was one of jazz’s other signature tendencies, isolation: Daddy likes to roll only his rotator cuff forward on three because it means everything else can rest until four.

  At class’s end, Francis, who’d become much more animated through the course of dancing, motioned me to come talk to him. He was standing on the side of the studio, next to the stereo speakers. Eyes twinkling, he unearthed a black-and-white photo of an exhausted-looking Liza wearing dance clothes and leaning against a barre. Then, to show me where the photo had been taken, Francis pointed at the barre that was less than two feet behind me. I whooped with delight.

  He asked how I was feeling and I said, “Energized, not whipped.”

  “That’s how it should be,” he said. “So you can do your class and then get to your show for a seven o’clock call time.”

  As it was only 12:30 p.m., my supposed Broadway-performing self had about six hours to dust off my trophy cabinet and then start self-medicating.

  * * *

  A week later, I found myself handing Francis my $20 at the registration desk again. “I haven’t been practicing,” I confessed. “But I did watch Liza’s at the Palace.”

  Francis, who, off the dance floor, often looked stilled or becalmed, simply stared.

  This totally fun 2009 Broadway offering, which I watched on YouTube, was itself an act of nostalgia—in the first act, a slightly wobbly sixty-three-year-old Liza reworks the vaudeville tribute that her mother Judy Garland performed at the same Broadway theater, the Palace; the second act is a redo of the nightclub act performed by Liza’s godmother Kay Thompson, the Eloise author who during the 1940s was MGM’s vocal coach and choral director. Yes, we get some crowd-pleasers (“Maybe This Time,” “Cabaret,” “New York, New York”), but we also get some less heavily trod stuff (“If You Hadn’t, But You Did,” “I Love a Violin”). More important to me, though, was the fact that Liza can be seen pressing her arms down on an imaginary barre twice, and doing the knee-lock once.

  Liza at sixty-three is not Liza at twenty-six, the age at which she made Cabaret and Liza with a Z and at which she could, as dance critic and Vanity Fair contributor Laura Jacobs has written, “send a shiver from head to toe with a fleshy little seal-like frisson—the hot mama on an Arctic ice floe.” Rather, what gives this newer offering its immediacy and crackle is not Liza’s singing and dancing (her voice is hoarse, and she can’t really kick anymore) but the volcanic effort she makes to try to get us to like her: surely this film, and not Ms. Riefenstahl’s, would be the one most accurately titled The Triumph of the Will.

  Seated at the Jazz Centre’s registration desk, Francis pointed to the studio behind him and said, “It was choreographed right in here. We were all there opening night.”

  I’d like to tell you that I am immune to such intimations of glitter. But I would be lying. I loved hearing this—just as, half an hour later, I loved it when Francis corrected my diagonally slanted body with “Straight ahead, Henry. You’re at the Palace, let them see you!” or, a few months later, “Henry! Chest! We’re on Broadway!”

  This kind of individualized attention reminded me of the Liza/Luigi relationship. Luigi was Liza’s godfather. She called him Papa. They’d met on the set of An American in Paris, which Liza’s father, Vincente Minnelli, directed. Liza was four. “She was a little girl,” Luigi recalled for a Wall Street Journal reporter who visited the studio in 2013. “She was hoping to feel it and that’s what she learned. A lot of these kids I taught them how to feel.”

  A self-described “studio brat,” Liza would ride her bike to MGM every day after school and sit in rehearsal halls and watch the likes of Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire rehearse. Kelly said of
her at a young age, “She’s gonna be a dancer!” Indeed, dancing would come first for her—she saw a production of Bye Bye Birdie that galvanized her—but she would come to consider herself an actress first, a dancer second, and a singer third.

  When Liza moved to New York in her mid-teens to pursue a career, she enrolled in Luigi’s school, where she would continue taking classes throughout her career. Liza would often bring her Cabaret colleague Marisa Berenson to class; Modern Family actress Sarah Hyland, who studied with Luigi in the late nineties and early aughts, was sometimes in class with them.

  In 2002, Luigi walked Liza down the aisle at her fourth wedding, to David Gest, joining best man Michael Jackson and maid of honor Elizabeth Taylor.

  * * *

  Liza has always been hard on her body, and I don’t mean just the partying and self-caregiving. Susan Stroman, who choreographed her in 1992’s Liza Minnelli Live from Radio City Music Hall, has praised Liza for never “marking” or walking through a rehearsal but for always rehearsing full out.

  The bodily ravages that Liza would have had to contend with when she did Liza’s at the Palace—scoliosis, two false hips, three fused discs, a wired-up kneecap, and arthritis in her feet—must have seemed like mere static compared to the brain encephalitis she contracted from a mosquito bite in 2000. “I was told I’d never move again, let alone walk and talk,” she told author Rose Eichenbaum. “I blew up to 180 pounds. I went to Luigi and asked, ‘You think I’ll dance again?’ . . . ‘Sure. You’ll dance better than ever.’ I went to class the next day and never stopped. In six months I was rehabilitated. I’m able to speak today because of dance. I’m living because of dance. There’s nothing more important in the world to me.”

  The loveliness of Liza and Luigi having latched onto each other had a way of continually reasserting itself. Sometimes Luigi’s ministrations to his young charge were less about feeling than not feeling. Liza’s character on the cracked sitcom Arrested Development, Lucille Austero, had chronic vertigo, and would fall to the floor when nervous. In 2009, Liza told NPR listeners about her first day of shooting: “It came time for the line right before I fell down and they said, ‘OK, cut.’ And they brought in a lot of pads for the floor and a stunt double, and said, ‘She’ll fall down for you.’ I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ I went to my dance teacher, Luigi, and he taught me seventeen different ways to fall down.”

  * * *

  I was heartened by the fact that the students drawn to the Jazz Centre skewed older than most in my other dance classes—lots of folks forty plus amid the younger professionals. As with doing Zumba at the Chinatown Y, this made me appreciate my comparative youth. My dancing was, yes, emotionless and awkward—but it didn’t lack in the oomph department.

  The fact that Luigi had died less than two years earlier seemed, on some days, to cast a slight pall over the proceedings. Did the woman on my left who kept looking up at the skylight expect Luigi to come barreling through, Santa-style? And what of the older woman who sometimes danced not alongside us other students, but off on the side, diagonally facing the corner of the studio: showgirl gone rogue?

  There is an occasional tendency among the Luigi followers to speak of the past in a way that would bedevil fact-checkers. If you call the studio, for instance, the outgoing phone message tells you that Luigi coined the expression “a-five-six-seven-eight,” which very well may be true, but how would you substantiate it? Or, in the documentary Broadway: Beyond the Golden Age, Liza tells us that Luigi’s car crash shook his eyeballs “out of his head, and they put them back in.” One sixty-plus Luigi student told me that she sometimes performs hip-hop. One day in class Francis told us that blind ballerina Alicia Alonso’s detached retinas were the product of too many pirouettes.

  But more typically, Francis’s nods to the past were conversational goads. They’d take the form “. . . and once Luigi started giving classes on the movie sets, some interesting people started to show up. Like you may have heard of George Chakiris.”

  ME: West Side Story!

  FRANCIS: Yes. Or Vera-Ellen.

  OTHER STUDENT: On the Town! White Christmas!

  Combining as it did a dance class with a round of Jeopardy!, this was highly diverting. It was also a nice distraction from the part of the warm-up that always made me quail. Namely, the part where you bend forward at the waist and reach your outstretched arms as far between your legs as possible—and then do it seven more times in succession, two of them while lightly bouncing. Yes, this kind of reaching is something that I wanted my body ultimately to be able to do, but right now, with my still slightly sore back, it felt like waving a T-bone in front of the lion’s cage.

  So, after my third class with Francis, I added to my Luigi training a weekly session of Pilates, the highly effective but highly expensive ($100–$200/hr.) body conditioning popular with dancers. Pilates has you pulling pulleys, mostly while you’re lying down. If the Luigi method’s twin dragons (the knee-lock and the invisible barre) had struck me as moves that I would only ever do in a class, Pilates gave me a move I could employ anywhere, anytime—while walking down the street or doing the dishes or lying in bed. Namely, collapsing my bellybutton, which is what you’re meant to do while carrying out all of Pilates’s stretching and pulley-yanking.

  One day I excitedly asked Stephen, my Pilates instructor, “Are you saying to me that sucking in my gut—the same method I use to try to look thin—is helping my back? Because, if so, that is a win-win situation.”

  Well, yes—more or less, Stephen answered, though Pilates wants more of a gentle tuck than a belly-wide suck.

  And so I embraced what I thought of as the Gentle Tuck.

  Once armed with the rudiments of both Luigi and Pilates, I could feel dramatic improvement. My spine was getting stronger. Ever since this most recent injury, whenever I needed to pick up something that I’d dropped on the floor, I’d been doing something like a grand plié to retrieve it, but now I downshifted to a demi. Flushing a low-slung toilet no longer necessitated a delicate crab walk. I could get into bed without lowering myself like a knight in armor onto a horse. I was Edward Saladtongs no more.

  Around this time I’d also started taking some jazz classes at Joffrey, with a short, funny, faux-furious teacher named Bill Waldinger. Bill teaches the Luigi technique, which, like Francis, he studied for many years with the master himself. I relayed to Bill that I was combining Luigi and Pilates—“I call it Lew-oddies,” I said—and he enthused that the two methodologies were very compatible.

  Indeed, pinging back and forth between the Jazz Centre and Joffrey and Noho Pilates added a geographical heft to my rehabilitation: the fact that my renewed strength wasn’t specific to one location somehow made it seem stronger. Seen from the air, the three outposts of my recovery would form a triangle—a giant athletic supporter on the Manhattan skyline. That I was still unexceptional at the dancing itself now seemed less pressing to me: I was getting something else from my studio hours.

  Handing over my $20 to Francis at the registration desk one day, I told him, “I wanted to thank you. My back feels much better.”

  “That’s very nice of you to say, thank you,” he said, looking up from a real estate brochure.

  I continued, “I’m feeling very bendy and pretzel-like. There’s a new pertness to my buttocks, too.” Then, trying to sound as much like Joel Grey in Cabaret as possible, I added, “Even the orrrrchestra is beautiful.”

  “I wonder where you got that line,” Francis said drily.

  “But I will say, the hard part of this technique has been all the bending over. I’ve sort of been anxious that I might get stuck in that particular position and that, in addition to talking and writing like someone whose head is stuck up his ass, I’d start looking like one, too.”

  Francis gave me a withering smile, and drew my attention to a real estate ad for a $32 million town house that had once belonged to Gypsy Rose Lee.

  * * *

  Francis can do a lot with a look, bu
t Bill can do a lot with a finger flick. “Tiny. Nothing,” Bill would sometimes say enthusiastically of a single extended finger or an isolated hip-check that he’d put into one of our routines. One time he paired a jutting shoulder move with “Tiny. Don’t do it for the audience—make the audience come to you.” I wasn’t hearing this kind of talk much in ballet or ballroom or tap.

  It occurred to me that, since Bill and Francis both studied with Luigi for many years, they were probably either best friends or mortal enemies. So, one night at Joffrey with Bill, I allowed as how I was also taking classes with Francis. Bill smiled and suggested that he and Francis were not thick as thieves. When I confessed that I loved my classes at the Jazz Centre but that there was a slight air of tristesse to the proceedings, Bill said, “Well, you know, Francis wasn’t just Luigi’s protégé, he was also his life partner.”

  I hadn’t known.

  Bill continued, “I don’t advertise this as a Luigi class because that’s Francis’s thing. Luigi left Francis the school, and that’s what Francis has. The school.”

  I nodded my head.

  Bill finished, “And the school should live on.”

  * * *

  That did it. Previously, all the strands of nostalgia swirling around my Jazz Centre tenure—the story of Luigi’s accident, my love of Liza, Francis’s allusions to yesteryear—had charmed and delighted me. They’d gotten me to show up. But they were part of my nostalgia problem, chunks of bacon in a thick soup of reference. But now, on concluding that Francis’s downbeat demeanor off the dance floor was the result of his having lost his partner, I had something palpable and human to work with.