Brian Seibert

NEW YORK — If vogueing is taken out of its original context, what is the cost?

That’s the concern that has been raised whenever vogueing, which developed decades ago as a competition form in underground balls, mainly for black and Latino gay men, gets some mainstream attention — as it has again recently, with the success of “Pose” on FX.

Usually, the discussion is about appropriation and misrepresentation. But those weren’t the issues raised by two performances in New York this weekend — Rashaad Newsome’s “Five” and Kia LaBeija’s “Untitled: The Black Act.” The vogue-ballroom credentials of both productions were strong, which left the seemingly less fraught question: If you take vogue dancers out of the ballroom and put them in a theater, what does the new context demand?

In the case of “Five,” at New York Live Arts, the context was actually at a double remove, since the work has previously been presented mainly in art galleries and museums. What might serve, in those settings, as a challenge to definitions of drawing and sculpture, seemed in the theater like something less than a substantial dance show.

It lasted barely 30 minutes, although there was a lot going on. In addition to eight dancers, many of them flaunting the earned honorific “legendary,” there was a five-person band, a small gospel choir and more vocalists, including two ballroom emcees spitting out profane, purring encouragement with thrillingly violent force. Newsome — a multidisciplinary artist but not a choreographer — stood center stage, facing away from the audience like a conductor and manning a table’s worth of computers, converting the dancers’ motions into video graphics projected on the back wall.

The format was partly pedagogical. After three dancers fiercely demonstrated techniques of hair flinging and high kicks, the other five, in sequential solos, fiercely isolated the five standard elements of Vogue Fem style: hands, catwalking, spins and dips, floorwork (rolls, splayed legs) and duckwalking (on the toes, in a deep squat). Each of these five was color-coded: leggings, gloves, wigs and even contact lenses all in the same single shade.

But after this introduction came little development — some unison, then another rotation of solos with new music (by Newsome), requiem-like this time, the dancers goaded by the stratospheric melisma of vocalist Kyron El. Individual dancers made an impression (especially the imperiously truculent Leggoh LaBeija), but there was more flash-and-fade than inventive variation, and all the artists were subsumed in the sensory-overload collage, the color scheme, the concept.

A dance-party coda, with Newsome and the vocalists and members of the audience all showing their moves, was unsurprisingly winning. Yet Newsome’s vision of vogueing, evident in his video-graphic squiggles and his dance-derived artwork in the lobby, is of a tangle of lines. That’s reflected in “Five” to the detriment of dance as dance.

“Untitled: The Black Act,” at Performance Space New York, also had one foot in ballroom culture and one in the art world. Kia LaBeija is a pedigreed, champion voguer — formerly mother, or leader, of the august vogue family Royal House of LaBeija — but she is also a photographer whose work has been shown in galleries and museums. And her inspiration for “Untitled,” presented as part of the performance-art biennial Performa 19, was a famous piece of art history: “Das Triadische Ballett,” a 1922 performance created by Bauhaus designer Oskar Schlemmer. (This year’s Performa has a Bauhaus theme.)

Schlemmer’s work was essentially an avant-garde fashion show — masked performers in elaborate costumes composed of cones, spirals and other silhouette-altering shapes, moving like puppets or figurines. It’s easy to see how a vogue artist would be attracted by the fashion fantasy of it but also perhaps repelled by the impersonal aesthetic. LaBeija’s take was at once faithful and divergent.

On the front of the stage floor, laid out in tape, was a spiral of straight lines and right angles; farther back was a grid. Both designs derive from the third part, the so-called black part, of Schlemmer’s work, as did most of Kyle Luu’s glamorous costumes, distinguished from the original designs mainly by more sparkle and less boldness.

Like Newsome, LaBeija (in the program note) pays lip service to the virtues of improvisation, but high-level improvisation is as rigorous a discipline as choreography, and much of “Untitled,” mixing bits of vogue with shallow borrowings from ballet and other forms, lacked sustaining power. Each section had an idea — one performer walking out of the spiral maze, two facing off as a mirrored pair — that was like a shell with too little inside it.

One partial exception was a late solo for LaBeija, accompanied by her father, Warren Benbow, on drums. Benbow, a veteran musician, understands improvisation, and as he worked up a brilliant abstraction of stripper music, LaBeija’s charisma emerged most fully. She reminded me of a young Josephine Baker.

It was significant, too, that at this point LaBeija had shed her elaborate costume for a simple corset-like affair, and had pushed the other elaborately costumed dancers offstage. Already, she had been pulling up strips of tape, and as the others returned in rehearsal attire, they helped her finish the cleanup job.

“Untitled” became a communal ritual. LaBeija elegantly unrolled a strip of tape toward the exit, a path that she and then her dancers followed. From a spiral labyrinth and an urban grid, she had created not a tangle but an illuminated line: an escape route, perhaps, on a journey that was personal but did not exclude others. This shape was moving, even if “Untitled” didn’t do justice to vogueing as dance.

This article originally appeared in

(Critic’s Notebook)

Two Vogue Shows Strike Art-World Poses

To the revival’s director, Leah C. Gardiner, the definition is not that complicated. “A choreopoem,” she said, “is a combination of all forms of theater storytelling.” Which isn’t to say that it’s simple to realize. In the carefully chosen words of the revival’s in-demand choreographer, Camille A. Brown, “combining text with movement is very complex.”

For Paula Moss, the choreographer of the original 1976 production at the Public, “choreopoem” summons a memory of San Francisco in 1973. Shange, who died last year, had just met Moss in a dance class and invited her to a poetry reading.

“She stood up and started to read a few of her poems,” Moss recalled in a telephone interview from her home in Rome. “Normally, poets stand there very stiff, but as she read, she starting dancing. Everyone was shocked.”

“When she sat down,” Moss continued, “she turned to me and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ I thought she was talking about writing. But she was talking about standing still.”

From then on, whenever Shange recited her poetry, she moved. Often, Moss would be beside her, improvising in dance. “She told me to listen to her words and the sound of her voice and interpret them,” Moss recalled. “She had the flow of a musician, and she could communicate the most intimate and secret feelings that women were going through. And movement and words came from the same breath. There could be no separation.”

Both in their 20s, they were quickly joined by other young women, and sometimes by musicians, as they performed the choreopoetry that would become “For Colored Girls” in women’s bars, cafes and Fillmore District clubs. After Shange and Moss drove to New York City, the work acquired a director and a more fixed shape. Eventually, at the Public Theater and then on Broadway, it became a landmark production of American theater, its script a classic of African American literature. But it is not always remembered that it all started with a poet dancing.

Shange, for her part, persistently emphasized the importance of dance in her life and work, the way it connected her to her body and her African American heritage. “It’s how we remember what cannot be said,” she once wrote.

In her essay-poem “Why I Had to Dance,” she recalled how, in the years she was developing “For Colored Girls,” dance became as important to her as writing. She acquired the habit of going directly from dance class to a coffee shop with her journal, as “the endorphin high” helped her “get to the truth.” More broadly, “movements propelled the language and/or the language propelled the dance.”

After Shange relocated to New York, her favorite dance classes were those she took as a scholarship student at Sounds in Motion, the Harlem studio of choreographer Dianne McInytre. Over the phone from Cleveland, McIntyre recalled “the beautiful flow” and flexibility of Shange in class: “She cut through space like a gazelle.”

For the rest of Shange’s life, McIntyre often worked with her as a choreographer and a dancer. What Shange wanted from her, she said, was not literal translation: “You respond to the energy of her words, the meaning. You’re going deep to the place where she’s coming from.” There was “total collaboration,” she said, among Shange, a choreographer and a director. Similarly, it was “sometimes not easy to tell the difference between dancer, actor, singer. Everybody does everything. Everybody is thinking motion.”

Aku Kadogo, another McIntyre student, joined Shange’s crew, improvising in bars, then becoming an original cast member of “For Colored Girls.” Now the chair of theater and performance at Spelman College, she remembers how dance was “more public” back then: “Dance was around us, integral to our culture, and Ntozake captured that. She caught it with language.”

References to dance abound in the text of “For Colored Girls,” in both the poetry (“we gotta dance to keep from cryin/we gotta dance to keep from dyin”) and the stage directions. Yet some audience members, Moss recalled, wondered where the choreography was. “That wasn’t the point,” she said. “This was a whole new form of theater. The choreography was within the poem and the performer. We worked hard to be free in our bodies as we recited the words.”

It was a form of theater that Shange often had to defend. Calling herself a poet rather than a playwright, she railed against theater conventions, arguing that for black artists, plays without dancers and musicians were a waste of an “interdisciplinary culture.” Explaining her collaborations with choreographers and musicians, she wrote how in her work, as in traditional theater, “everyone’s efforts are directed toward the exploration and integrity of the text.” The difference in her collaborations: “The text grows.”

Therein lies the promise and some of the perils facing the “For Colored Girls” revival. Brown knows something about the borderline between theater and dance. She is one of very few choreographers to maintain a successful contemporary dance troupe (hers performs at the Joyce Theater Nov. 9-10) and a thriving career in theater. (She choreographed the current Metropolitan Opera production of “Porgy and Bess” and her work on “Choir Boy” was nominated for a Tony Award earlier this year.)

Interviewed before a recent rehearsal, Brown said that choreographing a choreopoem wasn’t so different from her usual practice. Much of her work is rooted in social dance and gesture. The children’s games — hand clapping, double Dutch — important to both the original production and to Gardiner’s vision, are a facet of African American culture that Brown has already explored in her own “Black Girl: Linguistic Play.”

It’s a connection that Shange recognized. Before her death, Shange interviewed Brown for a book she was writing about dance. (“I should be interviewing you,” Brown recalls thinking.) Planning the “For Colored Girls” revival, she told Gardiner that Brown was her choice for choreographer.

Brown admits some difficulties, like the danger of falling into clichés of spoken-word performance. “How can we honor that tradition but still challenge people to think differently?” she asked. “How far can we stretch the abstraction and leave things a little more ambiguous?”

But, especially as a choreographer working in theater, Brown said that she is grateful for the precedent set by Shange: “What’s beautiful about Ntozake’s work is that movement is not seen as a distraction. It’s part of the story. When I’m given the space to serve the story through movement, that feels good.”

From her director’s perspective, Gardiner described the making of this choreopoem as a process of unusually pervasive collaboration. “You need everybody in the room at all times,” she said. “Even when I’ve directed musicals, everyone had a set role,” she added, whereas in “For Colored Girls” rehearsals, the team of black women — she and Brown and the composer, Martha Redbone — were “all in the pot, cooking it up together.”

Working that way is costly, Gardiner noted. But it was Shange’s way, and Gardiner sees a connection between Shange’s example, a current upswing in dance and music in plays and a surge in black playwrights “working and writing out of our tradition.” It is, she said, “an exciting time in American theater.”

A time that recalls an earlier time. Moss, thinking of the beginning in San Francisco, remembered a painful feeling, as she danced to Shange’s poems, of something holding her back, like being at the edge of a cliff unable to jump. “Until one day, I jumped,” she said, “and I felt this rush of freedom, and we drove that car across the country, saying to ourselves, “We have something.’ ”

'For Colored Girls' Is a Choreopoem. What's a Choreopoem?

NEW YORK — “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” is not a play. Or that’s not what the breakthrough work was called by its author, Ntozake Shange. Her word was “choreopoem,” and any production of “For Colored Girls,” like the major revival now in previews at the Public Theater, has to figure out what the term means.

“I started screaming,” he recently recalled. “You would have thought I was 12 years old.”

Unlike most Misty Copeland fans, though, Abraham, 42, gets to work with her. In 2012, he invited her to be a guest with his contemporary dance company, A.I.M. (Then it was called Abraham.In.Motion.) Busy schedules didn’t align that time, but he got another chance this year, when New York City Center commissioned him to make a solo for Copeland, 37. It premieres Tuesday (and repeats Wednesday) on the first of five programs in the theater’s popular, bargain-priced Fall for Dance festival.

Those programs are sold out, as is the opening night of A.I.M’s week at the Joyce Theater (Oct. 15-20), when Copeland will reprise the solo, fulfilling Abraham’s original dream. She is indisputably a draw. But he is a major figure himself, a 2013 MacArthur fellow whose choreography is constantly in demand. After rehearsing with Copeland at City Center one morning last week, he was off to the Paul Taylor Dance Company, which will debut an Abraham piece at Lincoln Center later this fall.

While Abraham comes from the world of contemporary dance, this isn’t his first experience with world-class ballet dancers. He worked with Wendy Whelan, the former New York City Ballet star, as a choreographer and a dancer on her “Restless Creature” project in 2013. Perhaps more significantly, he made “The Runaway” for City Ballet last year, becoming one of very few black choreographers to create a work for that company, and the first in more than a decade.

Abraham was aware of the pressures that distinction put on him (pressures that Copeland might understand). In response, “The Runaway” danced around expectations. The music juxtaposed a quiet contemporary classical composition by Nico Muhly and playfully aggressive hip-hop by Jay-Z and Kanye West. The choreography discovered commonalities between ballet and ballroom vogueing. Its central role for Taylor Stanley, a mixed-race dancer, was mercurial, slippery, hard to classify. The dance was a hit.

As it happens, Stanley is in another of this season’s Fall for Dance commissions, a duet with his City Ballet colleague Sara Mearns, created by Kim Brandstrup. Robert Fairchild (who used to dance with City Ballet) and Stella Abrera (who still dances with Ballet Theater) are part of the cast for yet another commission, “Unveiling,” by Sonya Tayeh, the choreographer of “Moulin Rouge” on Broadway. Such special-occasion combinations are a standard feature of Fall for Dance, and putting Abraham and Copeland together could be seen as formulaic.

Yet there seems to be something unusually meaningful about this pairing, especially to the paired, as was evident at a rehearsal last week.

It was a giggle fest. Not that the solo is a comedy. Set to droning, staticky music by Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto, it’s a searching work with, in Abraham’s words, “a simmer to it.” Throughout the dance, Copeland keeps shifting shape, her sinuous arms suggesting a ballet swan one moment and a street dancer the next. More than once, she looks over her shoulder anxiously. Yet all during the rehearsal, even as she grew frustrated with a section and they had to work out a solution together, they were making each other laugh almost continuously.

The humor was a sign of comfort, even shared perspective: With a different choreographer, Copeland might not have jokingly referred to race, including kidding about the possible meanings of the title “Ash.”

After rehearsal, the laughing continued as they sat to talk about the pressures they feel at this point in their careers; about dealing with audience expectations; and about what each artist means to the other. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Kyle, now that you finally get to make a solo for Misty, is it as you imagined?

KYLE ABRAHAM: It’s better. In 2012, I imagined her coming out with a boombox to this remix of the Ciara song “Goodies.” That would have been a strictly a showoff kind of thing, and I don’t think either of us feel we have to do that now. The more I get to know Misty, the more I want to show aspects of her artistry that people aren’t always given the chance to see. That’s why I wanted to make something with a simmer to it.

MISTY COPELAND: There are these expectations of what people have seen you do or what they think you can do. But I’ve been realizing what’s valuable to me and what kinds of works I want to be a part of. I love the tradition of ballet — the deep, rich history — but there are some things we have to let go of. So I feel this is the perfect moment to delve into something different and a new language for this generation.

Like what Kyle did in “The Runaway”?

ABRAHAM: I was thinking about what people might want or assume I would be doing for my next piece in the ballet world. With “The Runaway,” a lot of people talk about Kanye, but the first half is classical music. So [for “Ash”] I wanted something with bass, with electronic sounds, but also with strings. Just like we play with different modes of movement.

Are there similarities between “Ash” and “The Runaway”?

ABRAHAM: It wasn’t until yesterday’s rehearsal that I realized, “Wait a second, that’s the same beginning.” But if moments are similar, why are they similar? Both Misty and I feel there are things we have to prove to ourselves and to other people. I think it’s OK to have moments that are reference points in your life. This work has a lot of those ideas of shift and transition in it.

Is that how it feels to you, Misty?

COPELAND: It’s been nice to find ways of expressing what I’m going through, whether or not people get it. It’s a very transitional moment for me now, at 37. I feel like if I had been promoted to principal at a younger age I would have processed this a lot sooner.

And it’s so important to be with an artist who is empathetic and vulnerable. I can’t think of another choreographer that could have handled all I’ve been going through better than Kyle!

With someone else it might have gone badly?

COPELAND: Oh, yeah! Because of my journey. The older you get, the more self-critical you get. So I’ve started to panic a little and worry about what I’m saying [as a dancer]. But Kyle has been so calm.

ABRAHAM: I think it’s about wanting to see you, Misty, and going beyond the person I see onstage. It’s about seeing how the piece looks in your body, what the experience can be for you versus me.

COPELAND: And I appreciate that, because as ballet dancers we’re always just told what to do. It’s nice to have freedom.

Working with Kyle has been different?

COPELAND: Different from any process I’ve ever experienced. It’s been amazing to work with the dancers in his company, too. [What they do] is coaching, but it’s so different from the coaching I’m used to. In the ballet world, you’re coached and it’s like, that’s the answer. This is more collaborative. At this point in my life, it’s nice not to have as many rules.

Fall for Dance

Through Oct. 13 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org.

Kyle Abraham Wants You to See Another Side of Misty Copeland

NEW YORK — Choreographer Kyle Abraham is a Misty Copeland fan. One of his favorite fan memories is of a Prince concert where Copeland appeared as a surprise guest artist. This was before she was a superstar — before 2015, when she made the cover of Time magazine and became the first black woman promoted to principal dancer at American Ballet Theater. So maybe not everyone in the audience knew who she was. But Abraham did.

That she can be both at once may be surprising. But tap and jazz grew up together, and in the 1930s and ‘40s, it was assumed that the greatest jazz bands — Duke Ellington’s, Count Basie’s — would bring tap dancers with them on tour. After World War II, though, as jazz separated from dance, hoofers became much scarcer in jazz clubs and concerts — never entirely absent but unusual, forgotten enough to be a novelty. Lately, that’s been changing a little, and Lerman is at the forefront.

In October, after appearing at the Harlem Jazz Festival, she heads out with the Shakes on a nationwide tour of their Harlem Renaissance tribute show, Harlem 100. (You can also hear her on the Shakes’ debut album, “Emergence.”) In December, she’ll be back in New York with her own band, the Love Movement, invited by jazz pianist Jason Moran to perform as part of his music series at the Whitney Museum.

You might say that Lerman, 33, has arrived. Quincy Jones, who helped choose her to perform in “Soundtrack of America,” the African American music series that opened the Shed last April, hails her as “an absolute tap dancing star” who “knows her roots.” But finding, or making, a place for herself in the jazz world hasn’t been easy. “Where does the tap dancer fit?” is a question she and a few other contemporaries have been trying to answer for years.

“From the very beginning,” she said in a recent interview, “music was what attracted me to tap.” And from near the beginning, 20 years ago, as a teenage prodigy in New York improvising at the tap jam sessions led by beloved elder Buster Brown, she has considered herself a musician.

Brown and the likes of Gregory Hines encouraged her to be herself as an artist, but many others told her she wasn’t doing it right. They advised her to smile more, to pay less attention to how she sounded and more to how she looked, to play the game or she wouldn’t get hired, especially as a young woman. “Not just men but women told me that, which was always alarming,” she said.

Lerman stuck to her path. She started bringing her shoes to jazz jam sessions — not Brown’s inviting, tap-centric events but the intimidating kind with a line of cutthroat horn players, mostly male, itching for a turn. “It was like a shootout,” Lerman recalled. “Can you prove yourself? Do you belong?”

She did and she didn’t. She had the skills and talent but she had to learn the rules. Esteemed trumpeter Roy Hargrove took her under his wing. He explained her place in the jam format, the order of solo spots. After all the horn players but before the drummer — that’s where she could have her brief say.

“That really helped me find my way in,” Lerman said. “And of course having someone like Roy be my shepherd helped, too. He made a space for me.”

“People starting seeing me as a musician and listening to me,” she continued, “because I was fitting in the right place.” After a while, she got her own jam session, at Small’s jazz club in Greenwich Village. But the turning point was attending late-night sessions at Dizzy’s Club, uptown at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Michael Mwenso, the host, kept inviting her onstage — because, he recalled, “there weren’t many like her, a female tap dancer who can hear the music like that.” Mwenso also had a hand in programming, and as he learned “how deep her musical understanding was,” he began booking her projects for the club.

After that, the world just opened up for her. “I couldn’t do enough gigs with people,” she said. “They were writing tunes and musical arrangements for me. They were including tap in their thing. It wasn’t even a thought in their mind that it didn’t belong.”

The musicians welcomed her, and she welcomed them — back to her Harlem apartment for informal late-late-night salons, listening to music and discussing it until the sun came up. “She became our mother hen, our Mary Lou,” Mwenso said, referring to Mary Lou Williams, the great jazz pianist who hosted seminal musical salons in her Harlem apartment in the 1940s and ’50s.

Out of these gatherings grew Mwenso &amp; the Shakes. At first, Lerman joined the band as a featured artist, tapping on one or two songs a set. But sometimes she stayed. Mwenso realized that “we might as well leave her onstage through the whole set, and now we can’t do a gig without her,” he said.

“She’s a member of the rhythm section,” Mwenso continued, “improvising through all the songs, improvising just as deep as any other soloist. Her feet aren’t her greatest talent. It’s her ears.”

That can be what she looks like: someone listening. Although Lerman covers her small board with fancy footwork and participates happily in the Shakes’ showmanship, she’s not a performer who projects a big personality. Not everyone in a band needs to.

Lerman’s success in becoming part of the band (and not just after the horn players and before the drummer) makes her unusual, but not unique. Talk to the handful of young tap dancers who perform with top jazz bands — Brinae Ali, Sarah Reich, Maurice Chestnut and Jumaane Taylor, among others — and you hear similar stories. About the courage required to break into the jazz world. About the need to learn the rules and get someone to vouch for you. About facing skepticism, finding a place and meeting surprise.

For the past few years, Ali has been dancing with trumpeter Sean Jones, in their joint “Dizzy Spells” project and with the Baltimore Jazz Collective. “After a performance,” she said, “people always come up to me and say, ‘Amazing, it’s like you’re a musician.’”

She and the others recount many of the same frustrations. High on the list are floors, half of a dancer’s instrument. When first touring with the Shakes, Lerman encountered much warped, rotting wood and exposed nails (“even at the big festivals”). That’s why she, and the others, travel with their own wooden boards, reliable if restrictive. (Lerman’s board is supplied by a sponsor, O’Mara Sprung Floors.)

Even more important is amplification and sound balance. Ali, who also sings, likens the tap dancer’s problem to a vocalist’s: Everyone else in the band is louder. But because tap dancers are uncommon in bands, the technology and techniques for isolating the tap sound are still rather do-it-yourself. And sound engineers are often unaware of how to make sure a tap dancer is heard.

Above all, though, the challenge is to convince people that tap dancers can be musicians and bandleaders, not nostalgic throwbacks but on the vanguard. Chestnut has toured extensively as a member of Timeline, a jazz quartet led by revered pianist Geri Allen. And yet when he appeared with someone else’s band at a jazz festival recently and suggested to the festival director that he return with his own band, the director said that tap dancers were welcome only if “the artist” — the headlining horn player or vocalist — hired them.

“The artist?” Chestnut recalled thinking. “I’m an artist, too.”

“That was the norm,” Lerman said, when told that story. “But it’s not my norm anymore.”

Next year, Lerman’s band will perform at the august Newport Jazz Festival, where no tap dancer other than Savion Glover has led a band. Also in 2020, she’ll be at the prestigious Umbria Jazz Festival as an artist-in-residence, a first for a tap dancer.

At the festival in White Plains, it was sometimes hard to hear her. But in her featured spots, as when she and the keyboardist agilely jumped around a century of jazz history, the crowd went wild. Still, the rarer achievement was the more ordinary-looking one: Lerman up there with the others, just another musician in the band.

A Tap Dancer's Place: After the Horn Players, Before the Drummer

At the White Plains Jazz Festival this month, the band Mwenso &amp; the Shakes was setting up, plugging in instruments and checking microphones. Michela Marino Lerman was among them. She set down a wooden board and hooked it up to the sound system. Then she changed out of her sandals into tap shoes. Lerman is a tap dancer, and she is also a member of the band.

NEW YORK — The middle of August in New York usually means slim pickings for dance. So the debuts of two ballet companies at Lincoln Center on two consecutive August weekends would have stood out, even if the companies had not both been Chinese.

But they were: Guangzhou Ballet and Liaoning Ballet. This intrigued me and also made me wary. The Chinese ballet productions that have appeared at David H. Koch Theater in recent years have struck me as awfully high in melodrama and kitsch, conflating ballet with acrobatics, the choreography and music mired in formulas and clichés both Western and Chinese.

But then, in early August, the Chinese dance-theater production “Under Siege” came to the Koch, as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival. This wasn’t ballet, and it certainly had elements of kitsch and cliché, but its use of several Chinese traditions — high-level martial arts, borrowings from Beijing Opera, virtuosic pipa players — was freshly entertaining. Its modern, semi-Westernized adaptation of an ancient Chinese story basically worked.

Buoyed by this example, I gave the Guangzhou and Liaoning companies a try, only to get another surprise: the high level of competence of both companies. And yet there was also a dispiriting sense of the familiar.

Anyone expecting ballet-as-usual might have been happy with the performances. Anyone hoping for something fresh and different in a visiting troupe — something revelatory or challenging, even a cultural clash — was bound to be disappointed.

With “Mulan,” the Liaoning company, founded in 1980, came closest to earlier Chinese ballet productions seen here. Even if you didn’t know the story of the young woman who pretends to be a man so that she can take her aging father’s place in the army — a legend familiar to global audiences through the 1998 Disney animated film — you could easily follow it in this clear, smooth telling. (The ballet travels to Washington in September.)

Clear, smooth and dull. The choreographers, Chen Huifen and Wang Yong, adapt ballet conventions in a nearly rote fashion. When Mulan is homesick, she watches a flock of wild geese — a female corps de ballet doing stock ballet-bird moves. In the midst of battle, she tosses off a string of whip-around fouetté turns as if she were the Black Swan in “Swan Lake.” Not every Chinese company needs the martial-arts flair of “Under Siege,” but this medium-paced melee was a letdown, hampered by the wrong conventions.

Adhering to ballet convention almost seemed to be the goal. It was the overt intention of Liaoning’s other program. The first half was standard gala fare — duets from “Swan Lake” and “The Nutcracker,” the “Le Corsaire” pas de trois — and the performances were committed, careful, entirely respectable.

The second half was a different set of conventions, all up-to-date. Some pieces were by European choreographers: Marc Ribaud (French); Rui Lopes Graca (Portuguese). Some were by Chinese dance-makers: Fei Bo, the resident choreographer of the National Ballet of China; Wang Yuanyuan, the founding director of Beijing Dance Theater. Except for some terrible music, nothing was especially good or bad or particularly Chinese, though it all gave the dancers a chance to display their proficiency in the undulant noodling, hyperextension and cool attitudes of worldwide contemporary International style.

The situation was similar with the Guangzhou troupe, founded in 1993. In “Goddess of the Luo River,” Canadian choreographer Peter Quanz referred to another Chinese legend, a story of nature and transformation. But what it looked like was a decent pastiche of a George Balanchine mode: daisy chains and pretty formations suggesting water and the separation of two lovers, all carefully matched to the music (a saccharine violin concerto by Du Mingxin).

In “Carmina Burana,” by Jiang Qi, who was born and trained in China but has spent much of his career in Utah and Cincinnati, the music was Carl Orff’s medieval-inspired cantata, interpreted as an odd sort of Rite of Spring, the sacrifice to placate Nature somehow mixed up with drunk soldiers and temptresses, teenage romance and boyfriend-stealing. There were lots of steps and little sense.

Was this a “bridge between Western and Eastern cultures,” as the program claimed? Was any of this what the Liaoning program called “ballet art pieces of Chinese characteristics?” Was there much Chinese about these ballets besides the dancers performing them?

Only on the surface. There need not be, of course. Ballet is an international language. Danes have made great ballets out of Hans Christian Andersen stories, just as Americans have made ballets about cowboys or sailors on shore leave in New York, but choreographers all over the world have furthered classicism and modernism in directions not so obviously connected to national style. A Chinese troupe might make a great work about, say, 17th-century France or transform the classical language in some pathbreaking way.

Mainly, the performances by the Guangzhou and Liaoning troupes were mediocre, at the level of good regional groups from countries with much longer histories of ballet. That is its own accomplishment. If you lived in the city of Guangzhou or the province of Liaoning, and these were your local ballet companies, you could be proud. And if you live in the United States, and it means something to you to see Chinese dancers doing ballet well, these companies can serve that purpose just fine.

(Critic's Notebook)

What's Chinese About Chinese Ballet?

Later iterations have continued in that vein, but this year is different. This year is all about a single company. It’s from Britain, and it’s big, very big: the Royal Ballet.

As organized by the Royal’s artistic director, Kevin O’Hare, the two-week festival is both intimate and large-scale. It’s one major company presenting many small items — no fewer than 21 pieces in four programs. Selecting the opening program himself, O’Hare has delegated the other three to the designer Jean-Marc Puissant and the Royal stars Lauren Cuthbertson and Edward Watson.

Cuthbertson and Watson are also performing. Chances to see them and their expert colleagues in New York come far too infrequently for this up-close look to be anything other than a welcome treat. It’s the choice of repertory that’s suspect.

Later programs are filled with at least the potential for discovery and surprise: lesser-known choreographers, new works, guest stars (including David Hallberg and Robert Fairchild). The selection that opened the festival Tuesday (and continues through Friday) is the opposite: a classy collection of the big-name choreographers most famously associated with the Royal.

The names are big but the pieces aren’t — only solos and duets, many excerpted from more substantial works. Eight or nine items in 90 minutes is a lot of bang for your buck, yet the tasting-menu variety sacrifices depth. It might even do a disservice to the Royal’s artistic history.

Because there is history on the program, and not just in the oldest work: the slow, beautifully constructed pas de deux from Kenneth MacMillan’s 1966 “Concerto” (impeccably performed by Cuthbertson and Nicol Edmonds). Nor just in the two wonderful 1970s solos by the company’s founding choreographer, Frederick Ashton: “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” (performed with buoyant innocence by the young Joseph Sissens) and “Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan” (overacted by Romany Pajdak).

Much of the history is more recent. The opening pas de deux is from “Asphodel Meadows,” the 2010 work that put Liam Scarlett, then 24, on the map. But in this excerpt, a smooth expression of hesitancy, it’s hard to see what justified the buzz.

Similarly, one of two pas de deux by Wayne McGregor is from “Qualia,” the 2003 work that was his first for the Royal’s main stage. The acrobatic suggestion of sex here makes its point — the man (Watson) is as flexible as the woman (Sarah Lamb). But the excerpt from “Obsidian Tear,” a 2016 work hailed as a breakthrough for McGregor, doesn’t make much sense. In the full dance, is the master-slave dynamic less disturbing, or disturbing in a more artistically justifiable way?

One solo, “Jojo,” is very recent history. It’s a 2018 piece by Charlotte Edmonds, who is the first to hold the Royal’s new Young Choreographer position. But there’s nothing new here, sad to say, just a well-trained dancer (the shyly smiling Sissens) demonstrating that he can do bravura ballet steps and also get down at the club. Will the rest of the festival show the Royal’s present and future in a more flattering light?

Ballet Festival

Through Aug. 18 at the Joyce Theater, Manhattan; joyce.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/arts/dance/ballet-festival-joyce-theater-review.html" id="dc399f39-9a70-3cd0-a224-735e76971ad7">The New York Times</a>.

Review: Big Names (Royal Ballet!), Small Pieces at the Joyce

NEW YORK — When the Joyce Theater began its annual ballet festival, in summer 2013, it was as a useful showcase of small companies from around the United States. Upstart and offshoot troupes needed New York exposure but maybe weren't ready to fill the Joyce for a week on their own.

We hear the voice near the start of “Maze,” a frustrating dance-theater work debuting at the Shed this week. The message is true in several senses.

The intended one is thematic. As the program note indicates, “Maze” takes on social issues like “the school-to-prison pipeline” and “systemic racism in the justice system.” Viewed historically, such topics can induce a bitter sense of déjà vu.

The familiar smell also arises, though, from the many similarities between this production and “Flexn,” a show that originated at the Park Avenue Armory in 2015. Much of the talented cast and creative team are the same, as are many of the powerful themes, but so is the central problem: all that talent floundering for want of direction.

As in “Flexn,” one of the directors here is Reggie Gray, also known as Regg Roc, a pioneer in the Brooklyn-born street-dance style called flexn and founder of the D.R.E.A.M. Ring, a crew that serves as cast for both shows. Gray was one of the first to develop the form’s narrative potential — to show how its joint-testing contortions, otherworldly gliding in sneakers and stop-motion pantomime could express the extreme emotional pressures experienced by its dancers.

But what works in the context of a dance battle or a music video isn’t the same as what’s required for a 90-minute theatrical production. For “Flexn,” Gray shared the director’s chair with Peter Sellars, who pushed the dancers to go big without showing them how to grow. For “Maze,” he shares duties with experimental theater artist Kaneza Schaal. And this new team seems to be trying to correct some of the flaws of “Flexn.”

Where in “Flexn” the brilliance of the dancers was often lost in the vastness of the Armory, “Maze” begins with the 15 dancers close up, sharing the stage with the freely roaming audience in the Shed’s smaller Griffin Theater, an open space defined by Tobias G. Rylander’s lighting: pyramids and cones of illumination that outline crosses on the ground.

And where the music for “Flexn” was recorded (and oddly mawkish), this time the musical director, DJ Epic B, is joined by live musicians: excellent singer-actors Justin Hicks and Kanita Miller Hicks; t djembe drummer Rasaan-Elijah Green; and, a bit incongruously, a trio of taiko drummers called Taiko Masala.

The immersive staging and the live music provide gains in immediacy. And some of the lyrics, by Eisa Davis, increase the theatrical sophistication. Yet throughout “Maze,” whether the audience is encircling the dancers or (as later) watching from stadium seating, the core problem of weak structure persists.

There are, of course, many astonishing flashes — not merely of attention-getting tricks with hats and double-jointedness, but of real artistry. Yet so many of the serial solos meander and sputter, improvisational in the unfinished sense. And the group sections aren’t much more coherent, individually or in sequence.

“This happened already,” the voice whispers again as we see a stage of standing dancers, their hands crossed as if in manacles, swaying as if on a slave ship. It’s a striking image, and a familiar one — overly familiar, despite the thematic point. Another group section, acting out and abstracting the shooting of Laquan McDonald by Chicago police, is equally striking, unfocused and underdeveloped. Assembly-line choreography effectively conjures prison life, but it’s the street-to-stage pipeline that needs more attention. Everything feels like a first draft.

And everything is in contrast to the aftershow, when dancers and even audience members freestyle. Suddenly, there’s real person-to-person interaction, real in-the-moment invention, real joy. The dancers are still in the Shed, but they’re free from the Maze.

Through Aug. 17 at the Shed; theshed.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/arts/dance/maze-review-street-dance-the-shed.html" id="c623aaae-2f35-3d62-a55d-c4791bf11baf">The New York Times</a>.

'Maze' Review: Virtuoso Street Dance Sends Blurry Message

NEW YORK — “This happened already,” a voice whispers. “This smells familiar.”

Two of the sick, soon to die, were in the Taylor company: Christopher Gillis and Jeffrey Wadlington. Hurlin and her dancer friends, especially another Taylor member, Hernando Cortez, decided they needed to do something. They founded an organization called Dancers Responding to AIDS.

In the years since, that organization (which became part of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS in 1993) has raised millions of dollars. At the start, though, it was tricky to find somewhere to hold money-raising events that did not cost a lot. Cortez, who had a timeshare on Fire Island, had the idea to try there. They laid down vinyl flooring on someone’s bayside deck, set out chairs by the pool, and put on a show that pulled in about $8,000.

That was the first Fire Island Dance Festival, in 1995. This year’s installment, the 25th, has already raised more than $600,000, and the events do not even start until Friday. (It runs through Sunday, with a sun shade and chilled water for audiences, and an indoor venue ready in case of rain.)

The biggest change, Hurlin said, came in 2004, when the festival moved to the largest property on the island. “It has this fabulous position, where the shoreline curves, so you’re facing the sunset,” she said. “We cover the pool and build a stage right up against the sea wall” — a stage that has to be rebuilt each year — “so it looks like the dancers could jump right into the water.”

That move expanded the audience capacity, while the picturesque location increased the allure. But the festival resonated with Fire Island residents from the beginning. “Just as our dance world was affected by AIDS, so was this community,” Hurlin said. “We needed each other.” Beyond attending the shows, many Fire Island residents host dancers in their homes.

And then there are the volunteers — the stage managers, lighting designers, costumers, technicians and grunts who help out each year, many scheduling their vacations so that they can work the festival. “It’s a full-circle community experience,” Hurlin said.

Of the three shows each year, the sunset performance on Saturday is the most popular. The dancers and choreographers who participate tend to be big names. This time, Michelle Dorrance, Kyle Abraham, Christopher Wheeldon and James Whiteside, among others, are all offering short premieres.

The location is a draw for them, too. “There’s nothing else like performing on that stage,” said Robert Fairchild, the New York City Ballet dancer turned Broadway star, who is tapping in Dorrance’s premiere. “The wind that blows off the water, the exposure to nature — it’s such an incredible feeling.”

“The tone is set by the cause,” said Whiteside, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre. “It’s sobering but also a greater-than-you feeling, and a joy.”

The sense of camaraderie is high. The meals and outdoor dressing rooms are communal. Parts of the dance world that don’t often mingle — ballet, tap, Broadway, contemporary — mingle here. And connections happen.

The first time that Kyle Abraham, a contemporary choreographer and dancer, performed at the festival, in 2011, he met Wendy Whelan, then a principal dancer with New York City Ballet. She was a star, and he wasn’t yet. “She asked me if I would ever consider making something with her,” Abraham recalled. “I started laughing hysterically. Are you serious? Of course!”

They ended up working together on Whelan’s show “Restless Creature.” Brian Brooks, another choreographer Whelan met at the festival, was also part of that production.

Some dancers meet donors. Wheeldon met his husband, Ross Rayburn. A yoga instructor, Rayburn didn’t know much about dance then. At a cocktail party, he and Wheeldon hit it off. The next day, Wheeldon, one of the world’s foremost ballet choreographers, got to show Rayburn one of his dances, performed by Whelan against an unbeatable backdrop of sea, sky and sunset.

“If this doesn’t seal the deal, I don’t know what will,” Wheeldon recalled thinking. It worked.

Over the years, as the nature of the AIDS crisis has changed, Dancers Responding to AIDS has expanded beyond the single focus on AIDS and dancers into meal delivery and addiction and recovery services. “There is still a huge need,” Hurlin said, “but it’s broader, bigger. We’re able to incorporate more people into the mission.”

“I think that’s positive,” she continued, “moving forward with celebration, as opposed to sorrow.”

This year’s festival, hosted by Joel Grey, should have some of both. The premiere that Whiteside has choreographed — which he described as “a juxtaposition of extreme beauty and camp” — is for two fast-rising Ballet Theater members, Aran Bell and Hurlin’s daughter, Catherine.

“Catherine has filled in a couple of times when she was younger,” the elder Hurlin said. “Lately, she’s been helping with load in and ushering. But this year, I told her, ‘You have to dance.’”

The Paul Taylor company is also returning, performing part of Taylor’s haunting “Sunset.” Since Taylor himself died last year, that loss will further tinge the dance with sorrow.

For Hurlin and others, it has another resonance. Its duet for two men was originally performed by Gillis and Wadlington, the friends whose illness spurred the creation of Dancers Responding to AIDS, which has since helped so many but didn’t save them. When “Sunset” is performed at sunset on Saturday, the tears in some eyes won’t be from the glare.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/arts/dance/fire-island-dance-festival.html" id="e52770b2-407d-3f1d-ad31-058b02678d5e">The New York Times</a>.

Fire Island Dance Festival: A Full-Circle Community Experience

Denise Roberts Hurlin was a member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 1991, which meant she could not avoid the terrifying reality of AIDS. “So many friends and colleagues were getting sick and dying,” she recalled recently. “So many.”

For many years, especially as ballet companies came under increasing pressure to identify and nurture female choreographers, City Ballet’s failure to call upon Tanowitz was puzzling. It’s true that she’s an outsider to ballet, but she knows her ballet history, and her proven talent in discovering drama and wit through formal invention puts her right in line with the company’s best traditions.

So it’s about time that she be given a shot. Yet, as it turns out, the commission is also a little ahead of schedule. Originally, the plan was for Tanowitz to make a work for the fall, but when another choreographer pulled out, Tanowitz — suddenly in-demand and busier than ever before in her career — stepped in.

Might that fast-forwarding account for why her new “Bartok Ballet” feels both overstuffed and undercooked? Its plentiful virtues are characteristic, starting with a wonderfully multidimensional use of stage space. In this ensemble piece, two dancers might oscillate in and out of a relationship intermittently identifiable as a duet, while someone else, way in the rear, lies on her back, raising a bent leg, and yet another dancer peeks out from a forward wing.

Many of the steps, especially for entrances, are stimulatingly eccentric: odd, sideways, hunched, heely. Tanowitz also responds to the fractured folk melodies and rhythms in the score — Bartok’s String Quartet No. 5, played a little tamely by the Flux Quartet on one lip of the proscenium — with bursts of footwork and balleticized folk gesture: hands on hips or behind the head.

The costumes, by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, are gold to match the theater’s décor. The dance, like the score, is complexly symmetrical. It begins and ends with women, and at its center, two trios of women trade off forming and passing through golden gates, a beautiful image.

Throughout the dance, motifs are skillfully introduced, repeated, inverted. Yet the whole doesn’t quite come together as more than a demonstration of Tanowitz’s favorite methods. After how exceptionally well Tanowitz met the challenge of making a work for the Martha Graham company recently, it’s disappointing that she didn’t hit this one out of the park. Most fundamentally, the combination of this choreographer with this company and these dancers has not yet jelled.

That’s not a problem shared by Justin Peck, the troupe’s resident choreographer. Earlier on the program, the City Ballet dancers looked fully at home in his new “Bright,” even if this pretty appetizer of a dance lasted no longer than the speeches. Where Tanowitz fell short of the challenging, powerful music she chose, Peck — not for the first time — exactly matched a shallow, empty-headed score (Mark Dancigers’ “The Bright Motion: II”), using Sara Mearns as a kind of free spirit, slightly apart from the others and inspiring them into motion.

But if “Bright” was slight, the gifted Peck will have more chances. Crucially, so will Tanowitz. She’s already scheduled to make another work for the company next year. Too often, female choreographers are not given opportunities, as male ones are, to try again and grow. Signing up Tanowitz for two in a row is an excellent new-era move, a truly bright idea.

New York City Ballet: Through June 2 at the David H. Koch Theater; ncyballet.com

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/dance/review-city-ballet-pam-tanowitz.html" id="20350f66-b887-3cb3-a0b3-656c592c99a6">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Lately, there’s been a lot of talk of a “new era” or “new chapter” at New York City Ballet. At the company’s spring gala at the David H. Koch Theater on Thursday, both phrases cropped up in preshow speeches by the new artistic director, Jonathan Stafford, and the new associate artistic director, Wendy Whelan. These speeches were far from lively, but fresh ideas have been emerging in other forms. The fruit of one was on the program: a commission for choreographer Pam Tanowitz.

Two and a Half Cheers for Pam Tanowitz!

NEW YORK — Making a new work for the Martha Graham Dance Company is a tough assignment. Any attempt to copy Graham is self-defeating, sure to pale next to the real thing elsewhere on the program. And yet the new work must have some relation to Graham, some reason to stand beside her art and at the same time stand on its own as art of today. No wonder so few of the pieces the company has commissioned in recent years have been any good.

Now there’s an added challenge. The newest commissions come under the rubric of the two-year EVE Project commemorating the ratification of the 19th Amendment and the enfranchisement of women. Female choreographers are tasked with expressing female empowerment.

The first nights of the company’s two-week run at the Joyce Theater featured the world premiere of “Deo” by Maxine Doyle and Bobbi Jene Smith and the New York debut of “Untitled (Souvenir)” by the suddenly-in-demand Pam Tanowitz. “Deo,” striking on its own, suffers in comparison with the Graham around it. But Tanowitz has succeeded where so many have failed. Borrowing from Graham, she’s made her own magic.

Starting in silence, “Untitled” feels at first like a clash of aesthetics. There’s something willful about how Tanowitz fractures the stage space and keeps her rhythms fragmentary, chopping up the ordered world of Graham more in the manner of Graham alum Merce Cunningham, Tanowitz’s chief influence.

But with the start of the music, Caroline Shaw’s “Punctum” and “Valencia,” the piece builds and builds, establishing its own world, its own poetic coherence. Just as the music gives a swirling momentum to highlights of string quartet language, so the choreographymakes shards of Graham gleam with new brightness and beauty. The flow is Tanowitz’s.

“Deo” is more dutiful and less original. Following Graham’s love of myth, Doyle and Smith have extracted themes of mothers, daughters, mortality and grief from the story of Demeter and Persephone. The piece, for an all-female cast, proceeds by image and blackout: a forest of women on their backs, with heads and legs floating; a crowd of women with their backs to us, writhing as if weeping; a clump of women rotating like a slow-motion tornado.

Some of the vocabulary is taken from Graham: contractions and cupped hands. But these are surface gleanings. Smith’s physicality, true to her roots in the Batsheva Dance Company, pushes Graham’s pelvic truth down into squatting thighs. The Graham women clearly enjoy the sensual abandon and Batsheva-style solos, yet you only have to watch a little of “Chronicle” — a 1936 all-female, who-needs-men Graham juggernaut also on this season’s programs — to sense the relative flimsiness of “Deo.”

Even its ensemble largeness, “Deo” also seems small next to Graham’s two-woman duet “Hérodiade” (1944). Yet the logic of Tanowitz’s “Untitled” grows more engaging if your mind has recently followed “Hérodiade” and its patterns of intense indecision, especially as strongly performed by PeiJu Chien-Pott and Natasha M. Diamond-Walker.

Not all Graham is faring so well this year. The revival of “El Penitente,” an important and difficult Graham work from 1940, is anemic. There’s too much acting in the face, rather than in the body, as becomes particularly apparent when the performers wear masks or shrouds. And “Secular Games,” one of Graham’s swinging-60s pseudo-comedies, falls short of justifying its inclusion on overstuffed, jumbled programs.

I wonder whether what critic Clive Barnes felt about “Secular Games” at the time of its premiere — that it was witty, in a particular sense — is the same as I feel about Tanowitz now. By witty, I don’t mean funny. And it’s not only about eccentricity, though “Untitled” has many wonderful baubles that come out of nowhere and yet fit just fine.

One subtle bit of wit is the unemphatic way she gives female Graham steps to the men in her mixed-gender cast and how that cast unostentatiously splits into gendered groups near the end. A male trio, after completing a brilliantly complex section, sits to watch the women strike glorious Graham balances. Slowly, the seated men scoot along the front of the stage, still watching. And by this witty choreographic motion, Tanowitz speaks volumes about Graham and herself and the empowerment of women.

Martha Graham Dance Company

Continues through April 14 at the Joyce Theater, Manhattan; joyce.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/arts/dance/martha-graham-dance-pam-tanowitz-bobbi-jene-smith.html" id="f9aa3195-31a0-31a7-a8a4-3ee96065909c">The New York Times</a>.

Creating for Martha Graham's Company, Competing With the Great Mother

Not really. Not even the extremely talented cast of “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations,” which opens at the Imperial Theater on Broadway on March 21.

Times change. The past can never be wholly recaptured. Those are themes in this jukebox musical, which tells the story of the Temptations from the perspective of Otis Williams, the sole surviving original member (and an executive producer of the show). And deep in the second act, when consequences and regrets are starting to pile up, the actor playing Williams (Derrick Baskin) says, “Don’t nothing rewind but a song.”

Change can be lamented or embraced. Sergio Trujillo, the choreographer of “Ain’t Too Proud,” is the embracing type. “It was important to me,” he said before a recent preview performance, “that an audience that knows the Temptations is able to watch the show and think, ‘That’s what I remember.’ But it’s also important to look through the lens of today.” The question he asked himself was: “If I were choreographing for the Temptations now, what would I do?”

What he did was create choreography that is more intricate, stylistically varied and narratively sophisticated than anything the Temptations ever approached. All the characteristic slides and pivots and gestures in relay are in there, but amid a whole lot more. So while “Ain’t Too Proud” honors the past, it also brings out differences between dancing in Motown back then and dancing on Broadway now.

The Temptations were not trained dancers. At first, they didn’t think of themselves as dancers at all. “We would just stand and sing, or sit and sing,” Williams, 77, recalled over the phone.

The show has fun with this fact in an early scene. Paul Williams (no relation to Otis Williams) tries to get the other guys to dance in their act and they resist, claiming they can’t. He has to convince them that the ladies will like it.

Paul Williams, who died in 1973, did give the Temptations their first moves. In 1965, though, they started working with a professional choreographer: Cholly Atkins. He is not a character in “Ain’t Too Proud.” But that omission, presumably for narrative economy, has some historical justification. In his 2001 autobiography, “Class Act” (written with Jacqui Malone), Atkins says that Motown artists were often told to say that they did their own choreography. He was part of the behind-the-scenes operation.

That operation was called Artist Development, and it was a critical component in the vision of Motown’s founder, Berry Gordy. “Berry always wanted Motown artists to be more than recording artists,” said Shelly Berger, who became the Temptations manager in 1966. (He’s a creative consultant for “Ain’t Too Proud,” as well as a character in it.) And so the people hired for Artist Development were show-business veterans, there to teach the kids how to become versatile entertainers.

NEW YORK — Five handsome men, dressed sharp. Golden-voiced singers, each distinctly soulful, harmonizing on hit after hit. That they could also move well, smoothly executing snazzy, classy choreography, might have seemed extra. Yet it was essential to what made the Temptations exceptional and enduring. Think about it: Does anyone dance quite the way they did anymore?

Brian Seibert

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What's Chinese About Chinese Ballet?

Review: Big Names (Royal Ballet!), Small Pieces at the Joyce

'Maze' Review: Virtuoso Street Dance Sends Blurry Message

'Maze' Review: Virtuoso Street Dance Sends Blurry Message

Fire Island Dance Festival: A Full-Circle Community Experience

Two and a Half Cheers for Pam Tanowitz!

Creating for Martha Graham's Company, Competing With the Great Mother

Cholly Atkins' Motown Moves Get an Update in 'Ain't Too Proud'

Making Dances in the Shadow of Merce Cunningham

Mable Lee, Tap-Dancing 'Queen of the Soundies,' Dies at 97

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