Then I saw a Sufjan Stevens show at BAM (a piece about the BQE, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) during which he brought out dancers who did simple repetitive movements with hula-hoops or other such silliness.O It was charming and effective, moving even, something obviously low-tech that almost anyone could do. I thought to myself, “I’ve never had dancers on stage. Why not?”
I thought I would go a little further with the idea than Sufjan, who had a million other things going on during that show, like films and costume changes. I worked with my manager on a budget. I had learned over the years that we could predict, based on the size of proposed performance venues, how much we might make on a tour, so we could predict if singers, dancers, choreographers, and the cost of carting all of them around along with the band was feasible. In this case, it was. Money and budgets are as much a determining factor in music and performance as anything else, but that’s for another chapter.
Hoola Hoope Dancer, Sufjan’s BQE show, by Lawrence Fung
For the dance elements, I decided to approach “downtown” choreographers rather than the ones who typically do music videos, R&B shows, or Broadway musicals. The dance vocabulary of those shows is emphatic, energetic, and exciting, but everyone has seen that stuff before, so why bother? I thought I’d spread the creative risk to increase my odds, so I approached four choreographers—Noémie Lafrance, Annie-B Parson, and the team of Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs—rather than seeing if just one could do the whole show. This way, if one person’s contribution didn’t work out for some reason, there were still others who could carry the load. (Luckily, that didn’t happen.) Likewise, I suggested that each choreographer initially pick just two songs to work on. (They ended up doing quite a bit more than just six songs.) I provided a proposed set list, and left the choice of what to work on to them. All of the choreographers had worked with untrained dancers before, and often incorporated vernacular movement into their work—moves that weren’t based on ballet or typical modern-dance stuff. That was important for me, too; I didn’t want worlds in collision. I see dance as something anyone can do, though I knew that inevitably the dancers would have some special skills, as we all do.
Choreographer Noémie Lafrance had recently done a video with Feist that was widely seen. It used mostly untrained dancers, and though I didn’t necessarily require my performers to have no formal dance training, I knew that I didn’t want them to obviously look like dancers. I wanted them to blend in with the rest of us. Noémie had also done a lot of site-specific work in swimming pools and stairwells, so I knew she was interested in getting dance into new venues—like a pop-music concert. Annie-B Parson I’ve known forever. I’m a fan of her company, Big Dance Theater, and she’s worked with musicians like Cynthia Hopkins, so she seemed perfect, too. Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs are a performing/choreography duo whose work I saw in a video at an art gallery. In that piece they wore matching primary-colored off-the-rack outfits and did mostly pedestrian moves in unison. Sometimes they rolled down a gully and sometimes they clambered on rocks. It was often funny and beautiful. I didn’t know if they’d ever choreographed a “show” like this before, so they were the wild card.
I could afford three dancers and three singers in addition to the band, some of whom I’d worked with on two previous tours: Graham Hawthorne on drums, Mauro Refosco on percussion, and Paul Frazier on bass. Mark De Gli Antoni joined on keyboards. (He was new, though we’d once played together when he was in the band Soul Coughing.) The singers were easy: folks I had crossed paths with or worked with before. They were told that they’d be expected to “do some movement.” I used that phrase rather than “dance” because I didn’t want to give them the fearsome idea that they’d be expected to do Broadway jazz dance. To find appropriate dancers, the choreographers sent out word to dancers and performers they knew personally. We didn’t go the route of taking out an ad, as we’d have been flooded with inappropriate people. Even so, at the beginning of the dance audition there were fifty dancers in the room.
We had two days to whittle them down to three. Cruel, but, well, fun too. We decided that the dancers would be asked to do three types of things: exercises in which they made up their own movement, short routines which they would be asked to memorize, and bits where they would receive notes and suggestions as to how to improve what they’d just done. Noémie began with an exercise I’ve never forgotten. It consisted of four simple rules:
1. Improvise moving to the music and come up with an eight-count phrase. (In dance, a phrase is a short series of moves that can be repeated.)
2. When you find a phrase you like, loop (repeat) it.
3. When you see someone else with a stronger phrase, copy it.
4. When everyone is doing the same phrase the exercise is over.
It was like watching evolution on fast-forward, or an emergent lifeform coming into being. At first the room was chaos, writhing bodies everywhere. Then one could see that folks had chosen their phrases, and almost immediately one could see a pocket of dancers who had all adopted the same phrase. The copying had begun already, albeit just in one area. This pocket of copying began to expand, to go viral, while yet another one now emerged on the other side of the room. One clump grew faster than the other, and within four minutes the whole room was filled with dancers moving in perfect unison. Unbelievable! It only took four minutes for this evolutionary process to kick in, and for the “strongest” (unfortunate word, maybe) to dominate. It was one of the most amazing dance performances I’ve ever seen. Too bad it was over so quickly, and that one did have to know the rules that had been laid out to appreciate how such a simple algorithm could generate unity out of chaos.
After this vigorous athletic experiment, the dancers rested while we compared notes. I noticed a weird and quite loud wind like sound, rushing and pulsing. I didn’t know what it was; it seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere. It was like no sound I’d ever heard before. I realized it was the sound of fifty people catching their breath, breathing in and out, in an enclosed room. It then gradually faded away. For me that was part of the piece, too.
Having learned from the Rei Momo tour, I decided to go back to the white outfits. That way the dancers’s movements would pop against the musicians, risers, and bits of gear. But as with the big Latin tour, I sensed that there was a spiritual aspect to the new songs we were playing, as well as many of the older ones, so white also hinted at associations with gospel, temples, and mosques.P
We rehearsed for a month. For the first three weeks the band and singers learned the music in one room, while the dancers and choreographers worked in another room two floors below. I’d pop back and forth. In the fourth week we brought the dancers and musicians together. We then did what is called an out-of-town run: a series of shows in smaller towns to get the bugs out, where no one in the press would see what we were up to. Our first show was in Easton, Pennsylvania, in a lovely old restored theater in a little once-industrial town. There were some rough patches, but the big surprise was that the audience—hardly a contemporary-dance crowd—loved it. Well, they didn’t go nuts, but they didn’t balk at the dance stuff. It was going to be okay.
And it got better. I realized that the dancers, and the singers who sometimes joined them, raised the energy level of the whole show. I joined them when I could, and to do so felt ecstatic, but my interaction was limited by my singing and guitar-playing duties. Even so, they all became part of the whole, not a separate part tacked on. Over the course of the tour we took this idea further: some of the dancers would sing, some would play guitar, and eventually we added bits that blurred the boundaries between dancers, singers, and musicians. A little bit of an ideal world in microcosm.
The out-of-town tryout part was kind of a bust. That aspect of putting a performance together has been forever altered by cell-phone cameras and YouTube. Barely minutes after our shows were over, someone would announce that some of the numbers were appearing online. In the