Movin’ & groovin’ to Chrissie Hynde
GroundWorks rocks out w/ Hindsight
It was like the setup for a joke. Two choreographers walked into a vegan restaurant and the one, a local guy, said, “You gotta try this great restaurant; it belongs to Chrissie Hynde,” and the other choreographer, from New York, said, “Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders? Why does she own a restaurant in Akron?” And he explained that Hynde is from Akron so the choreographer from NYC says, “You should do a piece to Hynde’s music,” but he said, “It’s more what you do.”
And that, no joke, was how Lynne Taylor-Corbett came to choreograph Hindsight to the music of Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders on David Shimotakahara’s GroundWorks DanceTheater. We spoke with Taylor-Corbett by phone recently.
Lynne Taylor-Corbett: We left thinking, ‘That’s a nice idea,’ but David being David kept plugging until it happened. We talked about it while we were working on the program for the Ice House (Taylor-Corbett’s Unpublished Dialogues in late summer of 2008) and then last January he came to see me at Lorain Community College where I was workshopping a new play. We talked about it again and he sent me her CDs. I think he realized that her music would be a really good contrast in his rep and he also thinks of her — we both do — as a kindred spirit.
CoolCleveland: Tell us about your process.
David sent me all her CDs and I listened to them while driving from my home in Rockville Centre to my work in New York City. For some reason the car is my best concentration place. I had Chrissie’s CDs in a little bag and I listened to them all over and over and over waiting for the songs to speak to me.
Certain songs just jumped out at me and others fell away. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them. It’s like you’re trying to find a good menu, or looking for an arc that takes people on a journey. It’s a matter of trial and error, I think, to find in any song cycle both the material and the order that’s effective. And it’s completely subjective; there are people who would do it differently and that’s fine.
Having seen the preview of Hindsight, it seems inevitable that “Brass in Pocket” is the closing number.
Yes. In a funny way I was avoiding it. I wasn’t afraid of it, but I said, “That’s too obvious.” Sometimes we edit ourselves strangely, don’t we? Then I was having a meeting with my projection designer, Adam Larsen, trying to get some images going and talking about the time span and the raison d’etre of the piece, and I said, “What am I going to do for the ending? I have to stay away from “Brass in Pocket” because it’s so iconic,” and he said, “Why are you avoiding “Brass in Pocket”? Sometimes people want to go where it’s familiar and joyful.” And it is so joyful; it’s kind of her.
Anyway, the GroundWorks dancers and I had such a good time with “Brass in Pocket” and it was the last thing we did, so it was a really great way to end the week.
At the preview showing, someone asked you what order you choreographed the songs and you said you started with “Love’s a Mystery” because it was country western and so atypical in the Hynde / Pretenders body of work. Please explain.
There were so many of the songs that I liked, and I thought, if there’s going to be a problem here, it’s finding a variety that will take the dance in a different direction, provide, again, a feeling of arc. Then when I heard “Love’s a Mystery,” I thought “that is so different from anything that it would be a very great contrast and it also has content. It’s about human frailty and it has humor and great imagery so that’s why I started there — even though it ended up in the middle of the dance — because I was trying to gather a variety of songs.
“Hymn to Her” also intrigued me because it was deeply personal, very passionate and mysterious. Those were my must-haves.
Looking back over the amazing range of your work, we’re struck by your notable successes choreographing to music that’s not classical. Earlier this year you set a new version of Seven Deadly Sins to the music of Kurt Weill on New York City Ballet. Then there was your choreography to rock and roll for the film Footloose, and your up to the minute take on swing dance for the Broadway show Swing! What goes into successfully choreographing pieces like that? Do you do research? Do you look at contemporary, popular dance in clubs or on film?
I do a lot of research for everything I do. When I did Footloose, I went to the clubs with a younger assistant. Your research is a really important part of it; it’s not that you’re not going to do what you’re going to do anyway, but it gives you this incredible feeling of entitlement, that you really know the material, so it’s OK to do your own take on it.
It’s also a question of respect, when you bother to take that time. I always encourage younger people I work with to know their material and the ideas behind it. It’s just really important to know something about the person who wrote it.
So for Footloose you actually went around to the clubs doing anthropology?
You have to remember, that was the ’80s. I had never seen or done locking and all those styles until I started researching Footloose.
With Swing!, I had 3 associate choreographers who were more of that world, and they were all credited. And then I had competition couples who did specialties, who were credited with their own choreography. But I was the uber choreographer. I did the numbers that required a larger vocabulary. And for Swing! I spent hours watching those competitions on tape in order to learn what was current. Swing competitions have died down some but it was huge then.
How did you research Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders?
At first, I was lucky because David knew a great deal about Chrissie Hynde. And then there are liner notes and Wikipedia. As you know, everything is everywhere and there’s just no excuse any more. I don’t mean a deep-delving psychological study, but knowing the period and what was happening during the time she was making those songs, it’s just important to have a context.
And then again, when I’m in the studio with the dancers, most of what’s coming out of me is because of them. But still, the research is a very important building block.
What role did the GroundWorks dancers take in the creation of Hindsight?
The dancers did bring a lot. I’ll just start with Felise. She’s a fantastic technician, kind of deep and dark with a lot there. I thought she would bring something to “Hymn to Her,” and she did.
Then when I was doing “Love’s a Mystery,” I didn’t know Katie, the new girl, so I had both women learn it, and they were both delightful, but Sarah nailed it and I felt, “Something else for Katie.”
Then I found “Rosalee,” and I saw it with Katie as a crazed performance artist (laughing) and Gary as her obsessed fan. So it comes in bits and pieces really.
Because David is so encouraging of the ensemble spirit, they don’t stand back with their hands on their hips waiting for you to tell them every little move. They’ll take your images and go with it, trying this, trying that, always active with you. You feel like you’re in the room with a partner. That was a delight.
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Hindsight uses 5 GroundWorks dancers — Felise Bagley, Damien Highfield, Gary Lenington, Sarah Perrett, and Katie Wells — and 6 songs by Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders; Projection Design by Adam Larsen; and Costume Design by Victoria Mearini. It was commissioned with generous support from the Chuck and Charlotte Fowler New Works Fund.
We saw the preview performance of Hindsight with a preliminary version of Larsen’s projections at 5:30pm Thurs 6/23/11 at University of Akron’s Guzzetta Hall.
Hindsight will be presented in two upcoming performances along with two works choreographed by David Shimotakahara, Kabila and Boom Boom. World premiere of Hindsight will be at Cain Park, Alma Theater @ 7pm on Fri 7/15, 7pm on Sat 7/16, and 2pm on Sun 7/17. Tickets $17 – $23. Phone 216-371-3000 or go to http://CainPark.com. Akron premiere of Hindsight will be at Glendale Cemetery on Fri 8/5 and Sat 8/6. Part of the Heinz Poll Summer Dance Festival, performances are FREE and begin at dusk. http://www.AkronDanceFestival.org
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.
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