“The energy doesn’t end at the hands. I want such intensity that it feels like light is streaming from every finger.” — Bob Fosse

It’s his birthday today.

His work as a director – in films as diverse as Cabaret, Lenny, All That Jazz, and Star 80 is getting a lot of chatter from film critics, and of course that makes sense. I love those films too. All That Jazz made a HUGE impact on me. I saw it when I was 13, 14, and was way too young for it (I was a young 13, 14), in fact much of it scared me to DEATH (which, considering the topic, is appropriate). I was already in love with show business. I already had dreams. So this opening number launched me into a fantasy world so intense I honestly didn’t come out of it until I was 35.

But it’s what he did as a choreographer that really interests me.

His style is a FINGERPRINT. It’s not an exaggeration to say he changed everything.

More after the jump:

He has a personal style, so much so that even if you aren’t into dance, you’d recognize it. What is his style? His style is broke-down sleazy (yet coiled and controlled). There is not a flow in his work. His work is ANTI-flow. Dancers are turned into mannequins, marionettes, controlled by an invisible puppeteer pulling the strings on their pelvises, their wrists and shoulders. He took dance and broke it down, turned it inside out, turned up the (ssssteam) heat, but always ALWAYS kept the lid on. Fosse’s dancing can be disturbing because it seems to suggest that humanity itself is lost, somehow. In examining the dance, and the purpose of the dance, Fosse changed what we expected of dances in Broadway shows. Unfortunately, much of it has been lost, and what we see now is “Fosse-esque”. It’s watered-down. It’s not enough to hide your face with a bowler and jut your pelvis forward. His work was intricate, very difficult, and not every dancer could do it, despite their extraordinary technique and training.

Here’s a helpful primer.

You had to get into his world. You had to submit to the sleaze, the dehumanization. You see some of his stuff and you think, “I didn’t realize the human body could actually DO that.” Beneath all of it is, of course, the roiling chaos of sex, a topic that obsessed Fosse from early on. This makes him relatable, at least to me, since I’m also obsessed with sex, having been both tormented by it but also can’t get enough of it. There isn’t a number choreographed by him that doesn’t come from the groin. He isolated the body’s parts, like a serial killer cutting out his victim’s heart. Dancers were to be their parts, the parts highlighted, sometimes with a pin-spotlight, on a wrist, a hip, a face. It’s postmodern, to be sure, it’s decadent. Corruption is the way of the world, man has been crushed by forces outside of his control. Fosse’s work comes from the headspace (groinspace) that humanity is not warmth and flow and energy. Not at all. Humanity, the breath of life, is compartmentalized, atomized.

The women who helped make him famous were the women who could do this stuff and make it look like it was supposed to look. He chose his dancers well. Most of them were his mistresses or wives as well, sometimes at the same time. Ann Reinking, Gwen Verdon, Liza Minnelli … phenomenal dancers with extraordinary technique who certainly could do more standard Broadway fare, and did, on occasion. But it was Fosse who pulled them out of the pack, spotlit them, broke them down.

They were muses, but also his most willing and talented puppets. They could DO those steps. They could show him off. Them dancing his stuff was a way of saying “Here is what this man is about. And I’m about that too.”

My pal Paul reminded me that Bob Fosse makes an absolutely electric appearance in Kiss Me Kate at the end of the “From This Moment On” number, dancing with Carol Haney (who had been in Pajama Game on Broadway, killing it in the Bob-Fosse-choreographed number “Steam Heat,” which I’ll get to in a minute.) If you don’t know what Bob Fosse looks like exactly, you may start this Kiss Me Kate clip thinking: How will I know when Fosse shows up? Will it be obvious? How will I tell? How will I know it’s him?

Oh. You’ll know.

A Facebook friend reminded me of the “alley dance” Fosse does with Tommy Rall in My Sister Eileen, which is absolutely incredible. They both defy gravity. They do some “Steam Heat”-ish business with their hats. They leap over handkerchiefs from a standing position. They coil themselves inward, making those unmistakable asymmetrical sex-trapped-in-a-bottle shapes with their bodies. Additionally: these are long long takes, requiring the men to do huge amounts of choreography “in one,” just like they would have to do onstage. Also, the camera glides back and forth with them (and they cover huge distances.) One more “also”: they are doing so much of this in perfect unison. Two male bodies, side by side, doing extraordinary things.

Beyonce’s “All the Single Ladies” …

… is famously inspired by Fosse’s “Mexican Breakfast,” starring one of Fosse’s frequent muses (and wife), Gwen Verdon. People were like “BEYONCE STOLE IT.” Uhm. No. She was INSPIRED by it. She has good TASTE. She knew exactly what she was doing. It was an HOMAGE. Seriously, people, how do you think culture even WORKS?

But I see more influences in “Single Ladies”, especially the “There’ll Be Some Changes Made” number in All That Jazz, with the three women in black leotards side by side. Amazons.

His work is so influential it can still be felt today, and many people inspired by Beyonce have no idea they are imitating the imitator. (Again: that’s okay. It’s how the best culture works. In fact, it’s awesome!)

So let’s finally get to “Steam Heat.” Pajama Game, the Broadway smash hit of 1954/55, was directed by George Abbott. If I’m remembering correctly, Bob Fosse was the dance captain for the cast (meaning, he taught the choreography, ran the drills, all the rest.) Abbott tapped Bob Fosse to choreograph one of the numbers: “Steam Heat”. It’s a trio, performing at a Union meeting. The production of Pajama Game is famous for a couple of reasons, one being Shirley MacLaine’s unbelievable understudy story. She understudied the brilliant Carol Haney, who never missed a show. MacLaine was never rehearsed. She had to watch Carol Haney on her own, and learn the choreography that way. !! Finally though, one night, Haney got injured. MacLaine had to go on. WITH NO REHEARSAL. She had to go on and do the INCREDIBLY difficult Fosse-choreographed “Steam Heat.” She goes on, she’s a smash hit (even though she dropped the hat during “Steam Heat.”) All of this would be wonderful. What makes it legendary is who was in the audience that night. Who HAPPENED to be in the audience the ONE NIGHT MacLaine went on? Alfred Hitchcock. Who then took her to Hollywood and put her in her first movie. She does the movie. Then, because she’s a “gypsy” (New York chorus line girls), she went back to Broadway to go back into the ensemble of the show. Months pass. Carol Haney never misses a performance. Then, one night, she gets a terrible flu and can’t go on. MacLaine has to go on again. And who was in the audience THAT night? Who HAPPENED to be in the audience that night? The legendary Hal Wallis, who put her under contract, put her in Some Came Running, which made her a movie star and got her her first Oscar nomination. (When MacLaine came and spoke at my school, she told this story and then glanced at us mischievously, saying, “You see why I believe in destiny?”)

Back to “Steam Heat.” It’s so sui generis it’s still kind of shocking to watch it. It doesn’t matter that it was in 1955. It’s still new, fresh, filled with WTF-are-you-kidding-me?? LOOK at these three humans. Turning themselves into little steam chimneys. Filled with sex, but bottled up, so when it explodes it’s like a champagne cork flying across the room releasing a fountain.

His style is difficult and weird and requires another headspace altogether. You have to deny yourself catharsis. You have to contain yourself so stringently your body twists into anti-gravity poses. You can’t “act” sexy. You have to live in a world drenched in sex, so much so that you almost tune out, you go blank. The blank-ness, suffused with sex, IS Fosse’s choreography. Not everyone has what it takes to pull off his style. Not everyone can deal with it psychologically. The drive towards conventionality – towards conformity – towards vanilla monogamy – is so strong in this country it’s practically a diktat, and even bohemian liberals get squicky about certain KINDS of sexual expression. The repression runs DEEP. Fosse understands repression but he also acknowledges where it comes from, and where it comes from is where he lives. So, like I said: you have to be able to deal with this psychologically, as a dancer. Liza was one of his muses. She appeared, of course, in Cabaret and he also choreographed her special Liza With a Z. Fosse choreography done by Liza is how it’s done. (Same with Ann Reinking. It’s perfection.) Jay Alexander, one of the judges on America’s Next Top Model, is always telling the contestants to be more “broke-down doll” in their body language? That’s Fosse. Exhibit A:

It’s allll broken-down doll parts. Asymeetrical. Robotic. Confrontational. It’s vaudeville. It’s strip club. It’s razz-ma-tazz jazz hands, but jazz hands crooked the wrong way.

Here’s Fosse and wife Gwen Verdon in “Who’s Got the Pain” in Damn Yankees. They’re twins. They’re to die for.

Fosse women were vibrantly adult females, and therefore mysterious and intimidating: This is how he saw them. Fosse grew up tap-dancing in strip clubs (a scene he plays out in All That Jazz), and – in modern terms – he was sexually molested at a very young age. He felt women were far more powerful than men. Men were brutal, silly, foolish. Women were dominant and terrifying, and his main goal in life (to simplify it) was to “get inside” them. Women were inhuman in some ways, beyond his reach, and yet ultimately desirable. He would die, but the women would go on without him. They were otherworldly, eerie, stalking past him, leaping over him. The pin-spots he placed on their pelvises, or hips, suggest how he saw them.

Despite his ruthless work ethic, and the fact that he rose to the top very fast, dominating Broadway, changing dance, he always felt like a little bit of a fraud. Or somehow “lesser” than his dance contemporaries, like Jerome Robbins, who were perceived as more legit. In comparison, Fosse felt he was drowning in sleaze. (Which, of course, is the strength of his work.) Fosse was corrupt, he had seen corruption. He was openly self-destructive, as well as grandiose. He imagines his own death in All That Jazz, and there’s a gorgeous Angel of Death (Jessica Lange) seducing him, and his girlfriend and daughter doing numbers for him, intercut with footage of an actual heart transplant. It’s insanely egotistical and insanely moving. He was a deeply personal artist, as impersonal as his dances may sometimes seem to the uninitiated (and Fosse does require an “initiation”). His dances weren’t impersonal at all: if you watch him dance, if you watch his women dance, you can see what it was like to be him. He was a wonderful dancer, and could do the more conventional stuff, but when he was a choreographer, the oozingly atomized and dehumanized look was most real to him.

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He’s a fascinating case. In one year alone, he won the Oscar, the Tony, and the Emmy. I mean, come on.

Joan Acocella, dance critic for The New Yorker wrote an essay about Fosse in 1998. The final sentence is “Still, he was an artist,” showing she had some issues with his work (in particular the movies he directed). But she gives credit where it is due, especially in terms of his influence. The quick cuts of MTV (now de rigeur in filmmaking), models on the cat-walk with their dead-eyed flaunting strut, Michael Jackson’s moves, “Voguing” … all show the influence of Fosse. Here’s an excerpt (the entire essay is included in the wonderful collection Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints:

If, today, you go to see a dance act in a night club, it may well start with a single light trained on the stage, a single white-gloved hand jutting out, a single rear end gyrating meaningfully, and, then, as the lights go up, a pair of eyes staring at you as if to say, “I know what you’re thinking.” If you switch on MTV, chances are you’ll see the same thing: the glove (Michael Jackson), the cold sex, the person eyeballing you as if this were all your idea. There is an imp of the perverse at loose in mass-culture dance, a spirit that has little to do with the blowsy cheer of old-time night-club numbers, not to speak of the innocent jitterbugging we used to see on television. One could say that this is just part of postmodern culture – its toughness, its knowingness. But it is also something more specific: the heritage of Bob Fosse, who was Broadway’s foremost choreographer-director during the late sixties and the seventies.

That it is a specific style – one you can look at and say, “There’s Fosse” – tells us something about the era in which this man worked. The period from the forties through the seventies was the heyday of the choreographer-directors, a group that included Agnes de Mille, Gower Champion, Jerome Robbins (above all), and Michael Bennett. These were people who believed that the meaning of a show could be contained in its dancing, and that the show could be fueled by the energy that comes only from dancing. One by one, they changed the American musical, bending it away from its European-operetta roots. De Mille made it realistic, vernacular – fellers and gals getting together at clambakes. Robbins, in West Side Story, made it urban, modern, with sneakers and social problems. Fosse made it something else altogether, no longer even a representation of life but a kind of emanation from the lower brain – edgy, unwholesome…

Fosse died eleven years ago, but he is making a comeback. “Fosse: A Celebration in Song and Dance”, a revue directed by Ann Reinking and Richard Maltby, Jr., will open in New York next month. Meanwhile, the revival of his 1975 musical “Chicago” is in its third year at the Shubert Theatre, and the English director Nicholas Hytner is gearing up to make a film based on the show. In these productions, unlike the MTV trickle-down, one can see Fosse’s style in its pure and narrow form. Gottfried quotes the Daily News drama critic Howard Kissel saying that Fosse’s dances reminded him of “things that crawl under a rock,” but they don’t always look that way. Sometimes they look like a bad dream or a George Grosz drawing. What they seldom resemble is any dancing ever made on Broadway before Fosse got there.

 
 
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