The Books: Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, ‘Dancing and the Dark’, by Joan Acocella

On the essays shelf:

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays by Joan Acocella.

I am not a dancer but I recognize Bob Fosse’s choregraphy when I see it. It is instantly identifiable. He has a personal stamp, more so than any other choreographer in the last 50 years. It is a style, a broke-down sleazy (yet coiled and controlled) style. There is not a flow in Fosse’s work. Dancers are turned into mannequins, marionettes, controlled by an invisible puppeteer pulling the strings on their pelvises, their wrists. He took dance and broke it down, turned it inside out, turned up the heat, but always always kept the lid on. Fosse’s dancing can actually be disturbing because it seems to suggest that humanity itself is lost here, 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 as “Fosse-esque” is just that: “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.

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. 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. He refused to let humanity show. Dancers were to be their parts, highlighted, sometimes with a pin-spotlight, on a wrist, a hip, a face. It’s postmodern, to be sure, it’s decadent. It accepts that corruption is the way of the world, that man has been crushed to powder by forces outside of his control, it accepts that humanity – in its warmth and flow and energy – has been compartmentalized, shattered, atomized. It’s creepy awesome stuff.

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 fit in to 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 oozed charisma and sexual damage.

They were fully female, and therefore mysterious and intimidating. Fosse grew up tap-dancing in strip clubs, being sexually teased by the strippers (a scene he plays out in All That Jazz), and he always felt that women were more powerful, dominant, terrifying, and his main goal in life (to simplify it) was to “get inside”. Getting inside was a way of controlling, of maybe, for a moment, being superior. Because the rest of his life seems to have been one long inferiority complex. Despite his unbelievable work ethic, and the fact that he rose to the top very fast, and dominated Broadway, changing dance (his influence is huge) – he always felt like he was a little bit of a fraud. Or somehow “lesser” than his contemporaries, like Jerome Robbins, who seemed more legit, a company man, certainly not drowning in sleaze like Fosse was. Fosse was corrupt, he had seen corruption. He was openly self-destructive (again, we can see his portrayal of that in his autobiographical film All That Jazz), as well as somewhat 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. He was a deeply personal artist, as impersonal as his dances may seem. He clearly was a wonderful dancer, and could do the more conventional stuff, but when he was put in charge of choreography, early in his career, this was the sort of oozingly atomized and dehumanized look that felt most real to him. Fascinating.

This is Fosse captured, in essence.

Acocella’s essay, from 1998, is a wonderful look at this artist. The final sentence of the essay is “Still, he was an artist.” To Acocella, there are problems in his work (especially in his movies, she doesn’t care for Star 80, although she recognizes its power) that she finds troubling. But she gives credit where it is due, in terms of his influence. She posits that the quick cuts of MTV (now de rigeur in filmmaking) come from Fosse. She theorizes that models on the catwalk nowadays, with their dead-eyed flaunting strut, are actually embodying the ghost of Fosse, how he saw women, how he placed them. Women as terrifying broke-down puppets, powerful, inhuman in some ways, and yet ultimately desirable. Whether or not he desired them, though, was irrelevant. HE was irrelevant to women (despite the fact that he always had a ton of lovers, and was very active sexually). He didn’t feel like he mattered, like anyone gave a shit. The women would go on without him. They were otherworldly, eerie, stalking past him, and the pin-spots on their pelvises, or hips, seems to suggest how he saw them. This was how life SEEMED to Fosse. Very few choreographers actually are able to take all of that and put it INTO their dances.

He’s a fascinating case (in one year alone, he won the Oscar, the Tony, and the Emmy – phenomenal), and this is a terrific essay.

Gwen Verdon, Bob Fosse

Here is an excerpt.

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays, ‘Dancing and the Dark’, by Joan Acocella

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.

He had a personality to match. By the late sixties, Fosse was the kingpin of the American musical. He had a string of hits behind him, and more to come. Soon he began directing movies, and showed himself, as Pauline Kael had said, a prodigy in this medium. He went into television, too, directing the wonderful Liza with a Z, which, together with his movie Cabaret, made Liza Minnelli a star. In 1973, he won the Oscar (for Cabaret, the Tony (Pippin), and the Emmy (Liza with a Z) all in one sweep. He was at the top. Yet nothing could have persuaded him of this. He never learned to occupy his fame – never bought the suits, learned the tone, got comfortable. On the contrary, to the end of his career he regarded himself as an outsider, someone who’d snuck in off the street. According to his biographer Martin Gottfried (All His Jazz, 1990) , Fosse had lunch almost every day at the Carnegie Delicatessen with the playwrights Paddy Chayefsky and Herb Gardner. He would order a beer and a pastrami on white with mayo (he was a midwesterner) and then push the sandwich away, drink the beer, and pour out his miseries. “Everything he does he thinks it comes out of bullshit,” Chayefsky said. “It’s a game, a phony.”

But that was only half the story. The other half was that everyone else was a phony. As Fosse once said to a Times reporter, “I alternate between these terrible states of thinking I’m a fraud and this raging ego.” He was an uncomfortable soul, and looked it: runty, slope-shouldered, with a caved-in chest. He dressed mostly in black – a style not fashionable in his time – and often had a hat pulled down over his brow. He said this was to cover his thinning hair, but it may also have been to hide his face. Out of his mouth, almost always, hung a cigarette. (“There was a sort of groove in his lip where it sat,” the choreographer Donald McKayle says in Kevin Grubb’s 1989 book on Fosse, Razzle Dazzle.) In 1977, when Herb Gardner’s play Thieves was being filmed, the director needed someone to play a street junkie. Fosse volunteered, and was perfect. In some measure, he just had to be himself.

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.