If You Knew Fosse Like I Know Fosse

*Originally written 11-4-2006 out of frustration and anger at the shit jackasses use to vandalise YouTube.*

Fosse! Fosse! Fosse! Thanks to the release of the film version of Chicago in December 2002, and the “best of...” Broadway musical Fosse in the mid-90s, Bob is again all the rage in the dance world. This is understandable to the extent that he was a choreographic genius who should be revered and possibly emulated. What isn’t understandable is that his popularity waxes and wanes as if his originality were the phases of the moon. Yes, there is always going to be new generations of dancers exposed to his unique style as older dancers return to their roots and begin teaching, but his influence should never be allowed to rest in the years between. Too often aspiring choreographers grasp onto what they view as exciting and mind-blowing. They aren’t exposed to the Fosse style so much as they discover it. There are far too many pretenders to the throne who don’t truly understand what made Bob Fosse so brilliant in the first place.

I see young teachers (incidentally, without any formal training) who look to the revivals and Fosse-inspired vehicles for their Fosse education. Or perhaps they rent his most popular musicals that were fortunate enough to make it to the big screen, regardless of their failures (obviously, Cabaret and All That Jazz, exempt.) Although that is admirable itself – to experience the most important figure in American dance history – all too often, imitation becomes less flattery and more abomination. How many dance conventions, competitions, and recitals feature cutesy little numbers with bowler hats and the occasional cane? A derby does not a Fosse piece make, especially when considering the origin of his use of it…to hide his prematurely receding hairline. What should be an intricate flip-roll-replace movement becomes something more similar to “and push, and present, and spin, and drop, and tilt” etc. The bowler is representative of the cool defiance of showbiz norms, and its use must be justified by something more than what a high school cheerleading squad could do.

And I’ll probably never understand the use of a cane as a credit to Bob. Much like the signature hat, it was more than a prop. It was an ironic juxtaposition (witness Pippin) of smiling at the thought of dead babies while maintaining the classical dignity of the stage. It was anachronistic to his style, but it fit in so smoothly with his desire to pay homage to his own influences and idols, as seen in the “Nowadays” scene in Chicago (the play, not the movie.) To use it and/or the bowler as an image enhancer without demonstrating their potentially complex use as instruments of dance is to admit incompetence at the very act of choreographing. But this is symptomatic of a greater travesty. All this imitation without creativity or technical progression is evidence that Bob Fosse’s choreography, and so his genius, is grossly misunderstood, if not missed altogether.

Ask anyone about his brilliance, and most people will give answers like, “He used such subtle movements. It was amazing and so original.” Or they’ll remark on the hand gestures and slight pelvic tilts that are often described as sexy. It seems to me that the consensus idea of what was so amazing about Fosse’s style is that he said so much with such little movements. Bollocks! I say! What Fosse accomplished was far grander than a simple concept such as subtlety. More intriguingly to think is that his genius was so subtle that it was completely missed in its entirety. In other words, his genius was so subtle that something as subtle as a finger flick was enough to distract even the most ardent Fosse fans from it (myself included until now)!

As an experienced choreographer of both jazz and ballet, I understand the difference between mimicry and influence. Superficially the difference is, in keeping with the theme, subtle. It is a relatively simple concept to “steal” movement and incorporate it into one’s own choreography, which is what tends to occur when someone attempts to create a dance in “the Fosse vain”. The proof is in the pirouette…not so much in the spin as in the transitions into and out of it. For Fosse the movement is a build-up to the exclamation point of a phrase. He didn’t use them as a show of skill; rather he used them as an integral part of the body of his dances, which can be noted in abundance in the stage production, Dancing.

In contrast, would-be Fosse emulators use them as the exclamation points, or, as is more often the case, a diversion sandwiched between moments of action so as to put on display the dancer’s individual turning prowess or the group’s ability to perform multiple turns in unison. Neither is an artistic expression of the choreographer’s attitude towards movement. Instead, both are arbitrary displays of ego. Turns, to me, are the epitome of dance in that they are an all-encompassing derivation of technique, style, and artistry, and they are not to be used as a means to impress an audience by virtue of implying how amazingly difficult it is to spin on one foot for 8 seconds. Fosse never separated technique from art, as choreographers are prone to do today.

As a self-proclaimed “Fosse incarnate”, I’m well aware of these differences. I know when a person is attempting to forge Fosse’s signature on her dance checks. As much as I love pirouettes of all kinds, I rarely find an appropriate place to put them in anything I create. I would probably be able to write them in more easily if not for their induction of instant applause. (Although, I must admit that I occasionally work them in where I normally wouldn’t as an appeasement to my dancers. They find them fun, and who am I to deny a dancer the enjoyment of dance?)

They key to Fosse’s genius, though, is the subtle movement. Hands flexed, fingers poised ever-ready to snap on the upbeat; pelvis slightly tucked under, nudging the legs to move quickly and lightly; the body’s weight constantly shifting over the back heel as a counterbalance to the position of the hips. It all works fluidly and effortlessly so as to deceive the viewer into believing that little else is going on concurrently. The truth (as I see it) is that all of these movements are Fosse’s own unique way of contrasting the dynamics of small, smooth movements with the explosively chaotic leaps and body-flinging gyrations evident in such diverse numbers as Sing, Sing, Sing and Hey, Big Spender. It is something that any choreographer worth his salt understands…contrasting dynamics makes for exciting and dramatic dance.

So how is it that his use of these intricate isolations is so damn brilliant?! I would argue that it is not his creativity in using them, even though he was the master of transforming the pedestrian into the melodramatic. To me, it is simply something that a choreographer does. He was very open and honest about his past and from where he drew his ideas. Minstrel shows and cabarets were often performed in small theaters that presented the intimacy that made such minuscule movements almost mundane. As an intelligent and analytical man, he noticed that which most did not. He recognized the beauty of the movement, and he understood that large theaters were the graveyards where such subtlety would be buried forever. He not only saw the forest for the trees, he saw it for the leaves, roots, and saplings. A dancer’s body is not a whole. It is a sum of delicate parts that make up the entirety of kinetics. Every seemingly insignificant piece has a voice. That’s the beauty, not the brilliance.

Bob Fosse was a man who could take contemporary standards such as “Bye-Bye Blackbird” and Neil Diamond’s “Crunchy Granola Suite” and turn them into jazzy renditions far removed from their original forms. I have tried and failed on numerous occasions to utilize the style in the context of music in its traditional four-four bar structure. It simply does not work, and it is painful to me to watch a piece mimicking Fosse’s style crammed into such a confined musical space. This event is further lost on those who attempt to use recreations of Fosse’s music to perform the most basic A-B-C-B form of choreography, in which steps are neatly divided and sterily contrived to conform to modern popular music. Again, it simply does not work. It is another example of the subtlety of Fosse’s style and genius that is lost on those too dissonant to see the folly of their (and everyone else’s) faux creativity.

What a lot of people don’t seem to understand is that he didn’t choreograph his dances to music. He did, however, choreograph music to his dances. That is why he didn’t use original versions of most, if any, songs. He expressed himself vicariously through his dancers, and it was no different with his musical selection. That was Fosse’s brilliance. He created a context for his language where the status quo became insufficient to lend credence to his voice. It wasn’t the movements that he used; it was the fact that he created the sounds that would draw attention to those movements that made him a genius as a director, a choreographer, and an artist.

The key to creating a reaction - whether humorous, dramatic, or sympathetic – in an audience in musicals of the 40s and 50s was exaggeration. The shoulders slumped sharply, the head tilted on a wide fulcrum, the eyes popped out, and the smiles surrealistically emphatic. But those were the decades when norms were blindly accepted and even more blindly expected. Fosse’s body language didn’t shout, it whispered. And when he did shout, he used his diaphragm to project his voice to the back of the house instead of straining his vocal chords. His ideas shrunk the size of theaters by creating a keyhole of percussive and offbeat music that enabled entire audiences to get a glimpse of the peepshow that was his mind. He created an atmosphere that directed everyone’s attention to the exact spot he wanted to showcase, and he did it without informing the neighbors of his dirty little secret. Shhh...it’s a secret. Bob Fosse truly was a subtle genius.

(Who'da thunk this would actually come in handy some day?)