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What occurs when a theater-loving choreographer and a dance-loving director work collectively on a musical?
Broadway will get a solution on March 19, when Lempicka (pronounced lem-PEEK-a), the primary collaboration between choreographer Raja Feather Kelly and director Rachel Chavkin, begins previews on the Longacre Theatre. In faculty, he majored in poetry in addition to dance, and she or he did “tons” of motion work. (And this spring he makes his off-Broadway playwriting debut at Soho Rep with The Fires, which he’s additionally directing.) Their experimental mindset and overlapping expertise had been first utilized to the sprawling musical at its Williamstown Theatre Competition premiere, in 2018, after which once more in 2022, at La Jolla Playhouse, incomes sufficient applause to get them this Broadway outing.
Written by playwright Carson Kreitzer and composer Matt Gould, the present is impressed by the lifetime of the painter Tamara de Lempicka, following its plucky heroine as she and her husband, a Polish aristocrat, flee the Russian Revolution and land within the tumult of Twenties Paris. She pushes her means into the colourful Parisian artwork scene and forges a dynamic, Deco-flavored portray fashion and a brand new id as an unapologetic lover of ladies.
On a bitingly chilly February day, I watch Kelly, carrying his omnipresent cap and mismatched socks (left foot, lipstick purple; proper foot, neon yellow), rehearsing the ensemble in a busy, surprisingly Broadway-style manufacturing quantity through which Lempicka arrives in Paris. As Chavkin works with the principals in one other studio, Kelly warms this room together with his genial, good-humored vibe—he typically stops a sequence by waving slightly purple flag, a prop from his look within the Brooklyn-based comedy sport present “Why Are You Single?”—and the rehearsal dissolves into jokes and laughter at common intervals. (“All the time the case,” he’ll inform me afterwards. “It’s about growing belief.”)
However there’s no doubting the rigor and penetration of his eye as he asks a dancer with a paintbrush to sort out his easel with “extra velocity,” urges a pair to make a carry “sharp,” and encourages a leg right into a clearer diagonal because the bustling quantity evokes kaleidoscopic pictures of the Metropolis of Gentle.
Later, in separate interviews, Kelly and Chavkin speak about Lempicka the present, Lempicka the artist—Chavkin is aware of many audiences doubtless gained’t acknowledge Lempicka’s identify, however suspects they’ll acknowledge her artwork—and their very own collaboration on the musical. At occasions, they’re like he-said, she-said accounts of the identical comfortable marriage. Under are a number of excerpts from these conversations, edited for size and readability.
On Lempicka’s Work
Kelly: There may be a lot motion—the best way that curves transfer ahead and backward, how diagonals are made within the physique. And I believe any dance individual might see the épaulement within the work. I instructed them [Chavkin, Kreitzer, and Gould] that épaulement is the central motion language to start any choreography for this work.
Chavkin: He defined to us what “épaulement” meant, and it was, “Oh, my god, that’s it—we had been meant for you, and also you had been meant for us!”
On Storytelling With the Physique
Kelly: I’m a postmodernist, and I’m a recent dancer. I’ve to make use of all the pieces I’ve discovered to discover a new language—I’ve to make use of postmodernism, I’ve to make use of lyrical, I’ve to make use of jazz. And I’m at all times going to inform a narrative, it doesn’t matter what.
Chavkin: Once I first encountered [the theatrical training technique] the Viewpoints in faculty, I used to be like, “Oh! I get how to do that!” I get that story is communicated via the physique, via the bodily state of the performer, via the bodily state of the stage, and rigidity and line—the entire issues which can be completely ideas of dance however which can be additionally ideas of staging.
On Working Collectively
Kelly: What’s thrilling for me is that now, in 2024, she actually does belief me. We’ve been doing it for nearly eight years, and I believe she trusts my understanding of the present. I are likely to maintain the ensemble, and she or he leaves me to try this. Then we come collectively, and we observe one another. Generally I’m providing her conduct for scenes, as a result of I like for it to mix—in order that the present doesn’t go from scene to bounce. In order that the entire present is alive with the identical conduct. It might probably’t occur until we’re working each in tandem and likewise individually, as a result of we’d have a special standpoint on one thing. I’m definitely not a choreographer that simply makes dances.
Chavkin: There’s a dance that each single director-choreographer workforce does as soon as they get to know one another. Raja and I had the mandatory luxurious of a few years and a number of incarnations of this venture to determine whose territory is whose. What’s been so thrilling and so useful is I are likely to suppose in giant motion of our bodies and power within the area—the place do we want chaos, the place does it have to be extra steady, et cetera, et cetera. And Raja is so beautiful on human specificity and element. It’s a big-picture/intimate-picture sort of dialogue between us. He provides it extra form, extra line, additional articulation. It’s so satisfying if you meet somebody who can choose up what you’re placing down.
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