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Within the April 1984 challenge of Dance Journal, affiliate editor Joan Pikula spoke with Alfonso Ribeiro, Hinton Battle, and Alan Weeks, the trio of dancers main The Faucet Dance Child on Broadway.
The then-12-year-old Ribeiro, who starred as Willie Sheridan, the titular faucet dance child, informed us: “I’m in a position to get one thing inside me out in faucet dancing, simply actually take all of it and put it out into the open. Let my ft do the stuff, you recognize?” Ribeiro shot to stardom within the wake of the function, although at the moment he’s higher generally known as Carlton, from “The Contemporary Prince of Bel-Air,” and as a current winner after which host of “Dancing with the Stars.”
Battle (who handed away this yr on the finish of January) was already a bona fide star when he took the showstopping function of Dipsy Bates, Sheridan’s uncle and faucet trainer: He’d been the unique Scarecrow in The Wiz at age 16, danced with Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theatre of Harlem, and discovered to faucet and received a Tony for Refined Women. “To make your self a part of the actual fashion is the most important problem in working with completely different choreographers,” Battle stated. “I wish to dig into what I’m doing, see what the choreographer sees within the step, what provides it that specialness. I feel that’s why I used to be in a position to decide up faucet; it is steps, and there’s a way, however that’s solely half of it. The essence of it’s extra vital. I may exit and do steps all evening, but it surely wouldn’t imply something. It’s that different factor that I all the time consider as the important thing. And I actually assume that’s helped me perceive not solely faucet however other forms of dancing as nicely.”
And Weeks, The Faucet Dance Child’s Daddy Bates, was solely in his mid-30s however may boast a 27-year profession working with the likes of Jerome Robbins, Gower Champion, Michael Bennett, Michael Kidd, and Matt Mattox. “Present enterprise is my life—I simply love the enterprise, all aspects of it. However Broadway—dancing—is my past love,” he stated. “My solely objective is to be working. The goals change, the work is ever current. And when you can keep wholesome sufficient simply to work, I feel success and all these goals that individuals fathom up will routinely come.”
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