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You Can
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By Anne Kelly-Saxenmeyer
Backstage
Monday, April 11, 2005
Keith Young began his life in the arts as an educator. In his career--choreographing dance for film, TV, and stage--he has continued on that path. He received his bachelor's degree in arts education from Miami University in Ohio, where his focus was on painting and sculpture. When he was 21, he worked as an art therapist at a mental-health clinic, and a woman he was seeing brought him along to her dance class. Watching the dancers doing their preset warm-up, which appeared to him like "moving sculpture," he remembers being mystified and enamored that they could move in unison with no one calling out the steps. At the time, the teacher of the class was converting an old sewing machine factory into a dance studio, and she offered him free classes in exchange for his handyman expertise.
Says Young, "Once I started, I was so ridiculously taken by the beauty of it, and how your body was the entire thing--it was the instrument--and all that you can make, and all that you can say. I ended up trading my great job for a nonpaying one that was artistically fulfilling."
Though learning to dance at a relatively late age was a "humbling" experience, Young says, he had long been preparing for it: playing sports in school, and learning about composition, structure, and line through sculpting and painting. Also, because his sister was deaf, he had always known sign language, and the idea of communicating through movement made perfect sense to him. His sister's point-of-view not only influenced his process--he always watches his work with the sound off--but it also enlarged his view of what art can be.
As one of the most sought-after choreographers working today, he now strives to promote an inclusive definition of dance. Whether he's combining the talents of disabled and able-bodied dancers (most recently with Cleveland's integrated company, Dancing Wheels) or of rigorously trained ballet dancers and average Joes (in his Emmy-nominated work for The Drew Carey Show), he believes that dance is most relevant when it speaks the truth about everyday movement. It's a belief that poises him to meet the challenges of the movie musical--in his current project, the film version of Jonathan Larson's Rent, directed by Chris Columbus--and, through the reach of the entertainment industry, to forward a vision of movement as common language.
"I've many times felt like I should be doing something else that can really reach the world," says Young. "Sometimes [dance] just seems a little ornate, with the bigger problems in the world, but this is absolutely what I'm into doing. This is how I have to do it, so it's imperative to me that I really stay true to it, and make it part of life instead of a decoration."
Stage to screen: For the task of translating a beloved New York stage production to film, Young seems a logical contributor. His own trajectory took him from New York--where he danced with various notable companies before becoming a principal dancer for Twyla Tharp--to Los Angeles, where he came for a teaching position at CalArts and stayed for the trees and the chance to occupy what he saw as uncharted artistic territory. Although he has since discovered that L.A. was perhaps not so much uncharted as inhospitable, for instance, to dance companies, he has managed to bring what he values on the stage to his work on film, although he acknowledges that the mediums are worlds apart.
"One thing about stage is it's really pretty true," he says. "If you mess up onstage, you've messed up, or if you're great onstage, you've been great. It's rarely if ever recorded, so it's more of an in-the-moment little piece of life. On-camera, you get many takes, but [even beyond that] it's a whole different thing: the focus, the eye-line, hitting your mark, and continuity. Also, onstage, often you have to play to the upper rings of the balcony, but on-camera, you may be a couple of feet from the camera, so you can't be really huge."
Inevitably, film and TV work often pair the choreographer with performers not chosen for their dancing abilities; for instance, on the movie What Women Want, a game and tenacious Mel Gibson, who ended up executing one of Young's proudest film moments.
The collaboration with non-dancers is not always so smooth. He says, "That whole 5-6-7-8 kick-line thing, that's what people think choreography is, so they're hesitant about a choreographer and dancing. But, really, choreography is just an orchestration of movement: It can be when you turn the corner as you're walking down the street. I guess some directors would call that blocking or hitting your mark…. The frustrations of it are when people switch their heads into, 'Oh, no, I'm dancing now,' and it changes how they look, how they relate, how they deliver their lines."
Part of Young's reward for working on projects that may not center on dance is the size of the audience he can reach. "I highly, highly regard and admire the masters--the [George] Balanchines and the [Merce] Cunninghams, and Twyla [Tharp] and those people--but more people will see a 30-second commercial on a big sporting event than will ever, ever see the work of the masters," he says. "And I feel that's a great responsibility.... If we're going put dance out there in the world, I just want to put it out there correctly, that's all."
Adapting Rent: Larson's late 1990s update of La Boheme follows a group of bohemians struggling to survive in New York's East Village, faced with poverty and AIDS. The film adaptation, which recently began shooting (from a screenplay by Columbus and Steve Chbosky), holds exceptional opportunities for a dance ambassador. "It is crucial to me that Rent is very, very truthful," says Young. "Every decade or so there are films that I think are truly from the people in terms of movement--like A Chorus Line, All That Jazz, Hair--and I think this is one. And this is not, as I said before, a 5-6-7-8 kick-line thing; it's just not. The issues are very real; they're very present. I think the toughest thing working on this is the transition from drama to song; that's kind of the biggest challenge of any musical.... So it's imperative that I get that correct, and that these people come off as true, that there's nothing gratuitous surrounding what they're doing and saying."
The film features six members of the original Broadway cast, who "have helped to retain the heart and spirit" of Rent's ascension, says Young. Although dance styles in the film will range from "tango to vogue-ing," his main concern is that the movement communicates the essence of the characters: "How would this character move? What would this character say? How does this character say this through what you're having them do? So I don't know about different styles," he says. "I think it's just truth."
Realizing that some audiences will have problems with the film, Young still hopes "that some of the red states will be open to it," and that the movement can be a conduit.
"I think this just deserves a chance to be seen and heard, and I guess we're getting one," he says. "To some people it may just be a movie, but to me it's not.... This group of bohemians has a particular struggle; they have particular things to say. Their camaraderie and effort and love and compassion toward each other really lends itself to a particular feeling that we need back. I mean, let's face it, there's no group now that's infected with something specific. We're all breathing the same air--that's the truth--and I think this movie acknowledges it, and certainly movement-wise I want to try to say that as well."
Be willing: Before arriving on the set of Rent, Young set his choreography for the film on a skeleton crew of triple-threat performers, almost all of whom he has worked with more than once. They weren't intended to be onscreen, but "Chris Columbus liked them so much that he put them all in as fellow bohemians," he says, adding, "I know that these guys, because they're camera-wise, because they know the whole thing from top to bottom, they'll make a significant contribution."
When asked to describe the kind of dancer he prefers to work with, Young says, "A willing one, one who's not stuck in any particular way. Again, like an actor, I really believe you have to be willing to go outside of what you already know, otherwise you'll never learn.... A technical one, one who is open, who understands music or rhythm, but, more important, one who can say something, who has something to say.... I don't really like, as much as I used to, just plain old gratuitous dancing, just 'dance around.' Maybe it's because I'm older, because issues are more serious, and because life is a little more serious than just dancing around."
Having come to dance by an unusual path himself, Young encourages dancers starting out not to be deterred by narrow ideas about what a dancer or a dance career looks like, but also to understand what they're getting into.
"There are no dance or choreographic Fortune 500 situations--dancers have got to know that--but it's also more enriching knowing you're not doing it for that," he says. "I wouldn't trade what I do for the world, and I know that this is my place. I know that I have something to offer. I know that I learn daily, not just about myself and life, but how other people are and how movement is so relevant.
"Just start, that's what I would say," Young continues. "And don't be discouraged, because along the way there are people, a lot of teachers unfortunately, who can really dissuade you if you don't have all the key elements. Don't be dissuaded by anyone. You can dance if you want to, and that's the beauty of dancing. You can dance if you want to."