‘West Side Story’ Hits the Floor
TWNTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, A SUMMER STOCK theatre in central Pennsylvania hired me to choreograph a production of West Side Story, then promptly fired me when it became clear that I intended to create my own choreography rather than replicate the dance ideas director/choreographer Jerome Robbins conceptualized for the musical’s original 1957 Broadway production and 1961 film. Apparently, to present this seamlessly integrated, revolutionary musical theatre portrayal of teen gang violence without the iconic Robbins choreography was inconceivable.
Imagine my delight upon learning that for the show’s 2020 Broadway revival, its helmsman, experimental Belgian director Ivo van Hove, had insisted on brand-new choreography, made by the brilliant postmodern minimalist Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, a fellow Belgian. Touted by van Hove as “a West Side Story for the 21st century,” his is the first Broadway staging to forgo Robbins’s choreography. Indeed, though it sticks to the original dialogue and songs (with the exception of a few cuts), van Hove’s startlingly contemporary version is not set in the 1950s. Instead it sets out to illuminate the musical’s timeless themes of ethnic prejudice, violence, and love within a present-day cultural context where the urban youth don’t move like they did on the streets and dance floors of Robbins’s jitterbugging-and-mamboing ’50s America.
Yet just really be said to be serving up new choreography? After speaking with van Hove and De Keersmaeker during the show’s rehearsal period and observing an early preview performance (as of press time, the production was slated to open on Feb. 20 at the Broadway Theatre), I tried to answer that question by first asking what constitutes a musical’s “original” choreography. Is it simply the dance steps? Or is it the decisions to have particular characters dance at particular points in the show—as a break within a song, backed by an ensemble, or for an extended sequence that might be termed a “ballet”? Is it the degree to which a show relies on dance to advance the narrative, marking some musicals as “dance shows” and others not? Is choreography defined in terms of its formal elements, the spatial composition it draws upon the stage, or its temporal aspects, the energies generated by the moving bodies?
