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 school, 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 Pageant 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 approach into the colourful Parisian artwork scene and forges a dynamic, Deco-flavored portray model and a brand new identification as an unapologetic lover of ladies.
On a bitingly chilly February day, I watch Kelly, sporting 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 along with his genial, good-humored vibe—he generally stops a sequence by waving just a little 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 creating belief.”)
Kelly (entrance) in rehearsal for Lempicka. Picture by Andy Henderson, courtesy DKC/O&M Co.
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 elevate “sharp,” and encourages a leg right into a clearer diagonal because the bustling quantity evokes kaleidoscopic photos of the Metropolis of Gentle.
Later, in separate interviews, Kelly and Chavkin discuss Lempicka the present, Lempicka the artist—Chavkin is aware of many audiences probably received’t acknowledge Lempicka’s identify, however suspects they may acknowledge her artwork—and their very own collaboration on the musical. At instances, they’re like he-said, she-said accounts of the identical blissful marriage. Beneath are just a few excerpts from these conversations, edited for size and readability.
On Lempicka’s Work
Kelly: There’s a lot motion—the way in which 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 informed 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 up to date 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 all the time going to inform a narrative, it doesn’t matter what.
Chavkin: After I first encountered [the theatrical training technique] the Viewpoints in school, I used to be like, “Oh! I get how to do that!” I get that story is communicated by means of the physique, by means of the bodily state of the performer, by means of the bodily state of the stage, and rigidity and line—all the issues which might be completely ideas of dance however which might be additionally ideas of staging.
Kelly (proper) in rehearsal for Lempicka. Picture by Andy Henderson, courtesy DKC/O&M Co.
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 inclined to care for the ensemble, and she or he leaves me to try this. Then we come collectively, and we be aware one another. Typically I’m providing her conduct for scenes, as a result of I really like for it to mix—in order that the present doesn’t go from scene to bop. In order that the entire present is alive with the identical conduct. It may well’t occur except we’re working each in tandem and in addition individually, as a result of we would have a unique standpoint on one thing. I’m actually not a choreographer that simply makes dances.
Chavkin: There’s a dance that each single director-choreographer group does as soon as they get to know one another. Raja and I had the required luxurious of a few years and a number of incarnations of this undertaking to determine whose territory is whose. What’s been so thrilling and so useful is I are inclined to assume in giant motion of our bodies and power within the house—the place do we want chaos, the place does it have to be extra secure, 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 decide up what you’re placing down.
