Jerry Mitchell, a 32-year-old Broadway Hoofer, created a sensation every night by performing a near-naked dance on “Will Rogers Follies.”
It was 1992 in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Mitchell recruits seven fit fellow dancers from other Broadway shows, and on a rainy Sunday night at Splash, a gay club with shutters in Chelsea, they raise money for Broadway Care / Equity Fight AIDS. I was taking off in order at the bar. After two shows and a tray of tequila shots, novice strippers raised $ 8,000 — and the Burlesque spectacle Broadway Bears was born.
“Some people were confused about why we were using striptease to raise money for AIDS,” Tony Award-winning director and choreographer Mitchell said in a telephone interview. rice field. “It came from an innocent place,” he said, and lacks: he didn’t have the money to attend an expensive AIDS charity event.
Broadway Bears have become a hit, growing facilities one after another, and steadily refining to “we weren’t just profits.” “We were a Broadway show.” On Sunday, the show celebrates it. 30th Anniversary at Hammerstein Ballroom in Midtown ManhattanThe performance will be held at 9:30 pm and midnight.
With over 500 volunteer theater artists, including busy performers, designers and stage managers on the current Broadway show, the event is a complex and busy logistics game, with the final rehearsal sprint at the top. Become. One-night production will be completed in a few days.
In one of this week’s rehearsals, nearly 30 dancers were spinning, kicking, and pretending to strip off their pants in a studio near Times Square. Rayabarak, director of this year’s show and creator of the opening number, reminded everyone to “keep it sharp” and “reach out of the shoulders.” But even more pressing was the choreography of clothes. “Whatever your strippable thing, it has to move with you,” she told the group. Other items were to be handed over to other dancers or chucked behind the scenes.
“Are you wearing a jock or a G-string?” She asked one of his dressed dancers to show. He wasn’t sure. The costume was still made and wasn’t ready until Saturday.
That is, another lead dancer, Colin Hayward, and his castmates couldn’t practice undressing until the day before the store opened. During the rehearsal, Hayward, who made his Broadway debut with The Lion King in February, confidently attacked hip-hop choreography, but was worried about stripping. “It has to be seamless,” he said. “It’s additional pressure.”
Broadway Bares is a platform that attracts the attention of emerging dance makers, with about 12 dance routines, each with its own choreographer. Routines use a variety of styles, including hip-hop, Latin dance, ballet, and aerial art, often mashed up into new combinations. But burlesque is still at the core of the artistic spirit and attitude.
“Burlesque doesn’t just get naked,” Mitchell said. “It’s about interesting things. Humor is the heart.”
Still, the end is getting naked. And it has that complexity.
Known as a featured dancer, the “lead strip” may require as many as five layers of removal. The first one is as easy as a hat or coat. “Then it gets a little trickier,” said Nick Kenkel, who has been involved in the show for nearly 20 years and is now executive producer. The T-shirt may tear (small cuts are provided to make it easier to tear), followed by dancer shorts, but “you need to keep the tight boxer shorts underneath from popping out,” he said. Told. ..
Paying attention to such fragile costumes and perfecting them to take off at the right time is a new skill for dancers who are accustomed to focusing on counting rather than throwing away clothes. “If you don’t pull hard enough, the strip can be ruined,” said Jonathan Lee, one of Broadway Bears’ associate directors and choreographers.
That’s where costume designers come in, with the tricks and tools to make clothes that are “easy to dance, but don’t break at the wrong moment,” says designer Saramary Dixie. Quick rig costumes use a variety of fasteners, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Dixie calls himself an “anti-Velcro man” and “I love snaps and magnets. They don’t really get involved in anything.” A consensus was born from the performer’s point of view. : “Snap”, Lee said. “Always snap.”
Accidents are inevitable, but “these are the people who always do this,” Dixie said. “You don’t necessarily have to strip, but you can be on stage and solve the problem at that moment.”
Aside from the mechanics, stripping was “artistically a challenge to me,” said Alvin Ailey, a former dancer at the American Dance Theater, who appeared in early Broadway Bears shows and is now the Dean and Director. “The Lion King,” said Aubrey Lynch II. Education at the American Ballet Theater. Lynch was hesitant at first, but was free to experience it on stage. This “added a layer of performance to the toolbox and, strangely, increased self-esteem.”
It’s a lesson that Mitchell is happy to learn from performers. He sees undressing on stage as an empowering act, not a fragile act. “You are in the driver’s seat,” he told the dancer, “The audience is on your side. They are rooting for you. If you are comfortable, they are comfortable.”
Broadway Bears routines take 3-4 minutes to convey mininaratives and are inspired by Greek mythology and board games. Some choreographers use dance to comment on social issues.
In this year’s production, titled “XXX”, we winked at both the age of the show and its mischief. Lee reconsidered the number of superheroes at the 2002 event and included characters such as Black Panther (danced by Hayward) and Xiangqi in the dance hall music Afrobeats. Beats and stepping. “I wanted to respect what I got in the last 20 years,” he said.
The first Broadway Bear featured only good-toned cisgender men, but the following year’s event included women. Subsequent iterations covered transgender performers, dancers with disabilities, and expressions of all sexuality. “There were also straight performers,” Mitchell joked. (However, for all expressions on stage, the audience remains mostly gay men.)
When Jessica Castro was invited to make a dance this year, she wanted to embrace the positiveness of her body.She cast as her star Akira Armstrong, A plus size dancer and founder of the Pretty Big Movement Dance Company. “It’s about celebrating all backgrounds, all shapes, all types,” Castro said, adding that stripping felt like a law of agency. “It is all these ideals, the omissions of all these components that society has given us.”
After a 30-year show on Broadway Bares, AIDS is now in control. This is especially true for those who have access to health care and preventative medicine. But the devastation that caused the close theater scene in New York is part of Broadway’s history woven into the show’s mission.
The event is “both funding and educational opportunities,” said Tom Viola, executive director of Broadway Care, who attended the first Bears in Splash. (To date, Broadway Care has raised more than $ 22 million to support health and social services for entertainment professionals, both locally and nationally, during a coronavirus outbreak.)
As part of the rehearsal period, the organization is helping dancers who have not experienced the worst of the AIDS epidemic “understand the anger, sadness, loss, and stigma that put us into action first.” increase. During this week’s rehearsal, the dancer was provided with a profile of her beneficiary group and was encouraged to step up her online fundraising efforts.
And while Barak is interested in all the usual elements for directing a show of this size, “How can we continue to raise money for Broadway care and continue the tradition of this community?” Can the flames continue for the future? “
But in the meantime, returning to the rehearsal, she was ready for another run-through.
“Go from the pants strip!” She exclaimed.