At age 58, choreographer Garth Fagan is the new kid on the block: a respected modern dance artist with his own 29-year-old company who, because of dances he created for his first Broadway musical, "The Lion King," has suddenly reached the media winner's circle.
Where such notable concert-dance choreographers as Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris, Eliot Feld, Doug Varone and Lar Lubovitch have failed at high-profile Broadway projects, Fagan reaped a lion's share of honors for his debut on the Great White Way, including the 1998 Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award and Astaire Award.
A native of Jamaica, Fagan studied with modern dance royalty--Martha Graham, Jose Limon, Mary Hinkson and Alvin Ailey--along with major teachers from the Caribbean. Before "The Lion King," his theater-dance experience included directing and choreographing Duke Ellington's opera "Queenie Pie" at the Kennedy Center in 1986 and choreographing a New York Shakespeare Festival production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in 1988. He has also created concert works for companies including Dance Theatre of Harlem, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and the Jose Limon Dance Company.
In November, while making plans to restage his "Lion King" dances in Tokyo, he enjoyed twofold popularity and acclaim in New York when his Garth Fagan Dance played an engagement at the Joyce Theater.
"As a modern-dance choreographer, he fits no label," wrote New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff about "Two Pieces of One: Green," his newest work, at the Joyce. "But 'Green' shows him as the equivalent of a painter who explores the possibility of paint itself. The work has an abstract, geometric edge, but its musical overlay of jazz and a choral selection by a 16th century Spanish composer suggests an experiment in texture with a subliminal message."
Since dance is reembracing theatricality and storytelling, after a period of abstraction, Fagan seems an ideal artist to discuss working at both ends of the spectrum: comparing the satisfactions of dance-for-dance's-sake versus the rewards of entering the high-stakes, collaborative world of theater dance.
Question: Did you set yourself any specific goals for "The Lion King"?
Answer: I did say I wanted real concert dance in the show. You know how many Broadway shows you see and it's the same t-and-a, smile-smile, shake-shake. Only the music and the costumes change. I wanted a real changeability in the dances themselves, so when you see the hyena dance, it's hip-hop: very contemporary, very urban and very frightening. And then when you see the lioness dance, it's ethereal and imaginative.
