Moved to Make the Connection

NEW YORK — It was a few hours after midnight. The SoHo pool hall was closed, and all the tables pushed aside. As swing music played and the underground club’s dance floor filled, choreographer Susan Stroman couldn’t take her eyes off the mysterious woman in the yellow dress.

“She stepped forward and let everyone in the club know she was ready to dance,” Stroman recalls. “This was a place where people came to connect, to touch one another and dance together as one and, as I watched her, I thought ‘This woman is going to change somebody’s life tonight.’ ”

She certainly affected Stroman. When Andre Bishop, Lincoln Center Theater’s artistic director, called several weeks later inviting Stroman to create a piece for his theater, she still had the swing dancer’s image in mind. She immediately called playwright John Weidman, with whom she’d collaborated on the 1996 musical “Big,” and the two started writing the story of a dance club, a woman in a yellow dress and the man whose life is changed.

“Contact,” their tale set to music by everyone from the Beach Boys to the Squirrel Nut Zippers, premieres Oct. 7 as the centerpiece of a high-energy trilogy with the same name at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. Preceded by the brief, erotic “Swinging,” set in 18th century France, and “Did You Move?,” about a ‘50s housewife’s dance fantasies, the story of the woman in the yellow dress became the catalyst for what its creators are calling a new art form--the dance play.

Combining dance and dialogue, the form seems a logical next step for Stroman, a two-time Tony Award winner--for “Crazy for You” and “Show Boat”--an Olivier winner for her choreography on both “Crazy for You” and the National Theatre’s 1998 revival of “Oklahoma!,” and someone the New York Times this year called “the dominant Broadway choreographer of the 1990s.” Reversing the usual pattern for choreographers, her Broadway success led to work this year for both the Martha Graham Dance Company and New York City Ballet.

“I’ve been immersed in the world of pure dance, and as much as I loved doing that, I still missed having some theatrical aspects,” says Stroman, an animated blond who started out as a Broadway chorus girl. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if I could combine the two?’ ”

That sort of innovation is exactly what led Bishop to contact her some 18 months ago. “It wasn’t like I had a show in mind or anything,” Bishop says. “I just wanted to give her the opportunity to go somewhere, do her own work and not be the choreographer for another director. I said, ‘Here’s some money, here’s a room, go.’ ”

Stroman called Weidman the minute she got home from her meeting with Bishop, and the two began work that very afternoon. “When we started, anything and everything was on the table,” says Weidman, a frequent collaborator with Stephen Sondheim. “The notion of an original score and book scenes gradually went away when we started moving towards what we have on stage now--a dance piece with a very strong narrative.’

“The more we talked, the more it seemed to me an opportunity to unleash Stro in devising a new form that would make the language of the storytelling dance,” Weidman adds. “We would use dialogue but no songs and be halfway between ballet and musical theater.”

The collaborators met regularly at the airy, sprawling flat Stroman shares with her husband, director Mike Ockrent, talking out possible dance stories. Their breakthrough came when they paired Stroman’s memory of the woman in the yellow dress with their shared memory of Ambrose Bierce’s fantastical short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” about a Civil War hanging.

Onstage, the stories merge in actor Boyd Gaines’ portrayal of a despondent ad man trying in one scene to hang himself at home, and in another trying to dance at a swing club. Two-time Tony Award winner (“The Heidi Chronicles,” “She Loves Me”) Gaines says he considers himself “dance-challenged,” but that was part of his attraction for Stroman. “Boyd has a vulnerable demeanor, and the story is about someone taking a chance in unfamiliar territory. Boyd’s taking the chance of dancing among all those dancers helps with the metaphor.”

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Bishop liked both the story and its form, and the theater sponsored a five-week workshop in February. “It was wonderfully danced and touching,” Bishop recalls, “and I said we’d produce it. But at only an hour or so, it was really short.”

Bishop encouraged them to come back with another act, which Lincoln Center would also workshop. Focusing on the idea of people’s ability or inability to connect, Stroman and Weidman developed two shorter stories to introduce the larger piece, and a workshop was held in June.

“We decided to open with a dance piece about people who had no problem at all connecting,” Stroman says with a laugh. “John and I both knew of and adored Jean-Honore Fragonard’s painting ‘The Swing’ and what looks like an innocent picnic. We thought, what if Fragonard really meant something completely different, so we put ourselves in Fragonard’s mind and tried to think of what he was really painting with those three people and a swing.”

“Swinging” also displays Stroman’s signature use of unusual props to help dance convey information that might otherwise require dialogue. Her 18th century damsel catches a champagne bottle between her feet, much as a man on a picnic blanket catches the damsel. And as the evening progresses, Stroman’s 23 dancers make good use of everything from dinner rolls and serving trays to ropes, windows, pool tables and pinball machines.

The audience enters to string music by Rebel and as Fragonard’s painting comes to life, the music changes to jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli playing Rodgers & Hart’s “My Heart Stood Still.” “There’s something lighthearted and funny about the jazz violin, and to have that musical segue seemed to set the tone,” says Stroman. “Right away the audience’s antenna is up that something might happen in this picture.”

“Did You Move?,” which stars Karen Ziemba, is about a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage whose only release is her fantasies. They set it in 1954, Stroman explains, “because that’s when more women were trapped in those kind of relationships. Not that they don’t exist today, but it was more believable then that she would not be able to walk away from it.”

The music in “Did You Move?” includes Tchaikovsky, Grieg and Bizet. “When the husband tells his wife, ‘Don’t [expletive] move,’ ” says Stroman, “she not only moves, she does classical ballet. Karen has a fearless quality about her and is perfect as a middle-class housewife who imagines herself being picked up by a head waiter. Her daydream is the extreme rebellion.”

Ziemba, who has also inhabited Stroman’s choreography in such shows as “And the World Goes Round” and “Steel Pier,” compares Stroman’s use of dance in “Contact” to the use of songs in traditional musicals. “The choreography comes from the story first,” Ziemba says. “You need few words because so much is depicted in the dance. It’s similar to when someone is speaking and goes into song--the dance comes naturally.”

So does dialogue, which is omitted entirely in the first piece, is minimal in the second and more prevalent in the longer second-act story. Originally, says Weidman, they’d planned a curtain-raiser of all dance, a second piece with just language and no dance, and a third combining dance and language. But once they were well into creating “Contact,” “we decided that intellectual neatness didn’t really matter that much,” he says.

Stroman is also directing “Contact” and says she chose Weidman largely because of his affinity for dance in storytelling. “Because I’m from the theater, all my choreography is plot- and character-driven,” Stroman says. “So I needed to collaborate with someone who had the same sensibilities. John loves and appreciates dance in the theater, and he understands it as a writer.”

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Much of their time together was spent choosing music for each story. Stroman, who had worked with Gershwin music on her Martha Graham piece “But Not for Me” and Duke Ellington music for her New York City Ballet piece “Blossom Got Kissed,” also turned to standards in “Contact.” Her swing club dancers move to the rhythm of Dion performing “Runaround Sue,” the Royal Crown Revue doing “Beyond the Sea,” Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible” and the Beach Boys singing “Do You Wanna Dance?”

It’s classic contemporary music, Stroman says, and not pure swing music. “Every song in it is a classic, basically, and the choices came out of what we thought the character that Boyd Gaines is playing might think swing music was.”

In the same way, she continues, “the swing dance in ‘Contact’ is not pure swing dancing. It’s not acrobatic dancing in the sense of the ‘40s. It’s more contemporary--a combination of dirty dancing and swing dancing. It’s my version of swing dancing.”

It’s also dancing that incorporates the strengths of her cast. The woman in the yellow dress is played by Deborah Yates, a former Radio City Music Hall Rockette, and Stroman’s actors include New York City Ballet dancer Robert Wersinger. “With ballet, it’s the artistry of the legs,” Wersinger says during a rehearsal break. “Here it’s the acting--the overall package. It’s nice to have the best of both worlds.”

Gaines, who has been with “Contact” since its February workshop, read an early outline of the show and admits he was quite hesitant at first. “I spent the first couple weeks thinking they’d get rid of me. I could do steps individually but not put them together in an improvisational situation. It was like all the dancers spoke Russian, and I knew the words for ‘cup’ or ‘bus’ but couldn’t make a complete sentence. But I’m an actor, and it’s a play in which the language is dance.”

Gaines says Stroman also watched constantly for actors’ impulses as she choreographed. For instance, Jason Antoon, a onetime Santa Monica surfer who says he put break dancing in his resume as “kind of a joke,” recalls showing Stroman a couple of complicated moves one morning, then having her come back after lunch with new steps for him.

“Her capacity for invention on her feet, in the workshop and in person, is remarkable,” Weidman says. “She has a restlessness until it’s right, and she is also unsentimental about what she expects from the dancers. The transaction is, ‘This is what needs to happen here and let’s do it: Pick her up, spin her around, bounce her twice, throw her up in the air, cross downstage, pirouette and catch her.’ And I think the dancers are excited by what she expects them to be able to do.”

Stroman first went to the SoHo swing club to research possible film projects, and some of the dancers in “Contact” had an unexpected bonus--work in a yet-untitled movie about dancers, directed by Nicholas Hytner. Stroman choreographed dance sequences to music of Michael Jackson, Jamiroquai, Dru Hill and Stevie Wonder, and the film’s Broadway dance class is peopled with cast members from “Contact.”

Stroman says the film is due out next year, as are her choreography of “The Night They Raided Minsky’s,” which will be directed by husband Ockrent and premiere at the Ahmanson Theatre next summer, and a possible Broadway revival of “The Music Man,” which she would also direct. Also due next year is the Broadway production of “Wise Guys,” Weidman’s much anticipated musical comedy with Sondheim about 1920s brothers Addison and Wilson Mizner, which will be done in workshop at New York Theatre Workshop in November.

Meanwhile, Stroman indicates they’re both also prepared for a reprise at Lincoln Center. Besides an earlier idea set on a cruise ship, she and Weidman came up with a scenario based on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” in which a wife ties her husband up underneath a pendulum. “I could go on and on,” Stroman says. “If Andre Bishop asks for a ‘Contact 2,’ we will be ready for him.” *

* “Contact” opens Oct. 7 and continues through Nov. 29 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, New York. (212) 239-6200.