“It seems that I’ve actually stumbled back into relevance,” says choreographer Doug Elkins, talking about his dance production Fräulein Maria, a deconstruction of The Sound of Music.
Elkins put himself through college, paying off student loans as a
breakdancer before founding the Doug Elkins Dance Company and earning
critical acclaim in the ’90s. But all that unraveled in the middle of a
divorce and, as he says, “opportunities that weren’t there.” His
company dissolved in 2003. But rebirth didn’t take long. One evening in
2005, he found inspiration while watching The Sound of Music with his five-year-old son.
“We’d create these hilariously awful dances in the apartment, and as
we were playing, I had this awkward Joyce-ian epiphany, funneled
through Julie Andrews,” he says. The idea: deconstruct The Sound of
Music through dance, with allusions to pop culture — from
hip-hop to martial-arts films to the Marx brothers.
“I’m interested in our collective memory of The Sound of
Music,” he says, “whether you did ‘Doe, a Deer’ in a grade-school
production, or it was on TV behind you during Thanksgiving, or you saw
the Gwen Stefani remix. It’s all grist for the mill.”
Initially Elkins put together routines for only “The Lonely
Goatherd” and “Do-Re-Mi.” But then, over lunch one day, Dancenow/NYC
artistic director Robin Staff commissioned him to choreograph the
entire soundtrack. The production debuted to a sold-out house at Joe’s
Pub in New York City in 2006 and returned annually. This year, when the
tour (which is coming to Cleveland as part of DanceCleveland’s series)
returns to New York, it will move to a more prominent venue: Dance
Theater Workshop’s Bessie Schonberg Theater.
Elkins draws on his hip-hop background and experience as a fight
choreographer, incorporating martial-arts moves into the production. He
also borrows signature movements from modern-dance icons of the 20th
century. The song “Edelweiss” becomes a riff on Buster Keaton and
Jackie Chan. “Lonely Goatherd” is hip-hop-ified and involves
professional dancers from Cleveland companies, including GroundWorks
Dancetheater, Verb Ballets, Footpath, MegLouise Dance, Ohio Dance
Theatre and MorrisonDance.
Fräulein Maria even has Elkins thinking about where his
career goes next. Among the possibilities: a similar deconstruction of
Othello, using familiar Motown music.
This article appears in Nov 18-24, 2009.