'uncovering actor physicality and movement qualities.' MDA Member Chi-San Howard reflects on movement direction within musicals.
I never saw musical theatre coming.......Despite the fact that my first placement whilst training was assisting on a huge scale production of Sweeney Todd with the Welsh National Opera. Despite the fact that my first professional job was on a musical adaptation of a 1923 Expressionist play Adding Machine by Elmer Rice. Even five months later, as I opened Darren Clark’s dark cabaret musical about the Argentine military junta These Trees Are Made of Blood - had you asked me, I still would have looked you dead in the eye and said, “No, I don’t really do musicals.” How it is, therefore, that roughly six years later (notwithstanding one jobless pandemic year), I find myself stepping into the position of Movement Director on Les Miserables is somewhat of a shock. I, like many of us, whole heartedly believed that to create movement for musicals, I would have to have my jazz hands, pirouettes and split leaps at the ready. I believed that I would have to have every number mapped out, choreographed and ready to go in a notebook - possibly accompanied by some assistants . I was, of course, entirely mistaken. As musical theatre in its form and approach has evolved and developed exponentially over the last decade so has the role of movement and choreography. Whilst I had initially written off those early run ins with musical theatre as rarities - the rare musical where you don’t need dance numbers or the story was “weird” so I got called in. Over time I have learnt that they were no fluke. I found myself working on more and more musicals alongside my roster of straight plays and discovering that the approach to creating movement for musicals was far more similar than one might think and yet, with some distinct differences. Take for example my most recent work on the Royal Exchange’s Christmas show, Betty! A Sort of Musical co-written by Maxine Peake and Seiriol Davies. The show tells the story of an amateur dramatics troupe who decide to create a musical about local hero Betty Boothroyd; the first ever female Speaker of the House. Different periods of her life are told by different characters, so the style of the songs often matched the music of the period, and the personality of the character currently telling the story. The show then peaks when the controlling director of the troupe, Meredith Ankle - played by Maxine - is electrocuted on a tea urn (spoilers!). She then hallucinates a 20-minute rock opera in which famous political debates between Betty and various MPs are enacted with a silliness of epic proportions. For the cast, this was a unique challenge as only one of the six company members had never done a musical. My job was two fold. The first was to create musical numbers that felt like reflections of the characters who were supposed to have made them, that revealed that they were actually quite good at it (but not too good), and were funny. The second, was to coach, coax and encourage the company through a new theatrical experience, exercising a new part of their brain and body.
I started, with a mistake. My mistake was not naming and acknowledging the new and unique journey the acting company were going on, and explaining how we were going to face the challenge together. This, I believe, would have allowed for more space and permission to try and fail collectively at making a musical. Instead, I made the assumption that they knew this about me and realized much later that I needed to explain the process much more clearly. But, this is how we learn and get better at what we do. In preparatory conversations with our director, Sarah Frankcom, we set up narrative pegs within the songs to hang our staging from. Let’s look at one of the largest and most complex numbers Be A Good Girl. The songs all tell very clear stories about the events in Betty’s life that were taking place at the time. We broke the song down into these events - almost like scene units. In this song Betty leaves Dewsbury to join a dance troupe in London called the Tiller Girls. The story within the song is Betty being challenged to keep up with increasingly difficult choreography across the number - first within classes and then in performance. The added challenge is that the Royal Exchange Theatre stage is in the round and I had only 3 actors available. We decided that as the Tillers were famous for their kick line we would only use variations of high kicks in the choreography. We explored various formations for kick lines in the space and how they might shift and change to wrong foot Betty. We looked at how the steps might suddenly change mid phrase and even mid word in order to escalate. What emerged was a number less rooted in complex dance steps and much more in shifting rhythm patterns and spacing. With the comedy rooted in the never ending chase and Betty’s attempts to “Kick Betty, Kick Betty, Kick Pivot Turn!” Working with shifting rhythms I have found is crucial in musicals. It’s actually relatively rare in well written musicals to have songs and numbers that stick solely to a 4/4 time signature throughout. Time signatures often change mid song and understanding and working with the musical dramaturgy of that is key to better physical storytelling. Composers and musical supervisors spend hours, days, weeks, months working on how the musical composition tells the clearest narrative - nothing is written without purpose. Thinking about rhythm in relation to character and storytelling is deeply helpful for working on musicals. Connecting words to moves and the rhythm of the language is what I have used across every musical production I have worked on. It provides an anchor for discovery around gesture, and can tell you what the sequence requires physically. It offers a huge amount by uncovering actor physicality and movement qualities that then tie neatly into the musicality and dramaturgy of the piece. Often this alone helps to generate choreography for a number - questions such as, would a character celebrate by waving? Stomping? Clapping? Spinning? Is the sequence a ballad? Is it a call to arms? Is it a 20- minute battle of wills escalating in silliness until it culminates in a slow motion handbag battle between Betty Boothroyd and Margaret Thatcher?
If you follow the truth and pull of the music and script the process becomes far clearer and the need to adhere to preconceived notions of box steps and jazz hands slips away. Instead you make something filled with your own creativity and unique movement voice.
Chi-San Howard's movement direction work includes; Les Miserables (Sondheim Theatre, UK Tour, Netherlands/Belgium Tour); Betty! A Sort of Musical (Royal Exchange); O, Island (Royal Shakespeare Company); Ivy Tiller: Vicar’s Daughter, Squirrel Killer (Royal Shakespeare Company); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare North/Northern Stage); The Narcissist (Chichester Festival Theatre); Chasing Hares (Young Vic); That Is Not Who I Am/Rapture (Royal Court); Corrina, Corrina (Headlong/Liverpool Everyman); The Taxidermist’s Daughter (Chichester Festival Theatre); Anna Karenina (Sheffield Crucible); Two Billion Beats (Orange Tree Theatre); Aladdin (Lyric Hammersmith); Milk and Gall (Theatre503); Arrival (Impossible Productions); Typical Girls (Clean Break/Sheffield Crucible); Glee and Me (Royal Exchange); Just So (Watermill Theatre); Home, I’m Darling (Theatre by the Lake/Bolton Octagon/Stephen Joseph Theatre); Harm (Bush Theatre); Living Newspaper Ed 5 (Royal Court); Sunnymeade Court (Defibrillator Theatre); The Effect (English Theatre Frankfurt); The Sugar Syndrome (Orange Tree Theatre); Oor Wullie (Dundee Rep/National Tour); Variations (Dorfman Theatre/NT Connections); Skellig (Nottingham Playhouse); Under the Umbrella (Belgrade Theatre/Yellow Earth/Tamasha); Describe the Night (Hampstead Theatre); Fairytale Revolution, In Event of Moone Disaster (Theatre503); Cosmic Scallies (Royal Exchange Manchester/Graeae); Moth (Hope Mill Theatre); The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Scarlet; The Tempest (Southwark Playhouse); Adding Machine: A Musical (Finborough Theatre).
Film: Hurt by Paradise (Sulk Youth Films); Pretending - Orla Gartland Music Video (Spindle); I Wonder Why - Joesef Music Video (Spindle Productions); Birds of Paradise (Pemberton Films).
Production Details Betty! A Sort of Musical with book by Maxine Peake and Seiriol Davies; book, music and lyrics by Seiriol Davies, directed by Sarah Frankcom and produced by the Royal Exchange Theatre ran from December 2022 to January 2023.
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