Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks: Broadway



Karen M's "SDLISW Scene by Scene" (11/2003)


In a creative work designed to move and entertain people, sometimes the most important elements are what you don't see: the structure and artistry that are essential to creating the experience, but which blend in so seamlessly that they're not consciously noted. In the case of Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, there was a great deal going on that has not been mentioned in any reviews or online discussions of the play, and which I suspect very few people (if any) in the audience consciously registered. Even though I saw the play several times, I didn't notice these things until later, and the first time I thought there might be something there, I dismissed the thought as 'reaching'. After all, I told myself, only a truly rabid fan would think that a light comedy like Six Dance Lessons might involve some very interesting and imaginative artistic choices in the acting and direction. As it turns out, what I thought might be 'reaching' was actually a case of making a mountain out of the tip of an iceberg.

Everyone knows that Mark Hamill portrayed Michael Minetti as an outrageous clown and/or an outrageous jerk much of the time, especially in the first act. People who saw the play could also feel that his behavior was somehow different in different scenes, and they got very clearly that he becomes much more down-to-earth and nicer in Act II. What was clear only intuitively, not consciously, was that in the seven different scenes, to varying extents, Mark was doing different styles of movement and comedy -- complete with different gestures, body language and facial expressions --, and that to a large extent, each style thematically echoed the dance the scene centered around, or the period with which the dance was associated. I truly doubt that anyone saw this on a conscious level. Numerous reviewers have commented on the different costumes that were clearly designed to be appropriate for each scene, but no one has commented on the fact that Mark's acting was actually different in some very interesting ways (few, in fact, have commented on Michael in any substantive way). I think it's worthwhile to go scene by scene and take a closer look at some of the interesting things that Mark was doing in his portrayal of Michael, as well as some things that were done with the placement of the characters on the stage to help convey the essence of Michael Minetti and the changes he goes through over the course of the play.

Quick orientation for those who didn't see it: Despite the title, the play actually covers 10 weeks. Act I consists of four dance lessons: Swing, Tango, Viennese Waltz and Foxtrot. Act II has three: Cha-cha and Contemporary (things like the Twist, the Swim, the Pony, etc.), plus the Bonus Lesson which occurs four weeks after Contemporary Dance, and which doesn't have a specific style of dance associated with it. (You can see pictures from most of these scenes here on Sienn's site, though for Waltz you have to look at the picture from the Florida production, and there don't seem to be any pictures of the Bonus Lesson available. If anyone finds one, please send it to Sienn.) Each scene begins with a song playing in the background, which sets the mood for the scene.

Week 1 - Swing


The Swing lesson is thematically associated with the 1940s, starting with the song "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" by the Andrews Sisters. Michael explicitly links the Swing to the era of World War II in his explanation of the dance, and later as he makes frequent references to GIs, waking up in the barracks, etc. Even before he mentions World War II, though, the 1940s are evoked in his body language, from the moment he strolls in the door saying, "Ya sure?" once Lily has finally decided to let him in. The way he enters the room, and then the way he stands at the large picture window looking out at the view - legs apart, shifting his weight on the balls of his feet - are very reminiscent of the body language we see in musical comedies of the 1940s starring Gene Kelly, films like "Anchors Aweigh" and "On The Town". His goofy tone and the way he mugs and says "Yeah!" out of the side of his mouth (when Lily asks if he lives with his wife) especially strikes me as similar to some of Gene Kelly's delivery. But I should emphasize that it doesn't come across as if he's doing an impression of Gene Kelly or any other specific person; rather his delivery just incorporates elements of that style. The effect is that it's immediately clear he's doing comedy in a certain classic style which feels very familiar and which, as things progress, feels very appropriate to the scene, even if you don't consciously know why.

His performance throughout the scene is loaded with this 1940s-style mugging and physical comedy, such as his facial expression towards the end of the speech, "Now the Swing, though free-form, does have definite steps and patterns - and thank god, because otherwise, who needs me?!" followed by the way his face falls and he halfway stumbles forward in exaggerated despair when Lily doesn't laugh. The moment when the style truly stands out, however, comes somewhat earlier than that, in the speech that I referred to in my last report; I'm going to make another point with it in a different section below, though, so I'll hold it till then. At other points the style was less blatant, but you can easily detect bits of it if you think about it (look at the way he's hanging up the phone in the picture in Sienn's gallery, for example, and just before that, he crossed the distance to the phone in a couple of high leaps, again like the exaggerated comic language of one of those films). The overall feel of the style is also in some ways similar to the feel of the Swing itself, so everything goes together smoothly, but it seems clear that the theme he's carrying out in a lot of this scene isn't based just on the dance, but on the period. The performance style goes together with his outfit, the music and the way his hair is slicked back to give an overall feeling of a 1940s musical comedy.

Week 2 - Tango


For the Tango lesson, he comes in pretending to be a great Latin lover, complete with phony Spanish accent. He does a whole routine at the outset, ending with him dropping into a dramatic kneeling pose as he talks about how Lily perhaps "needs the seduction of the dance to open her heart!" He keeps going in and out of the character of the Latin lover, adopting the accent and striking tango poses near the front of the stage; at the end of the scene, he's doing that bit again and Lily is playing along with him. Many of his movements even when he's not doing the full-on act seem at least congruent with the overall movement style or posture of the tango - the specific way he stalks out the door at one point, for example. He does another, looser type of comedy as well, imitating Lily's Southern accent and making a very funny face, so it's not as if everything plays off of the Tango/Latin-lover theme, but a great deal of it does. In all these scenes, there were typically other bits of comedy that weren't necessarily done in the predominant style of the scene, and at the least, as he would gradually become more authentic with Lily he would also typically drop part or all of the act. So he wasn't carrying out a theme or doing an identifiable act every single minute; if he had been, maybe it would've been more obvious that there were these patterns. But instead, you could just see these themes recurring throughout the scene at various times, like a recurrent echo -- just enough that when you look back, it's obvious that the themes were there, though it wasn't obvious at the time. In a more subtle way, it also often seemed as if the way he held his face and body was at least congruent with the style of the full-on act that Michael was putting on -- in other words, even when his body language was more naturalistic, there often didn't seem to be a sharp break (in terms of how he was holding himself, etc.) from the more stylized act he was doing, but instead there was a subtle sense of things fitting together.

Week 3 - Viennese Waltz


For the Viennese Waltz, he comes in wearing a tuxedo, speaking with a German accent and pretending to be a stiff and formal Viennese dance instructor named Helmut. This act isn't maintained as long as many of the others -- probably because it isn't the kind of act that lends itself to blending smoothly with the rest of the scene, the way the others do -- but there does seem to be some congruence between the Helmut act and his body language as he's interrogating Lily about her husband -- he's doing things like leaning forward slightly from the waist with his hands clasped behind his back, and being a bit more theatrical in his delivery, though not with the Viennese accent. Without having pictures to look at, I couldn't say for sure, but I also think that the way he held his face during those parts of the scene had some elements in common with the Helmut routine. There's also a comic bit (where they squabble over whether he'll plug in the boombox) that had a style that I couldn't identify, or perhaps it wasn't based on a specific style; Moriah mentioned that it did feel like a specific style to her, one that felt even older than the other classic styles (maybe Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton or somebody), but I couldn't identify it. He briefly goes back into the stiff body language and the very formal facial expression with which he entered the scene, though, when they actually begin to dance (if you have the "Broadway Beat" clip, you can see this moment at the end of the clip, and you can also see it in the still of him dancing with Rue, from the Florida production). In this scene, the unifying theme was carried out more through other elements -- the costumes, the music ("Adele's Laughing Song" from "Die Fledermaus") and dialogue about Vienna -- than through the acting style, but the scene did begin and end with Michael putting on a distinct kind of act. This is also the scene where we see Michael beginning to connect with Lily, when he tells her (after she talks about the way that an old woman becomes completely invisible to other people), "I see you, Lily, in all three dimensions -- you're right here." Afterwards he seems possibly pleased but maybe also a bit startled by what he's just said, as if he's unsure what to make of that moment himself.

Week 4 - Foxtrot


The theme for the Foxtrot scene seems to echo the 1950s, with movements, poses and facial expressions that appear to be drawn from a number of musical comedies of the '50s such a s the ones that starred Bing Crosby and/or Frank Sinatra, such as "High Society" or "Say One for Me" (thanks to Moriah for pointing out the latter reference), probably a lot of "Guys and Dolls" and possibly some "Singin' in the Rain" (I haven't seen the latter two in a while and at first dismissed them because they're set much earlier than the 1950s, and the scene didn't feel 1930s-ish to me or Moriah; on the other hand, from what I do remember, these two feel like very likely sources, and they were made in the 1950s), and possibly some reference to the style of "The Rat Pack". In other words, a style that seemed reminiscent of a number of musicals of the 1950s, whether they were actually set in the 1950s or not (if anyone who saw it thinks of other important references I missed, I'd be curious to hear). Here the stylized body language occurred quite a bit in the scene and really helped to create a distinctive feel. You can see a bit of the style in the little video feature on the "www.broadway.com" site, and in Sienn's play pictures on this site (the one of Mark alone is a publicity shot, but it's similar to a pose he struck during that scene); those who have the tape from "Broadway Beat" can see a larger sample of it, such as where Mark says, "Think back, Lily - that is the charm!" as he brings his left hand up to the right side of his mouth, simultaneously leaning left. Again, the way he was moving his body looked as if they reflected both the Foxtrot itself and the style of those 1950s comedies, blended together. The acting style goes along with the costumes, the music by Tony Bennett ("The Best is Yet to Come"), dialogue references like the mention of the Stork Club and lines like, "Thanks, babe," (after Lily refers to him as "a normal-sized man") to convey the 1950s feel (though I'm reasonably sure Frank Sinatra would not have accompanied the "Thanks, babe!" line with the particular bit of physical comedy Mark did at that point to clarify what he thought she meant by normal-sized *g*). In fact, there are so many examples of this style that I could write for another page to list them all. If you have access to the online clips, just look; it's just about everywhere in the clips, except when he's delivering the line, "I can just see you out in the tobacco shed with your hoop skirt over your head." As in the other cases, he didn't maintain this style without let-up throughout the entire scene; rather it came and went (and seemed to be dropped more or less completely when Michael was being more authentic with Lily, as when he's telling her about his mother), but it re-occurred frequently enough to give this scene a very distinctive feel. His use of facial expressions was also very distinctive in this scene -- his face looked somewhat different in each of the seven scenes, but in this one his face was especially animated with stylized facial expressions that fit with the overall comic style (you can see a glimpse of this if you look at the clip where they're dancing together and he's saying, "That's it -- beautiful!", and you can also get a little sense of how he held his face just from the stills here on the page).

Week 5 - Cha-Cha


The Cha-Cha lesson, the first scene of Act II, has the least distinctive style of any of the six scenes that are associated with specific dances (even the Waltz scene, which doesn't seem to use a specific theme very prominently throughout, begins and ends with Michael putting on a very specific, identifiable act). In the Cha-Cha scene, he's allegedly being himself, and I briefly wondered whether Cha-Cha was just like the Bonus Lesson, in which Michael acts most natural and unguarded towards Lily (I don't think it is). The Cha-Cha was also the scene with the least emphasis on the actual dance, and in this one, Michael didn't do a lecture about the history of the dance or perform one of his fits of manic clowning (which is where we'd often see him most clearly putting on an act); also, at least some of the time he seems to be actually connecting with Lily. However, it still feels quite different from the Bonus Lesson, as there were several moments in the scene which were performed with greater theatricality than anything in the Bonus Lesson, especially when Michael is spinning his tales of love gone wrong to Lily, attempting to justify his jaded view of reality -- you can see one such moment in the pics on the site, the shot where Lily is looking at him. So we get the clear feeling that Michael is loosening up part of the time but is not quite ready to stop putting on acts and be authentic all the time. If there were any more specific correspondences between the style of acting and the dance, they weren't anything I could identify. There was just a general sense that the way he held his body, the way he moved and the way he delivered his lines were all different than in the Bonus Lesson -- he used a lot more theatrical gestures and his delivery was a bit more strident, not all the time but at certain moments. Finally, he didn't do any of the gestures that were part of the styles of the other scenes.

So as far as I could see, Cha-Cha had a different feel than the Bonus Lesson, but was distinguished from the others only by the fact that it didn't recycle elements from the other scenes, rather than by having specific elements all its own.

Week 6 - Contemporary Dance


The Contemporary Dance lesson had an obviously distinctive style of movement, very similar to the loose, free-form dances of the 1960s that the lesson centers around. The scene opens with the song "Surfin' USA" by the Beach Boys, and Michael shows up in a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt, loose pants, sneakers and sunglasses. This one is a fascinating example, because the differences between this scene and the others are so obvious once you think about it - and yet again, at the time it just felt very smooth and natural, so much so that you wouldn't consciously think about why everything was so different, you'd just be drawn into the mood of the scene. Once you see it, you look back and wonder how they managed to slip such obvious thematic differences right under your nose.

For the first time, Michael sat on the floor (or sometimes even rolled partly onto his back on the floor), sometimes with his legs crossed and his shoulders rolled forward, a completely different posture than anything we'd seen before. Even the way he held his body when he was standing, and the way he walked across the room, were visibly different than what we'd seen before, conveying a feeling of puppyish clumsiness. The style of comedy was also very different than in the other lessons, involving very energetic but deliberately less graceful movements, as when he bounces around as he yells at Lily (who's sitting exhausted in a chair) to, "Wake up!!" or when he dances around at the front of the stage while refusing to tell Lily the date (as she's making out a check), or when he does a goofy walk on his way back towards the shelf, his arms hanging down and wiggling in a funny-clumsy way.

The most outrageous part is when he tells her that the only way she can give him a check is to, "stuff it in my G-string like you're tipping a stripper!" and he swings his hips around two or three times, bends over and sticks his butt out, doing a sort of bump and grind move until Lily is thoroughly embarrassed.

For anyone who's seen the play, thinking about Contemporary Dance in contrast with Foxtrot gives a particularly dramatic illustration of how different the entire feeling of the scenes could be. The movement style Mark used in Contemporary Dance was all about rounded and (seemingly) unrestrained movements, with a lot of bouncing around, while the stylized body language in Foxtrot was all about angular, restrained, clearly theatrical movements with a lot of gliding smoothly across the floor (you can probably get a little feel of this just from the pictures Sienn has collected; although the pictures of Contemporary Dance are only of the dancing itself, I think they give you some inkling of the feel of the scene). His face in the Contemporary Dance lesson was entirely different than in the previous lessons, too, seeming much younger. As Susan observed recently, he looked about 30 years old in that scene. You can see some of the difference in the pictures in the Play Gallery, but of course the pictures of the dancing show him making a goofy expression; his face throughout the scene was visibly younger than in other scenes, though, even when he wasn't making goofy expressions -- he just looked completely different than he had before. I don't know any particular movie references for the type of movement used in Contemporary Dance, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there were some specific 1960s movies (maybe involving go-go dancing) providing inspiration for the style of the scene, in keeping with the fact that Swing was 1940s and Foxtrot was 1950s.

Contemporary Dance is also the lesson where Michael learns a lot more about Lily and truly opens up to understand her pain. These are the moments I described in my last report, in which Mark expressed empathy for Lily in a very moving and authentic way. In those moments, in the way he's sitting on the floor leaning forward, his posture and body language are congruent with the overall feel of the scene even as you see greater authenticity and openness. The body language here is in some ways getting closer to that of the Bonus Lesson, and there are much longer stretches where he seems fully authentic and natural (not only when he's listening to Lily, but also when he gets angry at her -- in the moment I described in my last report), but nevertheless, there is clearly a specific "movement theme" that echoes throughout the scene and gives the scene a distinctive feel.

Week 10 - Bonus Lesson


Finally, in the Bonus Lesson, Michael's body language is very natural and unguarded, as he at last goes through a whole scene with Lily without BS-ing or putting on an act. Well, he does do one last, very small phony-baloney act, but the contrast here is all the more touching: At the beginning of the Bonus Lesson, when he enters Lily's apartment, he's clearly distressed about what Lily has just been through and/or what's yet to come, but when she comes through the door, he suddenly acts cheerful and upbeat for her benefit. So he's still able to put on a tiny bit of an act, but it's a subtle and gentle one; now he's using his BS-ing abilities in the service of caring for her, rather than going off on his own manic trip and distancing himself from her. Even so, Mark's body language and expressions as he acted cheerful to reassure Lily were clearly different from any of the stylized acts he did in the previous scenes; there was a much greater feeling of authenticity.

Sayaka, who saw the play three times with me, did drawings afterwards of Michael in each of the seven scenes. It was her illustration of Michael in the Bonus Lesson that first gave me an inkling of what was going on. In her drawing, he's simply standing there, but she captured the body language so perfectly that I looked at it and thought, "Aww, she captured how in the Bonus Lesson he's just there, 'just Michael,' and in each of the other six drawings he's putting on a different kind of act, just like in the play." (Then I dismissed that thought as 'reaching' and didn't fully figure it out for another week, when I was explaining to Sienn why someone had said that Mark 'poses' a lot, and noticed that all my examples were drawn from the Foxtrot lesson.) When I asked Sayaka about it, she e-mailed back that in terms of what she noticed consciously, "I noticed he was exceptionally weird (in a good way) in the Tango lesson, but other than that, I only noticed how his true self was showing more and more as the lessons proceed." She adds, "Now that you mentioned it, I can see clearly how he was acting differently in each lesson, and I think I unconsciously noticed it because I remember having no trouble figuring out the different poses for the drawings." That seems to be the experience a lot of us had - we got it on an intuitive level, not an intellectual one. All of my friends who saw it have had the same reaction when I've pointed out these patterns: "Oh my god, you're right," and then they start coming up with examples. None of us got it on a conscious level, but once it's mentioned, it's so obvious that you wonder how you missed it. Except of course we didn't miss it, and that's part of what makes this so fascinating -- seeing that there were entire levels of experience that came through on a non-intellectual, intuitive level.

So, to sum up, part of Mark's performance in the seven different scenes was seven different styles of behavior, each with different movements, body postures, facial expressions, etc. In some scenes, the examples were everywhere, and in others, the stylized movements played a much smaller role. Five of them were clearly correlated with specific dances and/or the periods the dances came from, and each of them, including the more natural style of the Bonus Lesson, was thematically appropriate to the scene. He wasn't doing these things all the time, and the thematically stylized movements often graded off smoothly into a more naturalistic movement style or a blend of the two, but there were occasional sudden shifts - as when Michael abruptly dropped his Latin-lover routine to ask, "Did you have an acid flashback to our argument last week?" Especially in the first two scenes, though, when Michael isn't being a flamboyant comedian or losing his temper, I also notice that he often has body language that conveys a sense of uncertainty and immaturity (though this could be just because this happens in moments when Lily is yelling at him); he scrunches himself down small, clasps his hands in front of him uncertainly and looks almost infantile. Only much later in the play does he become someone who can drop the exaggerated acts and simply be present, without being angry and yet without becoming small and immature.

What I found especially interesting in terms of the artistic choices they were making is that they don't show us Michael being completely "real" at first; they don't give us that reference point against which to interpret all the craziness. The character walks in doing an act, so that you might think from the first scene, for example, that Michael always acts like someone from a 1940s comedy and that he'll be that way all the way through the play - until things suddenly shift with the Tango scene. Instead of feeling that we're watching a somber psychological study of a sometimes-authentic, partly-grounded person who sometimes shifts into doing an act, we at first get the feeling that we've gone into a bizarre world with some sort of zany character whose act keeps shifting - but who gradually settles down to becoming more grounded and real (and keeps us laughing most of the time till he does).

While most people I've talked to thought it all felt intuitively right, and we kept hearing people at intermission exclaiming over how funny and amazing Mark's performance was, I gather that there were some people who were thrown by the shifts and the theatricality of Michael's acts, and took all this to mean that the character was inconsistently portrayed or was inappropriately inauthentic. It should be clear from everything I've said that the kinds of acts Mark was putting on were deliberate and appropriate, given that this is a character who is essentially full of BS and out of touch with reality, and that a major theme of the story is the way he gradually, through the dance lessons, comes into reality to become more authentic and connect with Lily. Throughout the play, you gradually get larger and more frequent glimpses of authenticity, until with the Bonus Lesson, he's all there and real throughout the entire scene. The contrast between the phony-baloney, manic comedian and the grounded, authentic individual is not (as a few reviewers suggest) a matter of Mark giving a "better" performance in Act II, or Richard Alfieri writing a better Act II than Act I. Rather, the contrast is the essence of Michael's character arc. (Obviously there were some reviewers who at least partly got the point, however, as they characterized Mark's performance, and not just Polly's, as "awesomely professional," "delightful" and the like.)

I also found it very interesting how the director used stage positioning to convey something about Michael and/or how the audience is supposed to understand him. There's an important moment very early in Scene 1, when Michael launches into a ridiculously bawdy speech about the sociological history of Swing. He does a swaggering walk downstage with theatrical gestures (all of this again clearly based on body language such as you'd see in a 1940s musical), as he says, "Forget the cotillion -- point me to the dance hall, horny GIs and loose women." By this point he's near the edge of the stage, facing the audience directly, and crucially, Lily has been left behind, even though he's supposedly talking to her. Now he does a brief pantomime that slides into a ludicrous little dance as he says, "Relax, let your hair down, and make public reference to your genitals as you jiggle on the dance floor!"

This is the moment when we know we're not in Kansas anymore. By walking away from Lily and facing the audience to act so outrageously, Michael has moved out of the confines of the literal conversation with Lily. One clearly gets the message (intuitively, not consciously) that he's not to be understood only in relation to her, rather he's there to be appreciated directly by the audience, so that even while she finds him exasperating, we can laugh at his antics. This wasn't a case of breaking the fourth wall, if I understand the term correctly - Michael didn't show any awareness of the audience or make reference to being in a play --, but perhaps we could say he was bending the fourth wall a little bit, or was at least up against it *g*. This is all done smoothly enough that a viewer wouldn't consciously think, "Wait, that doesn't look right -- why would he move away from her like that?" But on some level, you get the message very clearly that Michael is in some ways larger than life, rather than a strictly literal portrayal of a man in a conversation with an older woman; the fact that we view him somewhat independently of his relationship to her also emphasizes the point that even if he's driving her crazy, we're still invited to laugh at him.

Not having a theater background, I don't know the technical theater terms to describe the effect that was created here, but in my profession (cognitive linguistics), it would be called a blended conceptual space, in which elements of reality and non-reality mix in ways that would be jarring or nonsensical if the character or situation were taken as a pure and literal depiction of everyday reality. Instead, the space created by the play becomes a reality of its own, within which everything coheres and feels intuitively right. As Moriah put it, "You just accept, 'This is how Michael is - deal with it!'"

There's a second possible meaning of what Michael does in that moment, and of the other times when he turns to face the audience and do one of his comic acts - and I don't think this excludes the first meaning, I think we get both messages together. The second dimension is that this is a person who's truly disconnected, who turns away from real people to go off on his own private trip; essentially, he's performing for his own amusement and for the private audience in his own head.

Of the two characters, Michael is the only one who's handled this way. Lily never comes downstage to directly face the audience without Michael, and while she does join him in clowning around down front during a couple of the dances, she's never pulled out of the realm of the literal interaction in the living room to become a larger-than-life character. Other than the fact that her dialogue is often more clever than anything a real person would think of on the spot, she's handled in a fairly realistic way; she doesn't seem to occupy the same blended space that Michael does.

It's also interesting and appropriate that Michael comes downstage to clown around much more in the first act than in the second, and his few appearances downstage in Act II are mostly handled very differently: Almost every time he's down there in Act II (except when he's dancing around refusing to accept her check in Contemporary Dance, at a moment when the two characters are maximally disconnected from each other), either he's with Lily or he's not directly facing the audience, or both (at times in Contemporary Dance he even turned just a little bit away from the audience to focus on Lily, which was frustrating if you weren't at just the right angle to get a decent view of Mark's facial expressions, but did feel appropriate somehow, no doubt because it made a wonderful intuitive statement about how he's turning towards her and away from the imaginary audience he's been performing for).

Even one of the moments when he forgets about Lily and dances off by himself - briefly - after the two of them have become more connected during the Contemporary Dance lesson is handled very differently than any such moment in Act I, as he then actually notices that he's forgotten her and comes back to her apologetically (in Act I, he would've just kept right on going, utterly oblivious - compare for example the way that, in the Tango lesson, he draws Lily into his embrace and into his little speech about dance being all about the art of seducing the beloved, and then lets go of her and turns away as abruptly as throwing cold water in her face - though the moment is played for laughs and is in fact very funny, because of the way the actress does a take). Finally, in the Bonus Lesson, he doesn't come fully downstage at all, in keeping with the fact that now he's authentic and fully in reality with Lily, no longer off on his own private trip or performing for his own imaginary audience.

Coming back to that moment in the Swing lesson, it's very interesting to see how one effect of this use of stage positioning is to help establish early on that Michael - much more than Lily - has tacit permission to go somewhat beyond the bounds of literal reality, to have an existence in relationship to the audience that isn't strictly confined to a realistic living room. With those "ground rules" established, it's okay for him to be over the top, to do comedy and body language in the styles of different eras, to mug and strike poses and be outrageous, with little danger that the audience will get hung up on thinking that he's not strictly realistic or that the dialogue isn't always faithful to a realistic interaction between a dance instructor and an older lady. (Unless of course they missed the signals, for whatever reason, and took the somewhat-more-literal Lily as the sole standard by which the play is to be viewed.) In other words, it's intuitively clear that he's an artistic, comedic interpretation of someone who's disconnected from himself and others, rather than a literal depiction such as we might find in a somber character study of people who can't achieve intimacy. (People who don't take it that way could presumably still make sense of him as a very realistic portrayal of someone who is himself extremely out of touch with reality, but the people I've been asking so far didn't take it that way, they took it the same way I did - that he's not 100% faithful to literal, outside-world reality, but he makes intuitive sense within the world of the play.) If we're not sure what to make of him at first, we're invited to let him be a comedian (albeit one who's also a jerk) and to laugh at him through much of the first act. Then, as Sayaka put it, his true self shows more and more as the lessons proceed.

Of course, all this intellectual analysis was not at all necessary for someone to enjoy the show, and I wasn't sitting there making notes while I watched (which may be part of why I had no difficulty getting into it). In fact, I didn't consciously notice any of the things I've written here until just a few days ago. When I was actually watching a performance, I was too busy laughing or crying to intellectualize about it all. So for those who didn't see it, I don't want to give the impression that the play came across as heavy or choked with symbolism. In fact, for all that its creators were putting into it, it all went together smoothly to come across as deceptively light and simple. I think all that most people noticed consciously about the different comedic styles was that some of what Mark was doing involved classic comedy of some kind, and that he was doing it extremely well. A lot of what we understood about Michael's character arc was absorbed intuitively, as he gradually shifted from being a manic comedian (and an obnoxious jerk) to being authentic and caring. It's interesting, though, to look more closely at some of the things that we experienced unconsciously, to bring them to conscious awareness and appreciate some of the craftsmanship and artistry that went into making the whole experience work so beautifully.

Special thanks to Moriah, another 12-time Six Dance Lessons viewer, for beta-reading, commenting on my interpretation, and checking whether I remembered the details correctly.

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