Six Dance Lessons: Broadway

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.