Page 100 - Senior Link Magazine Fall 2023 - Online Magazine

LEGENDARY

The Lion King

COMING TO

LUBBOCK

by Valerie Gladstone

This article titled "Daring Dance" was published in
the February 2022 issue of Showbill.
ig corporations
usually stay with the
tried and true. Risk
Bisn’t their game. But
in 1997, in an inspired act
of hiring, Disney asked the
choreographer Garth Fagan know where he stood. “They’d seen my work,” he says
to take on The Lion King. Until that point, Fagan had in his musical Jamaican accent, “and they knew what
choreographed only two other theatre works, the Duke they were getting. I told them that if I’d be able to do
Ellington opera, Queenie Pie, in 1986 at the Kennedy innovative stuff then we’d have a match. And they said
Center, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the New ‘absolutely’.”
York Shakespeare Festival in 1988. His name was hardly
synonymous with the glitzy, high-kicking numbers Once he had the assignment, it didn’t take Fagan long to
associated with the Broadway musicals. Bob Fosse he figure out his general concept for the show. Specifically,
was not. In fact, he won his distinguished reputation in a he wanted to make sure that it would resemble a concert
whole other ballgame, the modern dance concert world, dance. “I told them,” he says, “that I wanted to include
by creating subtle, sensuous, highly idiosyncratic works all types of dancing–modern, ballet, African, and hip
for his popular company, Garth Fagan Dance, a mainstay hop–so that any child coming to the theatre would be
at the Joyce Theatre for years. able to connect with something. Too often a show’s
choreography only used one particular vocabulary. But
While many experienced Broadway choreographers because I choreographed the show in so many different
vied for the job, the Disney producers saw something in styles, I had to have intelligent dancers who could switch
Fagan even more valuable than familiarity with musicals. quickly from one to the other. They were going to have
They saw daring. It had already been decided to break to roll with a lot of punches, from elaborate costumes to
the mold when they selected as director Emmy-and-Obie split second changes.”
award winning Julie Taymor, famed for her strikingly
different theatrical approach. Now they needed an Since The Lion King takes place in Africa, his choice of
equally imaginative choreographer. Fagan, they sensed, African-based movement was only natural. It was also
could turn Broadway dance on its head. Although something he had been using for years with his own
pleased by their trust in him, Fagan let the producers company. Between growing up in Jamaica and visiting

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