Portfolio at NYU

Posted 04.16.03
Charlotte Griffin Jolts Ballet Tech

By Elizabeth Varnell

Some choreographers reference the entire pantheon of western dance in each new work. Charlotte Griffin is not one of them. In fact, this 24-year-old Juilliard graduate refuses to compare her work to any choreographer.
And when you look at her moves, Griffin actually has a point. They are not Balanchine-inspired; the dancers aren't on pointe. This isn't Twyla Tharp; it lacks her company's complicated lifts and turns. The jazzy music screams Bob Fosse as dancers slide from their feet to their knees to the floor and pick themselves up in slow pirouettes. Hints of ballet tinged with sexy attitude mingle with athletic bravura.

This style becomes clear one week into rehearsals for "In Full Swing," the new piece Griffin is creating for 12 dancers at Ballet Tech, the tuition-free New York Public School for Dance. The dance is essentially a stylistic pillow fight. The steps are a jumbled amalgamation of divergent dance genres. Griffin is capitalizing on the company's reputation for innovation by introducing elements of modern dance into traditional ballet.

Today the dancers, aged 13-15, are going over scenes from the opening four minutes of the piece. "Five, six, seven, eight!" Griffin barks, and the dancers suddenly morph into stone-faced professionals.

Blaring horns introduce "That Doo-Wah Thing," Luther Henderson's orchestral arrangement of Duke Ellington's 1932 ragtime standard, "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)." Bodies seem to absorb bass lines thumping through the floor. Two opposing gangs traverse a shadowy gray studio in a circular pattern, sizing up the competition. Warring factions, armed with fluffy blue pillows are preparing to attack. Suddenly, they begin to jostle like WWF wrestlers.

Griffin, a spunky North Carolina native, pulls on a pair of rainbow stripped socks after viewing the opening sequence of the new ballet. In contrast to her dainty, thin-boned dancers, Griffin has a powerful, muscular body.
Her dancers, trained in ballet, are unfamiliar with her trademark style-- a combination of modern dance, jazzy accentuations and lyrical ballet solos. "They're little wimps," she says, explaining that the dancers complain about her choreography. "They don't know how to get up and down off the floor quickly because they've only been trained in graceful ballet moves. I make them work," says Griffin with a menacing grin.

But how does Griffin get a dance from her head onto the floor? It all starts with a list. Griffin admits that she is a serial list-maker. She has lists of choreographers, companies, artistic directors she dreams of working with, music she wants to use, and dances she wants to create.
In this case, Griffin began with the Duke Ellington piece. "Before I picked the music, I had a whole different dance vaguely in mind. Once I picked the tune, I matched my movement ideas to the music." she explains. The Ellington piece struck Griffin as great music for a pillow fight. In her mind, the word "swing" played a double role: swing dancing and swinging of a pillow in a pillow fight. Given that "pillow fight" was on her list of dance themes, the pairing was a natural choice.

She comes to each rehearsal with drawings, shapes and patterns recorded in a black book. She draws geometric shapes representing dancers' formations and levels of momentum. The pages look like football commentator John Madden's Telestrator drawings of passing patterns on the football field.
In the first week of rehearsals, Griffin takes a break and explains the arc of the piece. "The music is well organized so the structure is very important, it can't get chaotic," she says. Primarily she choreographs in terms of momentum. Energy builds at the beginning, tapers through the middle, then builds and tapers continually until the finale. She shows me a curvy line that maps the momentum. It looks like a roller coaster track.

Back on the dance floor, the kids are having trouble grasping the concept of building momentum. They immediately pummel each other so hard with the pillows that they miss their next steps. Griffin, perched on the back of a chair furiously taking notes, jumps onto the floor. "I want theatrical pillow hitting; pull back and then whack. Be gentle. It's slow motion like a Kung-fu movie," she explains. The dancers wait with sly smiles until she turns to start the music and then whack each other one last time. They are, after all, just kids. After five more tries, Griffin finally achieves the effect she wants.

Since graduating from Juilliard in 1997, Griffin has received commissions from over ten companies and dance schools, including Princeton University, Rutgers University, and Chrysalis Dance Company. Despite these achievements, she was incredulous when she discovered a message on her answering machine from world-renowned dancer/choreographer Eliot Feld, Ballet Tech's founder. "The only thing I could figure out," she said, "was that some big people had had a meeting and decided to kick me out of the dance world."

In fact, Griffin was being offered the chance of a lifetime; an opportunity to create an original work for one of modern ballet's most important choreographers. A veteran of the New York dance scene, Feld has created over 100 dances since 1967, working with companies like American Ballet Theater, the New York City Ballet, and the Joffrey. In 1997, he founded a ballet school to groom dancers for his company.

One would never guess Griffin's personal relationship with dance has been precarious from the start. But as a student, Griffin anticipated Juilliard's arduous classes with dread. "I hated ballet, I was a little jazz bunny," she said at the end of rehearsal after the dancers left the studio.
Griffin couldn't believe her good luck the day she received her acceptance letter to Juilliard's exclusive dance school. By Juilliard's standards, she was something of an anomaly: a modern dancer, not a ballerina, with a muscular body that doesn't isn't delicate or whispy.

Dance director Harkarvy was immediately overwhelmed by her choreography. "Charlotte has talent, she has intensity of concentration, she is fearless in exploring, and she's not hampered by the hang-up of not being self-confident enough to be objective about her work," he says. Harkarvy calls Griffin an imaginative choreographer whose work is "pure energy coming from the stage."

At last the piece is ready for its world premiere. The dancers are gearing up for the spotlight, but Griffin is ready to move on. "Once a piece is set, I'm thinking about the next one," she confesses. Griffin typically juggles three or four projects at once to make ends meet.

Griffin doesn't have a system to decide what work she'll accept, but she does have one rule. "Every job is a learning experience. I might as well be dead if I'm not learning. Every time I try a different process. I try to stay outside [Paul] Taylor, [Martha] Graham, [Merce] Cunningham, and [Trisha] Brown. When I'm 50, maybe I'll realize 걱hey, I want a formula,' maybe. But right now, in my personal work, I try to stay outside that tradition."